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In a stark, cinder block room in Salem, the smell of sweat lingers in the air. A group, mostly males in their 20s, begins a series of gravity-defying moves including flips, spins, cartwheels and handstands.

Dressed head to foot in white, they practice routines reminiscent of scenes from “Fight Club” or “The Matrix.”

The group that’s in this stuffy room at the Roanoke College gymnasium isn’t learning to fight. Its members are here to play a game.

It’s called capoeira, the Afro-Brazilian martial art practiced by African slaves in Brazil centuries ago and considered illegal to play there until the late 1920s. Since the 1970s, capoeira has built a steady and rich following throughout the U.S. with teachers and schools springing up in large and small cities. It arrived in Salem two years ago.

One member of the area club, 24-year-old Tim Irish of Roanoke, used to commute from Richmond to Alexandria twice a week to play capoeira. But now that he lives in the Star City, Irish says he’s thankful he can play capoeira without the heavy commute.

“With all my martial arts, it was very structured and no real emotion put into it,” says Irish, who works for Wireless Zone. He joined the group a year ago after 11 years of practicing and teaching traditional martial arts. “With capoeira, you can express yourself in thousands of ways. It shows you things that you never thought you could do.”

Irish is now one of dozens of area people who step inside the gymnasium room three times a week for play time in the roda (pronounced “hoda”), the human circle in which capoeira’s rich history and skillful moves are played out. Players form a roda, and a handful of other participants standing on the edge of the circle take turns playing instruments. Everyone sings in Portuguese mainly in a call-and-response style and awaits a chance to jump into the roda.

In a roda, cartwheels, handstands, head spins, hand-spins, hand-springs , jumps and flips are common moves. There is no scorekeeper, and once the game gets into a flow, the players go through a series of explosive dance floor moves.

Unlike a sport such as boxing, capoeira does not focus on hurting or injuring an opponent. Instead capoeira is about mastering skills, making sure moves are precise and stylized, and experiencing the music in the roda.

In some cases, players who haven’t seen each other in years can pick up a game where they left off. There isn’t a clear winner in a game.

“This is a big workout,” says Elizabeth Lloyd, a 20-year-old Roanoke College junior who’s majoring in biology.

She joined the Salem group in September and plays with members from as far away as Blacksburg and Christiansburg. Since this fall, the group has sprouted in size, and now several couples are involved.

The group is also affiliated with Omulu-Guanabara, based in San Francisco and Stockholm, Sweden. Students in Salem are now under the direction of two world-famous capoeiristas, Mestre Preguica and Mestre Dimola , who merged their international groups. The local group will embrace the philosophy and techniques of the mestres, or masters of the highest skill level of capoeira . Eventually a formal teacher will visit Southwest Virginia for workshops and to observe the group.

Lloyd, who had written a paper on capoeira for college, says she was drawn to the game for its history. It was first played in the 1500s and is still popular with Brazilians today. “The workout part is secondary,” she says.

“I looked for a school everywhere,” says Eric Canfield, a 20-year-old Craig County resident, whose four-year search led him to Roanoke College. “I just happened to see a flier. It has been great.”

For years he practiced tae kwon do, the marital art originating from Korea. Now he spends his free time fine-tuning his capoeira moves in his living room. “It’s like a dance where you communicate with the other person without getting hit,” says Canfield who is a sous chef. “It’s definitely different than any other martial art you can study.”

The group’s creator is Hany Hosny, the 39-year-old Roanoke College librarian who posted a flier two years ago in hopes of finding people to play capoeira. At the first meeting, three curious students showed.

“I like being active,” says Hosny, a father of two daughters. “If there wasn’t capoeira, I’d be blue. It’s the thing I enjoy so much.”

Hosny, who’s agile and quick, walks across the gym floor as the participants warm up. “OK, two minutes before we get started,” says Hosny, a thin man who grew up in Northern Virginia, where he played soccer games in Mexico and Europe in high school before leaving for college.

In this room, however, none of his past endeavors in sports matters. No one’s does. Hosny stumbled into capoeira in the late 1990s after watching a video about northeastern Brazil.

“They were playing capoeira,” he says. “I couldn’t let go of that idea. I just put the word 'capoeira’ in my memory bank. I saw music. I saw singing. I saw dance. I saw men. I saw women. I like the idea of not trying to figure out if it’s a fight or a dance.”

It was after he and his wife, Mirna, moved to Chicago that Hosny, who has a white cord — a beginner’s cord — was able to play and learn from a man in his 20s who now is four belt cords away from being elevated to a full-time mestre. The goal might take Hosny’s teacher another 20 years to achieve. Each cord denotes a person’s skill level.

“Capoeira is really a language,” Hosny says. “The vocabulary for this language is the moves that we learn.”

Getting his wife involved wasn’t easy. But after her first try, she got addicted, too, he says.

“Sometimes you go into the roda scared,” he says. “Walking into the roda isn’t always an easy thing. There are a lot of things in life when you take a deep breath and know it wouldn’t work. It’s an exciting thing to do. You never know what’s going to happen in the roda.”

Ultimately, Hosny says, a person doesn’t have to be a gym rat to be a good capoeira player. “Capoeira is for everybody,” he says. “The question is: Are you for capoeira? With a little bit of time, we learn to read a person in the roda, and you will learn things about that person you couldn’t in four or five years” of just talking.

Matt Miller, a 20-year-old Roanoke College junior and physics major, is one of the group’s original members and one of the few who doesn’t have a martial arts background. After two years of practicing moves, Miller says that physical strength and flexibility are a must for skilled capoeira play.

“I started off for the workout thing,” says Miller, who likes to do flashy moves in the roda. “It really intrigued me. And then it entrapped me.”

He often practices his moves outside the gym to get better, he says.

But getting better at capoeira is generally viewed as a goal over the course of a lifetime.

Hosny says a skilled capoeira player likely would have to practice for decades before mastering the game.

Iin his case, Hosny might not get to his batizado (or baptism), for which he would be given a higher level cord belt and earn a capoeira nickname. In his past, Hosny missed a chance to move forward in capoeira because of scheduling conflicts. He says he awaits the day when a formal batizado happens in Southwest Virginia.

Capoeira will always be a big part of who he is.

“I’ll still sing,” he says of the future. “I’ll still clap. I’ll still jump into the roda to feel what the roda feels like. You won’t be able to go a long stretch without wanting to hold some part of capoeira.”