Known to students around the world as Mestre Joao Grande, Joao Oliveira dos Santos starts each day the same way: He lights candles and places fresh flowers as offerings to the Afro-Brazilian gods, or orixas.

The 72-year-old Mr. dos Santos holds these 12 gods, a syncretism of African and Catholic religious beliefs, responsible for guiding him to teach New Yorkers capoeira, the 400-year-old Brazilian martial arts dance.

“God and the orixas brought me to New York,” Mr. dos Santos said between classes in his Chelsea loft studio. “It was my destiny.”

In the 14th street studio, where squash husk instruments and photos of historic capoeiristas cover the walls, Mr. dos Santos preserves a Brazilian tradition while guiding his students in physical movements. For capoeira, according to Mr. dos Santos’s definition, is not just a sport but also, “a dance, an art, profession, and a culture.”

Slaves working in sugar cane plantations invented capoeira, a cross between a fight and a dance, in order to evade their master’s watchful eye. The popular history of the sport recounts that Yoruban slaves would pretend to be singing and dancing when really they were playing out tribal battles. Capoeira continued to be a mainly underground recreation until the 1930s and the rise of Brazil’s dictatorship, when the activity was revived and named a national sport.

While capoeira has spread throughout Brazil, when Mr. dos Santos moved to New York 14 years ago there was only one other teacher in the city. The type being taught was a faster, more fight-based variation than the slow, studied movements Mr. dos Santos teaches. It was about that time that the sport, first popular with the city’s breakdancers began to spread. Now Mr. dos Santos can count off eight other teachers, including one of his style – Angola – a more playful variation named after the country where most of the slaves came from.

But Mr. dos Santos is still the undisputable grand master.

On Sundays, students representing a full spectrum of races and nationality pack the floor, all dressed head to toe in white for the weekly roda, Portuguese for circle.

Mr. dos Santos indicates in Portuguese for two students to face off. In a seated loop around them the two dozen or so students chant and play a berimbau, the gourd instrument, tambourine, and African bell, while the pair moves to their own rhythm, exchanging slow, practiced kicks and blocks.

As mestre, Portuguese for master, Mr. dos Santos, dedicated to the sport’s African roots, tells his students that learning capoeira is more than evading your opponent or learning the songs in classes. The idea that “Every motion of the body is capoeira beginning with the motions in the womb of the mother” is the basis of his approach to the sport.

In class, Mr. dos Santos often explains the sport through the motion of animals (and many of the movements are named after animals). “Every animal has a different movement,” he tells them. “You walk in the street, that’s capoeira. You sleep, you are doing capoeira.”

In everyone there is a capoeirista waiting to be released, he says, and conversely, by playing capoeira, one can better learn about his own motions, both physical and spiritual.

Indeed, Mr. dos Santos said he learned capoeira by mimicking the animals and nature around him long before he received any formal instruction. It was not until he was 20, in 1950, that he left his rural background and went to the city of Salvador, to learn from Grand Master Pastinha, who had recently opened the first capoeira Angola school. With that school he traveled throughout Africa and Europe. The first time he came to this country, for a meeting of capoeiristas in Atlanta, he visited New York and decided to stay.

Mr. dos Santos acts as an ambassador to the sport, traveling around the world from Japan to Belgium. The National Endowment of the Arts recognized him as a National Heritage fellowship and he received an honorary degree from Upsala College. Home has become a student’s apartment in the Upper East Side and Chinese food is a favorite dinner.

It’s been a long road from his native Bahia, but Mr. dos Santos continues to find humanity in the city to inspire his movements. He said, “Everything has capoeira, you just have to know how to look.”