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Stick dance was a dance style that African–Americans developed on American plantations during the slavery era, where dancing was used to practice "military drills" among the slaves, where the stick used in the dance was in fact a disguised weapon.
Stick dance was a dance style that African–Americans developed on American plantations during the slavery era, where dancing was used to practice "military drills" among the slaves, where the stick used in the dance was in fact a disguised weapon.
Origins
To add to the dance element of the practise, other slaves would gather around the competitive fighters. They would clap in rhythm, and sing in acall-and-response
Call and response is a form of interaction between a speaker and an audience in which the speaker's statements ("calls") are punctuated by responses from the listeners. This form is also used in music, where it falls under the general category of ...
style, while one caller led the rest of the crowd.
Like the banjo and other instruments, the berimbau was based on African instruments and developed by African-American slaves. An early depiction of slaves performing a stick dance is an 18th-century watercolour painting called ''The Old Plantation'', which is in the collections of The Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Museum in Williamsburg, Virginia
Williamsburg is an independent city in the Commonwealth of Virginia. As of the 2020 census, it had a population of 15,425. Located on the Virginia Peninsula, Williamsburg is in the northern part of the Hampton Roads metropolitan area. It is ...
. It shows a dozen African-Americans gather in front of two slave cabins, with one stick dancer, and two women dancing with scarves to music of a drummer and a banjoist. The watercolour is believed to have been made of a plantation between Columbia and Orangeburg, South Carolina
Orangeburg, also known as ''The Garden City'', is the principal city in and the county seat of Orangeburg County, South Carolina, United States. The population of the city was 13,964 according to the 2010 United States Census and declined to 1 ...
.
Minstrel stick dances
The stick dance became a standard part of theminstrel
A minstrel was an entertainer, initially in medieval Europe. It originally described any type of entertainer such as a musician, juggler, acrobat, singer or fool; later, from the sixteenth century, it came to mean a specialist entertainer ...
shows performed by African-Americans during the late 19th century. It had an element of humour, where the dancer would shuffle onto the stage dressed as an elderly African-American man using a cane, and then suddenly use the cane to perform energetic acrobatic capoeira dance moves.
See also
*Cakewalk
The cakewalk was a dance developed from the "prize walks" (dance contests with a cake awarded as the prize) held in the mid-19th century, generally at get-togethers on Black slave plantations before and after emancipation in the Southern Uni ...
*Set de flo'
Set de flo' (Set the floor) was a type of dance competition held among African Americans during the 19th century. It possibly is based on dance styles originating in Africa.
Overview
Set de flo' dancing involves drawing a circle on the ground (u ...
* Patting juba
* Weapon dance
References
Competitive dance African-American dance Pre-emancipation African-American history Capoeira {{dance-stub