Stick dance (African-American)

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.[1]

The Old Plantation, a watercolour painting from the 1780s, showing a slave performing a stick dance on a South Carolina plantation.

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 a call-and-response 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. 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.[2]

Minstrel stick dances

The stick dance became a standard part of the minstrel 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.[3]

See also

• Cakewalk
• Set de flo'
• Patting juba
• Weapon dance

References

1. Knowles, Mark (2002). Tap Roots: The Early History of Tap Dancing. McFarland. pp. 49. ISBN 9780786412679.
2. Southern, Eileen; Wright, Josephine (1990). African-American Traditions in Song, Sermon, Tale, and Dance, 1600s-1920: An Annotated Bibliography of Literature, Collections, and Artworks. Greenwood Publishing Group. p. 61. ISBN 9780313249181.
3. Knowles, Mark (2002). Tap Roots: The Early History of Tap Dancing. McFarland. pp. 49. ISBN 9780786412679.