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 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.
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.
