Maculele
An Afro-Brazilian stick dance from Bahia, today part of the capoeira school programme. It is danced in pairs to the atabaque rhythm.
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About Maculele
Maculelê is an Afro-Brazilian stick dance from Bahia, specifically from around the town of Santo Amaro. It has no founder and no year of origin, and the eighteenth-century dates sometimes attached to it rest on no source; this is a folk custom of the plantation world, not a founded school. The tale of a fighter named Maculelê who defended a village single-handed is legend. The documented part of the story is modern. In 1963 the Viva Bahia company was founded in Bahia; its founder Emília Biancardi had studied Bahian folklore systematically and brought maculelê into the stage programme, from where leading capoeira masters, Bimba, Pastinha and Canjiquinha among them, took it up. In Santo Amaro the revival is traditionally associated with a master known as Popô do Maculelê, but no verifiable date attaches to it. It is danced in pairs with a pair of sticks called grimas, roughly fifty to sixty centimetres long and made of biriba, canzi or pitia wood. The rhythm is set by atabaque drums placed at the entrance of the circle: a dancer strikes his own sticks together three times and on the fourth beat strikes his partner's. Some schools replace the sticks with machetes, whose impacts throw sparks, an effect meant for performance rather than training. Maculelê is not a combat discipline with bouts or rules. In its present form it is part of the programme of capoeira groups, where it serves rhythmic preparation, work with an implement and stage performance.
Similar styles
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