Dada Masilo’s The Sacrifice
Dada Masilo in The Sacrifice. Photograph- Tristram Kenton
“Contemporary African dance and ballet can co-exist,” declares Dada Masilo. This sentiment-cum-mantra has been at the core of the South African choreographer and dancer’s work since her career’s inception. Scan dozens of her interviews and this thinking springs up time and time again, to varying degrees. “It is about finding an innovative way of fusing the two,” she says in one publication, and “I've got my own fusion thing going on” she adds in another.
This drive to bring these two worlds together and have them “speak to each other” can be pinned to one significant location in her early career – Johannesburg’s The Dance Factory. Notorious for its rich cross-dance and cultural Arts Alive festival, the dance organisation regularly brought together international dance artists, South African dance companies, community and youth dance groups with a range of styles from classical ballet to Pantsula.
It was at this festival in 1996 that an 11-year-old Dada found herself performing with her all-girl Meadowlands-based troupe ‘The Peacemakers’. Their mixture of high-energy popular culture dances – from Michael Jackson moves to South African craze Kwaito – set the perfect stage for Dada’s talent to dazzle and catch the eyes of Suzette le Sueur, executive director of the dance centre. This earned her and the troupe an invite a year later to formally train in classical and contemporary dance forms.
It was during this period of time that Dada came across her first ballet, Swan Lake, and it was love at first sight. In awe of the classical ballet’s beautiful tutus, pointe shoes, and enticing storytelling, she vowed to embody what she saw and most importantly make it her own. And so began an immovable desire to fuse her first loves.
This by no means would be an easy feat. “I always feel that you've got to know what the rules are before you can break them,” she reflects in a 2010 CNN profile. First came the study of forms. From 11 to 18 years-old, Dada blossomed under the mentorship of The Dance Factory’s director who praised her extraordinary focus, concentration, and incredible abilities.
In 2002, she completed her schooling at Johannesburg’s National School of the Arts, then spent a year at Cape Town’s Jazzart Dance Theatre before landing at Belgium’s renown P.A.R.T.S (Performing Arts Research & Training Studios) in 2005. A year later, she received the Gauteng Arts and Culture Award for the Most Promising Female Dancer in a Contemporary Style upon her return to South Africa, with the Standard Bank Young Artist Award for Dance in 2008 kickstarting her choreographic endeavours.
It's no surprise then that her first works were classical ballet adaptations serving as testing grounds for her fusion aspirations. She was finally ready to break the rules she so diligently learnt. Romeo and Juliet (2008), Carmen (2009) and Swan Lake (2010) followed back-to-back, with each production building on the previous.
In her telling of Romeo and Juliet, Dada plays a striking Juliet that left audiences and critics alike in awe. “… singly the most compelling and convincing representation of this role I have seen,” said theatre critic Robyn Sassen at the time. The form of a signature style began to emerge – Dada and company moving at hummingbird speed, darting from grand jetees to Pantsula footwork.
Carmen was a step further, moving even faster with voice punctuating each movement. Dada took time to study Flamenco and added that to her brewing elixir of dance fusions. Rapid off-axis pelvis movements meet firm and poised braceo (arm movements), and barefoot, zapateado (feet stamping) transforms from percussive punctuations to softer and grounded Zulu Indlamu stomps; all the while contemporary and balletic forms still flow as conduits.
By the time Swan Lake premiered, Dada had a dynamic and energetic fusion style to embody her childhood vision of the classical ballet – beautiful, crisp white tutus that bellowed with each delicate yet tempestuous hip movement.
ʺIn the beginning fusing classical ballet and African dance was not easy at all,ʺ she says in a 2014 interview for Afro Buzz UK whilst touring Swan Lake. And it’s understandable. Here is a young Black South African woman transforming a renowned classic with culturally different techniques and histories. Ballet tied to its aristocratic mid-15th century history and African dance lingering with colonial sentiments that reduce it to exotic entertainment.
It’s hard to ignore this legacy. Especially as ballet has been embraced and practised in all corners of the world. Ballets, no matter where created and performed, still tell Eurocentric stories, with little reflections on non-European or global south experiences.
Swan Lake feels a significant budding of Dada’s choreographic growth and weight in adding political commentary on a uniquely South African experience. In this production, Odette is a naive bride, married off to a gay Siegfried who in turn yearns for his lover Odile. Both male and female dancers wear tutus and white feathers while the male Odile is the only one to perform en pointe.
To date, South Africa stands as the only African country to constitutionally protect against discrimination based on sexual orientation and the only one to legalise same-sex marriage. Yet the lived experience across the country is rife with homophobia, violence, and death (20 LGBTQ+ and intersex people were killed between February and October 2021 alone). Through the appropriation and subversion of the classic ballet with recognisable African dance moves and a culturally relevant story, Dada imposes her voice on the artform and makes this local experience global.
From the onset, Dada’s vision of fusion was not one of folding contemporary African moves into balletic forms; that much is clear from her choreographic interests. Bare feet are favoured over pointe shoes – significant as they played a part in her falling for the beauty of the technique – and the speed of her choreographies defy even the faster up-tempo classical ballets.
Instead, ballet acts as a conduit, a vessel to be deconstructed, shaped, and reformed with contemporary and southern African dances into culturally relevant narratives of her choosing. For example, Dada’s adaptations focus on stories involving victimised female protagonists who meet untimely and unjust deaths: Juliet, Carmen, Odette, Giselle. Her retellings right these wrongs and redeem these women in patriarchal South African contexts.
Her latest production falls in line with this thinking yet builds on its predecessors to be the most radical yet. The Sacrifice is inspired by The Rite of Spring, centering Dada as the female protagonist being led to her sacrifice.
In her past works, Dada has favoured using original scores with minor tweaks – Carmen for example switched around compositions to create new, dynamic tones for duet and ensembles. Now, however, Dada and her creative team have opted to be inspired by Stravinsky’s epic score rather than adhere to it, creating a totally new composition rooted in southern African rhythms and music.
The Sacrifice also forms around Tswana dance, the traditional dance of Botswana inspired by the meerkat, often used in storytelling and in healing ceremonies. This undertaking involved a close study of the form by Dada under Pinky xu Ramagole’s tutelage, firstly in isolation for three months, then with the company for one month at The Dance Factory.
For the first time in her career, Dada has opted to name and centre a specific style of African dance from Southern Africa. Despite specific styles named as inspirations in the past – from Pantsula to Indlamu – these forms only appear loosely within written or televised interviews documenting rehearsal processes; never in public facing programmes or synopses. Instead, the blanket term ‘African dance’ has been favoured to describe parts of her practice.
The naming of Tswana as the main dance form of inspiration and fusion feels significant. It removes the enactment of erasure, whitewashing, and minimising by giving it as equal a recognition as ballet. Dada is known for refusing to be boxed as a choreographer, yet, to the public eye, her pursuit of fusing ballet and African dance may have done just; perhaps something she herself has contended with.
But The Sacrifice feels like a release of expectations, an unravelling of what the fusion has become and should be. So what if it’s a renowned ballet? Dada’s artistic impulses will drive the story down exciting and radical avenues. So what if Stravinsky’s score warrants attention? Tswana rhythms and sounds are calling louder. So what if a live orchestra makes the most creative sense? The strong vocals of opera and gospel choir singer Ann Masina will be the conductor.
It is fascinating to witness such a radical shift in real time. Dada is pushing beyond the borders of what it means to reimagine classical ballets, with her signature blends of contemporary and southern African dances, and is claiming it as the centre. She is simply waiting for us to move over to where she stands.
This article was commissioned and first published by Dance Consortium.
In loving memory of Dada Masilo, 1985-2024
