As a child in Johannesburg, Dada Masilo fell in love with ballet when the Bolshoi performed Swan Lake in her home city. As a choreographer, she has built an enviable international reputation on reinterpreting the great ballets, including Swan Lake and Giselle, in her own inimitable African style. As a dance student in Brussels, Masilo performed an extract of Pina Bausch’s Rite of Spring, since when the concept of adding it to this repertoire of reimaginings has simmered over many years.
After several revisions during the pandemic, her ideas have culminated in The Sacrifice, a 65-minute work that received its UK premiere at Brighton Dome before transferring a few days later to Sadler’s Wells in advance of a further 12-venue, six-week Dance Consortium tour of England, Scotland and Wales. Eagle-eyed readers will realise that Masilo’s new work is almost twice the length of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring and despite the indelible influence of Bausch’s choreography to that music, Masilo has choreographed The Sacrifice to a new and compelling score by four African composers (Ana Masina, Leroy Mapholo, Tiale Makhene and Nathi Shongwe).
The Sacrifice is an extraordinary and absorbing integration of dance, music and speech, which takes place in front of a simple projected backdrop that simulates an ideal of the African bush. It begins with several sequences of joyous celebration, punctuated by moments of humour and ends in the sinister suggestion of gang rape and the sacrificial tragedy of what appears to be maternal filicide. The eleven dancers and four musicians are closely wrapped together on stage with the superb singer (Masina) and the “chosen one” (Masilo) intimately coordinated as mother and daughter.
Masilo has often experimented with an Africanised interpretation of established dance forms (ballet and flamenco spring to mind) but in The Sacrifice she has looked closer to home for inspiration, choosing the Botswanan dance form of Tswana (pronounced as s-swana), where a unique traditional style has evolved from close observation of animal movement. Erect, quicksilver bobbing and swaying with rapid hand and arm movements brings the meerkat immediately to mind. It also sometimes seems as if the dancers are repeatedly washing their hands. The rhythms of the onstage musicians are routinely augmented by the dancers’ clapping, slapping and stamping. And during a particularly joyous mid-section group dance they stop, on Masilo’s command and challenge the musicians to do better or do it differently. Masilo is not just the “chosen one” but the troupe or tribe leader since the other dancers all take their cues from her breathy expressions.
Masilo has had longer training in Tswana than any of her dancers and as a newcomer to this form of dance it seems to me that the clearest exposition of this unique style came in all-action solos where electric currents appeared to fizz through her limbs. The unity of the group dances, coordinating seemingly random twitches and stretching, was slick and tight.
It must be a risk to perform a work closely inspired by The Rite of Spring without using Stravinsky’s coruscating score but here that gamble has paid off handsomely. The neat tapestry of eclectic music, written in close coordination with Masilo’s emerging choreography, is perfect. In addition to Masina’s superb vocal clarity and range, the three other musicians played piano (Shongwe), violin (Mapholo) and percussion (Mpho Mothiba) as well as contributing supporting vocals. Mothiba was like a travelling music man, employing a wide range of percussive instruments, including various wood blocks, a triangle and bird whistles; the most unusual of which was a flexible tube that he whirled around his head at various speeds to imitate the winds of the African bush (it turns out that said instrument was a length of corrugated tubing that he ripped out of his mother’s washing machine)!
The joyful, rhythmic group dances segued into a more sinister environ when the corps of dancers each brought a lily to present to the “chosen one”: Masilo has said that she used the lily because it is her favourite flower and not because of its associations with death but this coincidence provided powerful symbolism. The daughter is stripped to the waist and surrounded by four men in a scene suggestive of abuse without portraying it and this leads into a long final sequence of the mother’s lament: beautiful music, hauntingly sung by Masina as she cradled her violated daughter, gradually lowering her lifeless body to the floor.
I will be lucky if, in the remainder of this year, I can again experience theatre as arresting as these last minutes. Nothing mattered beyond the emotional singularity of these events and the aria that exposed the mother’s torment. It is powerful and magical dance theatre. If you see only one dance performance between now and Easter, then this should be it and there are twelve venues around the country to choose from!
