by Leigh Witchel
A transformation can also be a journey home. South African dancer and choreographer Dada Masilo had learned a section of Pina Bausch’s “The Rite of Spring” while studying in Brussels, but it inspired her to create a sacrifice she felt more deeply about. The dance style of “The Sacrifice” is Tswana, which is Masilo’s cultural heritage, but she had never studied Tswana dance. To create her version, she and her dancers studied Tswana dance, and went back to her roots.
To open, the stage was dark, with the cyclorama lit in wedges suggesting an abstract mountain. The live musicians, a versatile trio playing multiple instruments, were crowded into a corner downstage left. The score mixed high tech and low tech: a whirly tube as well as an electronic keyboard.
Masilo entered first, slowly. Her head was shaved and she wore a long filmy skirt, and no top. Her movements suggested struggling, wiping, flying. Ann Masina, a big woman with a glorious voice, walked in slowly from the opposite side, carrying a small vessel that looked like a glowing orb on her head. She crossed and took a seat with the musicians, who made their small contingent sound like a larger ensemble.
The backdrop changed to a projection of a bare tree under a twilight haze. A group entered, led by Masilo. It moved in unison in tight, percussive vocabulary at double time. You could sense, even without reading the program, that Masilo ran the show. She led the group, but not like a ballerina. This type of leadership echoed a village or tribe, with elders elevated by wisdom and experience. The others formed a semi-circle to cheer on Masilo, sometimes letting out a shout or a yell. The work was exciting and because of the taut pacing, the dancers could freestyle for short periods without the dance breaking down.
The violin scratched, and the dancers snapped to attention, then fell to the floor, moving jerkily. Thandiwe Mqokeli, her hair in a high topknot, rose for a solo that was sometimes hunched to the ground, but also rose with her arms above her head to her full height.
The music changed, and Masilo started stamping. With their legs straight on the floor, everyone bent over and chanted in unison, clapping. The clapping moved from a simple beat to a syncopated double time, and from the complex clapping to another ripping unison section. Unison wasn’t military idea here, but a commonality: everyone moved with the same timing, but in their way.
The musicians indulged in a dramatic falling chord, which stopped the dancers dead in protest. “It’s too fast!” Masilo spoke for the group: “Can you please give us an adagio so we can breathe?” After general approval, one man still objected, “Not so loudly!”
English was only spoken occasionally, more often the cast spoke in African languages, most likely Tswana. Masilo mentioned at a talk later that the Lord’s Prayer was sung in Xhosa.
The bedrock of Masilo’s reimagining of “Rite” was the matrix in which it played itself out. Nijinsky imagined a ritual of pre-historic Russian tribalism through an almost military structure of phalanxes: maidens, young men, old women working within their groups. It’s not called a corps de ballet for nothing. Bausch saw it also as a group, but a mating ritual divided by sex.
Masilo saw the group onstage as mirroring a village. Not a corps, and only an ensemble by voluntary choice. It was a community of dancers. Masilo did individual solos, but just as often she spoke for the group. The interplay was essential and again the musicians started to speed up. And again, “Too fast!” Masilo signaled a tempo change request and the musicians went jazzy. The dancers let them know they approved before the lights dimmed.
The tall man who still didn’t like the music earlier, Lwando Dutyulwa, danced a solo, his long legs kicking high to the side, which moved into a sextet for the men, weaving in and out of counterpoint. Four women arrived to do floor work in unison; the men joined in.
“The Sacrifice” journeyed to its emotional center. A series of frenzied and desperate smaller dances and solos followed, whirling and writhing. After people entered one at a time, a woman brought in a long, single calla lily, a flower native to South Africa, and touched Masilo with it. She danced with the bloom and made Masilo clasp it.
Masilo laid the lily down. The woman tried again to give her the flower before leaving but Masilo turned her back. A man walked in, outfitted identically in the same filmy skirt as Masilo, also bare-chested. As the music began to rise, he took over from her as she walked off.
Tswana dance contains tighter movement based on that of nature or animals; a dance for a group used waving arms in water or animal references. When the group left, a man, now in in wide white pants, performed a showpiece solo of floor work and extensions as well as jumps and turns.
Masilo had also changed to white but with a top. One of the tall men entered and gently and slowly removed her top. He stayed behind her, she fell back into his arms, twice, the second time to be spun round slowly.
By this point the work briefly strained to sustain itself and you might have wondered if it could hold. But that’s an inherent problem of single work evenings: very few choreographers can sustain 65 minutes, even with good material. Nevertheless, Masilo moved towards a ritual and spiritual conclusion of a different kind of sacrificial offering.
She flailed; the other women surrounded her to join in an adagio. The men brought her to the floor and walked behind her. One man lifted her, then all the men carried her supine above them. Masina met her from the opposite side, and sang as she embraced Masilo. Masina’s early career was at Cape Town Opera Company, and she has a wide vocal range from low to soaring to belt. But here, her sustained tones seemed almost like keening.
The men, their heads bowed, walked off slowly in a silent cortege. As the music became more rhythmic, Masilo resumed dancing, and Masina embraced her again, then took her and dipped her low as she sang high. Hugging her, but also supporting Masilo as she crouched, Masina wept as she supported Masilo and finally laid her down. If the position recalled a pietà, is there any more universal, deeply felt sacrifice than a mother losing her child?
The cast walked in from the opposite side, all in white, bent over, shirtless, all bearing lilies that they raised as they knelt. Masina was miked, but that seemed superfluous as she soared into her final notes as the cast bent, laying the flowers in front of them as a final offering and exhortation. In the quiet, she exhaled and slowly the lights went out.
Masilo has done her own version of several touchstones of the ballet repertory including “Swan Lake” and “Giselle.” What she did with “The Sacrifice” felt like a distant cousin of the work Michael Keegan-Dolan has done with Fabulous Beast Dance Theatre and Teaċ Daṁsa. It’s less commentary or reaction than naturalization; taking a foundational work as a starting point and making a completely new, native piece.
Masilo went farther because she had farther to go. “The Sacrifice” took not just what she had encountered with Bausch and Stravinsky, but the things imported and sometimes imposed from the West: opera, the idea of choreography versus dancing, Christianity, and placed them alongside African art, laying claim to both.
copyright © 2023 by Leigh Witchel
“The Sacrifice”– Dada Masilo
The Joyce Theater, New York, NY
May 24, 2023
Cover: “The Sacrifice.” Photo © John Hogg.
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