More than a profession, dance was a calling and an innate need for the South African performer and choreographer Dada Masilo. “I’m very miserable when I’m not moving,” she said in a 2013 documentary. “I have no stress when I’m dancing. If anyone wants to make me happy, just put me in the studio, put me on stage.”
Masilo, who has died unexpectedly after a short illness aged 39, brought happiness as well as provocation to audiences worldwide as she toured her singular works fusing ballet and contemporary dance with her South African culture.
She transformed well-known titles including Swan Lake and Giselle into something vital for their times, not only deconstructing them on a technical level and injecting southern African dance styles, but revoicing them from a contemporary point of view to reflect social issues. Her work touched on war, power, greed, domestic violence and rape.
In Swan Lake (2010) she dealt with gender stereotypes and homophobia, depicting a gay prince in an unhappy marriage. Her feminist Giselle (2017), set in a South African village, was full of superstition, shame and vengeance. A version of The Rite of Spring, called The Sacrifice (2021), centred on grief, pain and healing, drawing on Tswana dance, from Botswana – Masilo had discovered she had Tswana heritage – and was hailed as “deeply moving and astonishingly fresh” by the Observer critic Sarah Crompton.
In 2024 Masilo had begun touring a deconstructed Hamlet, set in urban South Africa, where she played Ophelia and placed the character at the centre of the story. She also worked with the South African artist William Kentridge and the choreographers Gregory Maqoma and PJ Sabbagha.
Masilo received a plethora of awards for her work, including a UK National Dance award in 2020 for Giselle and most recently Italy’s Premio Positano Léonide Massine lifetime achievement award and a star on the wall of Soweto theatre to acknowledge her contribution as a Johannesburg artist.
But her ambition had never been to become a choreographer. To dance was her passion – she performed in all her works – but there simply were not any choreographers making the kind of work she wanted to perform. “So I thought, ‘Well if no one is doing it, then it has got to be yourself’,” she told an interviewer in 2023.
Masilo was a petite but striking presence, with shaven head and spry, quicksilver movement. She spoke modestly but quickly, her energy quietly fizzing. Friends talked of her kindness and her ability to find joy in the smallest things but also her ability to express herself fearlessly, and her artistic choices were bold and brave. She wanted to ask questions, of the wider world and of her own culture.
“As a society, we tend to sweep things under the carpet,” she said in 2019. “There’s this ‘shut up and do’ mentality because that’s the way we’ve always done things. But now I’m at a stage in my life where I want to go further and, respectfully, ask the deeper questions like ‘Why?’ and ‘What is the meaning behind this?’”
She was born Dikeledi Masilo in Soweto, the daughter of Faith (nee Ngene) and James, and raised by her mother, who owns a daycare centre, alongside her older sister, Ntsiki Xoliswa. In a post on her Instagram account, Masilo described how her aunt had given her the nickname Dada after the vocal refrain of the Crystal Waters song Gypsy Woman which they loved to sing.
Masilo’s first dance classes were with a local group, the Peacemakers, a project started to give girls something to do while their parents were working and to keep them off the streets. The teacher, Mulalo Nemakula, said of Masilo: “She was the best dancer, she never struggled, because I think it was within her blood ... she had a gift.”
At 14, Masilo decided she wanted to make dance her life after seeing the Belgian company Rosas. Her family did not think it a viable career, but in the end her mother gave up trying to convince her otherwise, so single-minded – and clearly talented – was Dada.
She studied at the Dance Factory and the National School of the Arts in Johannesburg, then in 2003 went to train with Alfred Hinkel at Jazzart Dance Theatre in Cape Town. She was then accepted, out of hundreds of applicants, at the prestigious Parts school in Brussels (directed by the Rosas founder Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker).
Masilo didn’t love life in Belgium. “I was miserable in Europe. It was a real culture shock, and living there was really hard,” she said in 2023. “But the dance classes were incredible.” And it was the making of her as an artist, when she had to make her first choreography, a piece about her grief over her aunt’s death from Aids, set to The Swan by Saint-Saëns.
All Masilo’s dance experiences, especially her love of ballet, fed into her unique approach. “I wanted to know what was the problem between African dance and classical ballet not coexisting. So I gave myself the challenge of fusing them to see how the body reacts to that kind of fusion,” she said in 2013. In a later interview she said: “I’ve got this thing that if something seems impossible, then I really want to go there and make it possible.”
Masilo was fuelled by artistic investigation but also raw emotion and social justice. Of returning to South Africa in late 2006 after her studies, she said: “It was always my intention to go back home. I need that rage and anger of my own country to feed my creation process.” There she was commissioned by the National Arts festival, in Grahamstown (now Makhanda), and created her first reinterpretations of classical ballets, Romeo and Juliet in 2008 and Carmen in 2009.
Most of all, Masilo wanted her audience to feel something in response to her work. “Dance is not worth doing if it doesn’t have a visceral impact,” she said in 2023, and on stage she was putting herself on the line to make that happen. “I want to tell my story with honesty,” she told the writer Shirley Ahura in 2019. “If I’m not able to be vulnerable on stage, then it just won’t translate to the audience. I want the viewer to feel everything – the joy, the pain, the sadness, the grief.”
Masilo is survived by her mother and sister.
• Dada (Dikeledi) Masilo, dancer and choreographer, born 21 February 1985; died 29 December 2024
