The South African choreographer Dada Masilo has made her name by reimagining big old ballets like Giselle and Swan Lake in a way that fuses contemporary and southern African dance. But The Sacrifice, her version of The Rite of Spring, is something else. It jettisons Stravinsky’s music except as an inspiration, and while it preserves the structure of Rite – the idea of a community coming together and deciding to kill a woman for society’s greater good – Masilo refashions it into something new, with its music, rhythms and rituals rooted firmly in the Tswana dance of her own background.
The result is both deeply moving and astonishingly fresh. It opens with Masilo herself, bare-chested, fragile, moving across the stage with slow deliberation, arms flexing and stretching in delicate shapes, her back arched, hands flicking in circles, responding to the subtle beats of the music (played live by a group of exceptional musicians and singers on the side of the stage).
As the piece unfolds, against a backdrop of bare-branched trees, she is joined by her ensemble in a joyful dance, teasing the musicians as they clap and stamp in time, the call and response between players and dancers setting up a vibration of movement and sound that seems to ripple through every muscle of their bodies.
It’s only after this sense of an entire society has been established that Masilo is marked as the chosen one in a rising tide of religious hysteria; and she does not dance herself to death but dies in the embrace of a mother figure. The rich voice of singer and composer Ann Masina brings a piercing beauty to these final moments. As Masilo collapses into her arms, she holds her like a pietà, singing a lament.
There’s acceptance here as well as struggle, a recognition of a world that demands sacrifice as part of the natural order of things. It’s an original response to a western dance classic, one that transforms it utterly.
