‘The Rite of Spring’ gets a feminist, African perspective from Dada Masilo

Toronto is about to host the North American premiere of a critically acclaimed work inspired by Igor Stravinsky’s explosive ballet score “The Rite of Spring.”

“Stravinsky’s music just messes with your mind,” said South African choreographer Dada Masilo, whose 2021 work “The Sacrifice” opens at Harbourfront Centre on Tuesday. “I mean, what is going on here? One minute it’s melody and the next minute it’s ‘bang.’”

Over the past 110 years, countless choreographers have struggled to match the visceral energy of that celebrated composition, but few have come close. While Stravinsky was the starting point for “The Sacrifice,” Masilo’s ideas evolved into a reimaging of the original’s themes from a female perspective using African music and dance.

The journey began when Masilo, after several years of dance training in South Africa, left her Soweto home in 2004 to take up a scholarship at the prestigious Performing Arts Research and Training Studios in Brussels. There she was required to study and perform excerpts from revered German choreographer Pina Bausch’s 1975 “Rite of Spring.” It is the most influential interpretation of Stravinsky’s score, performed here in 1984 by Bausch’s own Tanztheater Wuppertal and again last October by a 32-member company specially assembled from 14 African nations by Senegal’s École des Sables contemporary dance centre.

After two years in Belgium, Masilo returned to Johannesburg and, while still committed to performance, found little that suited her interest in contemporary dance. So she decided to make it herself, bringing an African sensibility and feminist viewpoint to reinterpretations of such Western classics as “Romeo and Juliet” (2008), “Carmen” (2009), “Swan Lake” (2010) and “Giselle” (2017). Globally toured, the latter two astonished audiences in Montreal and Ottawa but, sadly and too typically, never made it to Toronto.

Apart from featuring her South African company, Masilo’s versions of these familiar works play fast and loose with the originals, integrating different music, realigning the plots to comment on social issues of today and disrupting the decorum of classical ballet with a powerful injection of contemporary movement.

Her “Swan Lake” featured men in frilly tutus and a gay prince. Masilo likes to recount how one critic described the work as “a homophobe’s worst nightmare.”

Traditionally, Act II of “Giselle” features the ghosts of jilted maidens — “Willis” in balletspeak — dressed in white tutus. In Masilo’s version vengeful men as well as women rise from their graves, all dressed in red, the colour of blood and passion. As Masilo explained it, men can have their hearts callously broken, too.

Meanwhile, the Stravinsky seed sown in Brussels began to sprout. In 2016, Masilo brought a small group to New York City Center’s annual Fall for Dance festival to present “Spring,” an early 20-minute iteration of “The Sacrifice” that even included some of Stravinsky’s music.

What emerged five years later at its Vienna world premiere was a very different work informed by Masilo’s own desire to connect with her ancestral roots in Botswana, and her thoughts about the role of ritual, and the processes of grieving and healing.

Masilo said her interest in her own cultural heritage was only fully awakened in adulthood and that “The Sacrifice” is in some respects a work of personal exploration.

“I wanted to understand my heritage. I wanted to understand my language. I wanted to understand what the rituals mean.”

Stravinsky’s original was framed as a pagan rite in which, each spring, male elders choose a maiden to be sacrificed to propitiate the gods. In most versions, the chosen maiden dances herself to death. The music essentially dictates the structure.

“The Sacrifice” also ends with the death of a woman, danced by Masilo, but the choreographer frames the narrative as a ritualistic inevitability that is at once sad, sacred and in its own way beautiful, a communal act of cleansing steeped in African tradition and deploying a style of Tswana dance Masilo spent months studying and learning in preparation.

“The Sacrifice” is danced to an original score composed and performed by Leroy Mapholo (violin), Tlale Makhene (percussion), Nathi Shongwe (keyboard) and singer Ann Masina. Musicians and dancers play off each other; call and response. Masina plays a pivotal dramatic role in the work’s final moments.

Although Masilo ultimately decided not to use any of Stravinsky’s score she did insist that her musician-composers listen to it.

“I told them I wanted something similar, the discordances, the contrast of very soft bits, then really loud bits out of nowhere.”

“The Sacrifice” was conceived and developed before the COVID-19 pandemic. Masilo explained that initially the work had a dark, angry tone.

“I wanted to comment on the state of the world and what’s happening in the world, the power struggles, the greed, the hatred.”

This was the version that had its premiere at ImPulsTanz, the Vienna International Dance Festival, in July 2021. By then the impact of the pandemic, the deaths of friends and loved ones, and the toll of repeated lockdowns made Masilo realize this was not the right work for the times.

“It became a gentler work about healing and grief,” she said.

“The Sacrifice” is the final offering in Harbourfront Centre’s 2022-23 “Torque” season of contemporary dance.

Nathalie Bonjour, the series’ curator and the centre’s director of performing arts, is breathing a huge sigh of relief. A week or so ago, because of delays in the issuing of Canadian visas, Masilo and her company could not leave Johannesburg in time for scheduled appearances in Vancouver and Ottawa. Toronto ends up being the only Canadian stop before “The Sacrifice” heads to New York City and other U.S. centres.

“This is also Dada’s Toronto debut and I’m so thrilled we are able to present her in such an extraordinary work,” said Bonjour.

“Not only is Dada an amazingly strong performer but, as a choreographer, she brings a fascinating female perspective to retelling a famous work. I love the way she mixes dance genres and also that there is live music. It’s the whole package, as they say.”

Although “The Sacrifice” is embedded in Masilo’s specific cultural heritage, she sees it as a universal statement about the centrality of ritual in our lives, and the connection of healing and grief.

“I simply want audiences to understand and to feel.”

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