South African choreographer Dada Masilo's Swan Lake
Place des Arts
At Place des Arts
Ballet has a long history in South Africa. Cape Town had a strong enough ballet company in 1973 to convince the great Margot Fonteyn to headline a touring production of Swan Lake. The opposition of the good white swan and the bad black one must have looked like a racial morality tale under apartheid.
South African choreographer Dada Masilo studied ballet as a girl, adored the first Swan Lake she saw, and has repaid her devotion in a telescoped remix for Dance Factory Johannesburg (JFJ) that reached Montreal's Place des Arts on Thursday. This ambitious and sometimes fascinating fusion of ballet and South African dance was also a hot mess dramatically, opening with a comic bluffer's guide to ballet and closing with a sombre reflection on AIDS in Africa.
In this show, all the swans in the corps de ballet were black South Africans, and everyone wore a white tutu, women and men. DFJ is a contemporary dance company, but there were a lot of balletic moves on view, performed sincerely, in spite of the send-up of the art form narrated at the opening by dancer Nicola Haskins. But Masilo's ballet phrases often segued into something much earthier. Elbows began to jab the air, legs strutted or made low springs off the floor, bottoms waggled. The ballet rule of silence didn't apply, as we discovered when the corps rushed across the stage singing or wailing at full voice.
Masilo herself took the role of Odette, the good swan, who in this version was chosen as a bride for Prince Siegfried by his mother, unaware that her son is gay. The great pas de deux of the first act became a seduction solo for Odette, trying vainly to ignite some lust in her prince, who stood bored and humiliated downstage. This solo was the best thing in the show, expressing in concentrated form Masilo's dynamic mashup of ballet and contemporary African dance. I was a bit thrown when she began, dancing at a much faster clip than Tchaikovsky's music, but I think that was just another instance of the creative tension she enforced all evening between her work and the classical tradition.
The 70-minute show uses only excerpts of the original score, and adds pieces by other composers, including Steve Reich and Camille Saint-Saens, whose The Dying Swan introduced the real love of Siegfried's life, the male Odile, whose role contained the most consistently balletic dancing. Apparently the traditional association of pure ballet style and pure love still works for Masilo at some level. The Dying Swan also set up the final scene, in which the whole company swirls around the stage in black floor-length skirts, collapsing one by one as AIDS ravages the community.
This last scene, set to music by Arvo Part, was beautiful in its way, but choreographically distinct from the rest, with way more focus on port de bras and not much movement to see under those long skirts. It felt like a free-standing elegy that had been tacked onto a show that, till then, had seemed to be about finding postcolonial, gay-positive meaning in a beloved but exotic cultural heirloom.
Another scene, in which the corps inflicted a group shaming on Siegfried for being gay, made sense as a reflection of homophobia in Africa. But as Masilo became absorbed more and more in these big social issues, her fairy-tale drama seemed less and less relevant. By the end, those poor birds had no further point.
Dance Factory Johannesburg's production of Swan Lake continues at Place des Arts' Salle Wilfrid-Pelletier through Saturday.