South African dancer and choreographer Dada Masilo brings new dance piece to Bradford

One such dancer looking forward to that welcome is Dada Masilo, the South African choreographer and dancer whose company bears her own name and who is making a welcome return to the city this week. “It’s great to return to the UK. With this tour we are going to quite a lot of new places, so I’m really excited about being back in Bradford,” says Soweto-born Masilo who was 12 when she started contemporary dance and ballet classes. She went on to study in Brussels, one of just 30 dancers accepted to study at the acclaimed P.A.R.T.S. School of Contemporary Dance. After graduating, however, she says she struggled to find back in South Africa productions that brought together the international elements of dance and music which had inspired her while training.

“To begin with I didn’t want to be a choreographer, but we had to create work as part of our training. Then when I came back to South Africa there were no choreographers making work that I wanted to perform,” she says. “I wanted to do the narrative, the dance drama, and nobody was creating that kind of work. So I thought ‘well, if no-one else is doing it, then it has got to be yourself’.”

Masilo has since created a series of hugely successful works which take Western classics and fuse them with elements of storytelling, movement and music from her own African heritage. Her reinterpretations of Carmen, Romeo and Juliet and Swan Lake have been critically acclaimed worldwide.

As well as choreographing, Dada performs in all of her own shows.

“For me it’s easier to be both choreographer and dancer because I’m not sitting out watching what I want dancers to do, I’m doing it too. I want to feel what everyone else is feeling. Then I know that when I’m tired, then everybody is tired. I need to be there, it is what I love to do.”

For her latest show, The Sacrifice, in Bradford this week and heading to Hull next month, blending traditions meant a lot of work for Masilo and her dancers. The Tswana dance, traditionally performed at festivals, originated among the people of Botswana and is also popular in South Africa and Namibia. “Tswana is a dance from my heritage which is inspired by the meerkat – it’s a very small, very fast animal and I was drawn to that because I love to move very fast. In the past I’ve fused contemporary dance with flamenco, ballet and many other things, but not with a specific dance from my own culture, so this is an opportunity to do that. I had to learn Tswana from scratch – I spent three months with a teacher, just by myself, and then we brought in the company for about a month. It was incredibly difficult, but I always love learning something new.”

She also sought the advice of community elders to ensure the work remained respectful of her people’s traditions. “There is a section where we call out all our surnames, basically calling the ancestors saying the ancestors have come to this place and I had to ask the elders whether that was all right to do. I needed to get their permission.” The Sacrifice is also inspired by Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, but Dada and her teams have taken that inspiration and used it to create a new soundscape firmly rooted in African music.

“There are so many versions of The Rite of Spring set to Stravinsky’s music that I wanted to create an entirely new score. I have four musicians, a percussionist, a violinist, a keyboard player and a singer. We listened to the music and I said ‘okay, what can we do with those references?’ They created the score while I created the movement vocabulary.”

Dada Masilo’s The Sacrifice, Bradford Alhambra, March 14&15; Hull New Theatre, April 7&8.