Why Dada Masilo’s Hamlet Centers Ophelia

South African dancer and choreographer Dada Masilo is known for her reinterpretations of Western European classics. With her latest, Hamlet, she has shifted her focus from the ballet to the literary canon, centering a key female character from Shakespeare’s tragedy, Ophelia. Like her previous ballets, which have been described as “challenging prejudice by turning race, class and gender stereotypes on their heads,” Hamlet interrogates the impact of patriarchal power imbalances on women through the dynamic movements born of Masilo’s particular fusion of ballet, contemporary, and African dance forms. Following its premiere in Vienna this July, the work’s U.S. debut was slated to take place in New York City this month, but has been postponed. 

How do you decide the works you’re going to take on? 

I decide based on what I’ve read. I think of the narratives. I’ve really had to go into this thinking, If you’re going to tell a story, I want to tell a story that I would be able to sit down with my grandmother and say, “Okay, this is what happened.” She was a fantastic storyteller and a big lover of the TV dramas “Dallas” and “Dynasty.” I would come home from school and she would say, “And, this is what J.R. did…” as if she knows these people, as if it’s real. So with Hamlet, I want to be able to sit people down who’ve not read the play and go, “So this is what happens in a nutshell.” It doesn’t matter if you know Shakespearean English, it’s the story. 

We’ve become so desensitized because we’re very happy with just not allowing ourselves to be a part of what it is that we’re watching in the theater and in real life. We’re sometimes too quick to say, “Okay, that’s your problem.” I find that is so sad. That is why I started working with the classics and narrative, because I want people to feel. When you’re telling a story, at the end of the story you have to have felt something. You can’t just walk out of the theater going, “Yeah, the movement was nice.” I want people to understand the narrative without having to be told in words. And that’s what I’ve done with all my work.

Why Hamlet? 

I wanted to challenge myself because this is the most difficult of Shakespeare’s­ plays. In reading the play, I just felt Ophelia’s journey was not explored enough. This is not a criticism of Shakespeare. You see this young woman’s relationship with her father and Hamlet, and then the next thing she does is this major mad scene. I wanted to explore how we got to the point of this madness, looking at the misogyny and the fact that women were just disregarded. I’m doing it from the perspective of the two major women in the work: Gertrude, Hamlet’s mother, and Ophelia, his lover. 

Was Gertrude aware of the relationship between Hamlet and Ophelia? If so, what did she think about that, and was she in on the murder of the old king? I followed Ophelia’s narrative because I did not think that it had enough weight. Hamlet murdered Polonius, her father. So for her lover to do that…she had so many questions about everything. She is the only person who does not know what is going on. There is this very young woman who has been told to be a certain kind of woman and she ends up with a room full of dead people and doesn’t know how she got there.

Your work has been referred to as socially conscious or political. By centering Ophelia and Gertrude, would you say there is an element of feminism in your Hamlet? 

I don’t think that it is about feminism. And a lot of people have called my work political, but I am just working with what I observe. Misogyny, which is what Hamlet is about, is something I see every day, whether in Hamlet or in Johannesburg. I don’t have to be a feminist to go, “Okay, I live through this.”

It’s sad that misogyny is still such a pressing issue.

I was doing an interview in Vienna and they asked, “Why do you think that it’s important to portray Ophelia as the hero in the work?” But, it is about her. She is the person that has to deal with all of this. 

In The Sacrifice, your work inspired by Pina Bausch’s The Rite of Spring, you used ballet and Tswana dance, a traditional African form. Is there an Africanist presence in all of your ballets, and is it evident in Hamlet? 

I always say to people that my roots are always going to be in South Africa. I was born in South Africa, and I think that people say, “Oh, you’re trying to accentuate that.” No, I can’t take the South African out of me. It doesn’t matter what fusion of dance techniques I do. That is my core. I think that what has become so interesting for me over the years with the works that I’ve made is that people sort of think that fusing contemporary dance or African dance and classical ballet is a thing. For me, it’s not a thing. I’m trained in and love classical ballet and African dance, so I will bring elements of all of these techniques into my work and see how they would coexist. I’m not trying to prove a point or be clever. This is what’s in my toolbox. 

In Hamlet, we have a little bit of African reference. I say to the dancers, “Think of ‘Bridgerton,’ but put it in Africa.” [Laughs.] I believe that even though we are referencing the Elizabethan period, we bring it back home just slightly by taking “Bridgerton” and putting it in Soweto, or somewhere in Africa. Also, people need to understand, we were colonized by the British, so that is something that is always going to be part of our culture. You can have the African rituals that we do that are our rituals, but we have been colonized. I’m not trying to be bougie, but that is just part of our culture, too.