This article first appeared in THE SUNDAY INDEPENDENT

6th July 2008

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Very few people who attend the annual National Arts Festival in Grahamstown know that this country’s flagship cultural event has its roots in a comparatively modest festival of Shakespeare productions and lectures held in 1974, linked to a conference on “English-speaking South Africa” and not as far removed as the organisers had perhaps hoped from the jingoism and colonial cringing that was still strongly associated with ‘Englishness’ south of the Limpopo at that time.

Shakespearean criticism and performance has changed a lot since then, and over three decades there have been hundreds of different manifestations of Shakespeare’s plays at the Festival. 2008 is the first year that there is no ‘straight’ Shakespeare performance on in Grahamstown; but there are nevertheless three adaptations that offer rich pickings for bardolators and bardophobes alike.

Ingrid Wylde directs Puck’s Story, an outdoor site-specific performance in which the impish sprite leads the audience through the ‘forest’ of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. A production of Heiner Muller’s HamletMachine offers an engaging version of the East German playwright’s notoriously difficult text and thus, indirectly, of Shakespeare’s most famous play. The talk of the town, however, has been Dada Masilo’s dance interpretation of Romeo and Juliet. Last year, Masilo starred in PJ Sabbagha’s Macbeth, a work that was well received by dance aficionados but less gratifying to those with a Shakespearean interest.

With Romeo and Juliet, Masilo – who dances the role of the eponymous heroine – announces a career shift from being Sabbagha’s protégé to being a choreographer in her own right. The piece is her creation, although she has been assisted by her mentor and by Gregory Maqoma with some of the sequences and, as she is quick to point out, the collaborative nature of the production means that much of the choreography is attributable to her fellow-dancers (a company of 11 performers from The Dance Factory in Johannesburg, a number of whom were also involved in Macbeth).

Although Sabbagha and Maqoma’s contributions are integral to the piece, Masilo wanted to avoid the appearance of a “triple bill” – which might give the impression that Romeo and Juliet consists of distinct scenes by separate choreographers rather than being a single, organic narrative. As she explains, “It’s an episodic treatment of the play, but there is a line of continuity and we were careful with the narrative transitions.”

That is chiefly what distinguishes Romeo and Juliet from last year’s Macbeth and, in the opinion of this reviewer, makes it a more accessible and, simultaneously, sophisticated work. (The same could perhaps be said in comparing other physical theatre or dance productions on the Main Programme of the Arts Festival. In Bar Flies, Gerhard Bester, Craig Morris and Rayzelle Sham have created a nuanced but light-hearted piece that documents a typical late-night, alcohol-infused rendezvous between two patrons at a bar, and the hapless attempts of an increasingly drunk bartender to intervene. By contrast, Bernardo Montet’s take on evolutionary processes in Batracien, L’Aprés-Midi (Amphibian, the Afternoon) may entail no small degree of physical skill but remains, in the final analysis, a ponderous and impenetrable work.) Masilo’s version of the tragic love story is not simply an aesthetically invigorating dance production; it is also a subtle piece of literary criticism.

The programme provides a schematic explanation of the episodes selected from the play, along with details of the music that accompanies each scene. The first of these musical choices is a nod to the best-known dance transposition of the play: Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet overture, from the score that, since it was first performed in 1938, has become more renowned than the ballet it was written for.

The opening also follows a parallel tradition in performances of the play: a tableau of the dead couple and their mourning families, echoing the explicit reference in Shakespeare’s Prologue to their “death-mark’d love”. The young lovers, we know, are doomed from the start.

The characterisation is equally faithful: we have the solemn Friar Lawrence (Bailey Snyman), whose strategising is ultimately the couple’s undoing; Juliet’s bawdy nurse (Nicola Haskins); and Juliet’s parents (Gustin Makgeledisa and Vishanti Arumugam), whose obsession with contriving an appropriate marriage for their daughter results in a domestic tyranny that borders on the violent.

Indeed, the patriarchal structure of Verona’s aristocratic society and the latent misogyny of the male characters in Shakespeare’s play is brought to the fore – a “feminist” interpretation, as Masilo puts it. This emphasis on gender is introduced early in the performance, with the quarrel between the Montague and Capulet families portrayed by opposing groups of male and female dancers. As the men and women ‘battle it out’, there is an undercurrent of desire in their physical confrontation, offering a potential critique of masculine bravado and fighting as a testosterone-heavy sublimation of homo-erotic feelings.

The implied criticism is extended to the interaction between Romeo (Daniel Mashita) and his ‘boys’, which is underscored by narcissism and self-absorption. A striking rejuvenation of the scenes leading up to the masked ball comes in the form of Mercutio’s famous “Queen Mab” speech, hauntingly rendered in Xhosa by Songezo Mcilizeli – the only spoken words in the production.

Interestingly, this Romeo and Juliet reaches its climax not in the tomb, where the Friar’s botched plan results in the twin suicides of the protagonists, but in an interpolated scene: “The Missing Letter”. The sheer misfortune of an undelivered letter (a phenomenon familiar to most South Africans, although in Shakespeare’s play it is as a result of an outbreak of plague, rather than Post Office bungling) is actually what seals the tragedy – it is more than a mere plot device, suggesting that the lovers’ deaths are accidental as much as they are guided by fate. Highlighting this aspect of the story potentially changes the way we read the play: what does it mean to describe the couple as “star-cross’d lovers”?

Aside from literary interests, Masilo describes the work as having its origins in her “experiments in creating a unique fusion of ballet and contemporary techniques”. The balance of the old and the new, of Eurocentric and multi-cultural traditions, is sustained throughout the production. For instance, the double storey scaffolding of the set (apart from its obvious use in the balcony scene) evokes a modern, industrial atmosphere; but in a solo number, “Juliet”, Masilo weaves between the poles with a combination of urbane ‘ballet-based’ grace and energetic ‘contemporary-based’ movements.

Masilo admits that some of her cast members were initially resistant to the “pointwork and tights and hair buns” that they associated with ballet. One of the great achievements of this production, however, is to prove that ballet need not have those connotations, and that it can complement and be complemented by other dance forms.

This says as much about Shakespeare as it does about ballet – both were long associated, for better or worse, with the colonial centre. But as talented young artists like Masilo are showing, they are not inherently ‘Western’ or ‘European’; they belong to a global performing arts community.