Dada Masilo, a South African dancer and choreographer known for injecting African dance into bold, unconventional interpretations of classical ballets like “Swan Lake” and “Giselle,” died on Sunday in Johannesburg. She was 39.
The death, in a hospital, was confirmed by Bridget van Oerle, a spokeswoman for Ms. Masilo’s family, who said she died unexpectedly after a brief illness.
Ms. Masilo built a reputation as a fearless choreographer who deconstructed long-performed ballet classics and fused them with African dance styles. Her interpretations of classic stories — including “Romeo and Juliet,” “Carmen” and “Hamlet” — intrigued critics and won the admiration of audiences in South Africa and abroad.
“In the beginning, I battled just to make them speak to each other,” Ms. Masilo said in a 2014 interview, of fusing African dance moves with ballet. “I thought, OK, let me just try.”
Among her most lauded works was a gay spin on the 19th century ballet “Swan Lake” in which Odette, played by Ms. Masilo, is married off to Prince Siegfried, who pines after a male Odile. Ms. Masilo said she wanted her “Swan Lake” to break gender stereotypes.
“I don’t just want to be a body in space,” she said of her dancing and choreography in a 2016 interview with The New York Times, before the production’s New York debut. “I want to open up conversations about issues like homophobia and domestic violence, because those are realities at home.”
Critics praised her powerfully muscular, kinetic movement and her witty handling of these 19th century ballets’ themes, which she deployed to raise thorny issues including race relations, feminist struggles and homophobia. She followed “Swan Lake” in 2017 with “Giselle,” another well-reviewed work that mixed African dance techniques with ballet and contemporary dance.
Dikeledi Masilo was born on Feb. 21, 1985, in Soweto, South Africa, and grew up as the country was transitioning from apartheid to a democratic government. Her mother, Faith, a single parent, worked as a cashier, and Dada, as she was called, was mostly raised by her grandmother.
She began dancing with a neighborhood group, called The Peacemakers — an initiative to keep young children off the streets — when she was 10 years old. She later began formal dance training at the Dance Factory in Johannesburg before moving on to National School of Arts, also in Johannesburg, where she trained in ballet and contemporary dance.
“I was bitten by the bug right away,” she told The Times in the 2016 interview. “I fought very hard to be able to dance; my family did not like it one bit. They wanted me to be a lawyer or accountant, something stable.”
After graduating from high school in 2001, she moved to Cape Town to work with Alfred Hinkel’s Jazzart company, but already knew she wanted to move abroad. “When I was 14, I saw a video of Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker’s Rosas company,” she said in the 2016 interview. “I wanted to dance like that.”
In 2004, she went to Brussels to audition for de Keersmacker’s P.A.R.T.S. school. “There were 250 people — I was terrified,” Ms. Masilo said. But she was one of 30 students selected and it was during her time at P.A.R.T.S. that she choreographed her first work, a solo about grief inspired by Camille Saint-Saëns’s “The Dying Swan,” as a tribute to an aunt who had died from complications of AIDS.
The experience made her want to explore choreography further, she said, in part because she could not find narrative works that she wanted to perform.
After returning to South Africa in 2007, she danced in other people’s work and simultaneously began to tackle the classics: first “Romeo and Juliet “(2008), then “Carmen” (2009) and “Swan Lake” (2010). She chose these works, she said, because she had always been interested in ballet, although “wasn’t led to become a ballet dancer.” The narratives, she added, “are so good and the characters are so great. I don’t feel that because I’m South African, these aren’t my stories to tell.”
Ms. Masilo’s reputation began to grow internationally and she also began to collaborate on a variety of projects with the South African artist William Kentridge, as well as PJ Sabbagha and Gregory Maqoma, among others.
“To have someone who is engaged with the traditions, who is starting with the classics, but playing against expectations, who has the openness to allow all things to come into the dance — that’s a sensibility that feels close to me,” Mr. Kentridge said in a 2016 interview.
Her recent works included “The Sacrifice,” a reimagined version of Pina Bausch’s “The Rite of Spring” that debuted in 2021 and was performed in New York last year. It explored the ballet’s themes of ritual and sacrifice by drawing upon traditional Tswana dances.
Full information on survivors was not immediately available. She had been working on a new autobiographical solo piece about the loss of loved ones when she died, Ms. van Oerle said.
In early December, she was recognized by City of Johannesburg with a star embedded into the wall of Soweto Theater. She accepted the award onstage with her nieces, and said she was thinking of her aunt.
“It means so much coming from home,” she wrote on social media.
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