Dada Masilo, the South African choreographer-dancer whose re-imaginings of classical Western European ballets have captivated the international dance world, is returning to New York’s Joyce Theatre with one of her own works, “The Sacrifice,” from May 23–28. The highly praised piece, inspired by the late German neo-expressionist dance artist Pina Bausch’s ”The Rite of Spring,” fuses the rituals of Masilo’s South African Tswana dance form with ballet and modern dance to create an iconoclastic evening-length work that will be performed by Masilo’s company of South African dancers and musicians.

In the past, Masilo’s work has amazed audiences and critics with its passionate re-envisioning, re-telling, and deconstruction of dance’s sacred cows, capturing the essence of their narrative while injecting the original fairy-tale scenarios involving swans, sylphs, and such with a contemporary sensibility that grapples with relevant issues such as racial, class, gender inequality, discrimination, and resistance to oppression. 

The plot twists are conveyed by using movement that blends ballet’s developpes, arabesques, and jetes with an Africanist presence that grounds the story in a new, more diasporic reality as Masilo wrangles the classic canon into a contemporary mode.

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While her fusion of classical ballet and African dance forms have been applauded internationally, Masilo said, “Some people have gotten annoyed when I pick the classics. They say, ‘How dare you!” But I’m like ‘Do you have copyrights on this work? I’m not taking anything away from you, I’m just introducing something different. Something that opens your eyes a little bit. That’s all.’” Her defiantly innovative approach to dance comes both from love of the art form and years of study.

Born in Soweto, South Africa. Masilo started training at the Dance Factory at the age of 12 and after matriculating from the National School of the Arts, trained for a year at Jazzart in Cape Town. At 19, she was accepted to study at the Performing Arts Research and Training Studios in Brussels. After two years, she returned to South Africa and in 2008, she was awarded the Standard Bank Young Artist Award for Dance. 

Three commissions from the National Arts Festival resulted in her versions of “Romeo and Juliet” (2008), “Carmen” (2009), and “Swan Lake” (2010),. In May 2017, she premiered her “Giselle” in Oslo and in 2021, ”The Sacrifice” in Vienna. 

Since 2012, her works have been performed in 25 countries and 150 cities around the world. She has been nominated for or received a Bessie Award (“Swan Lake,” 2016); Danza&Danza Award for “Best Performance 2017” (“Giselle”); Prince Claus Fund Next Generation Award (2018,  Netherlands); and UK Critic’s Circle 2020 National Dance Award for Outstanding Female Modern Performance in the title role as Giselle.

Discussing her unique approach to ballet classics and shared passion for the art with American Ballet Theatre Principal Ballerina Misty Copeland, a fan of her work, Masilo described how she “fell in love with ballet” at a very young age and “stumbled into choreography” after being told that her body was not right for ballet. Finding that the types of ballets she wanted to do just weren’t there, she decided to create them.

In a recent conversation with the Amsterdam News she said, “What I try not to do is limit myself. I don’t like being put in a box. I suppose as Black people, we’re always put in that box. I saw an opportunity of [asking] what happens if we get out of our boxes and just try and see if things can co-exist without going into the mode of ‘Oh, you can’t touch that.’ For me, fusing different dance styles, breaking down the barriers, is more challenging.”

Masilo’s “The Sacrifice” is an example of what happens when her indomitable spirit takes on that challenge. The piece first grew, she says, out of a dance exercise that involved learning a 3-minute segment of the Bausch work set to Igor Stravinsky’s masterpiece. 

“I remember listening to Stravinsky’s music, thinking ‘this is wild,’” she said. “I became very intrigued about the music. I like working with complex rhythms. I started improvising to the music and I found it incredibly difficult and frustrating, but then I thought, I’m not giving up on this one, so I did a 20-minute version using some of the Stravinsky score.” 

The result was shown in New York several seasons ago during the annual Fall for Dance concerts at City Center. But that wasn’t the end of it. Masilo wanted to do a full-length work of “The Sacrifice,” but the Stravinsky score was too short, “so I had this idea to work with live music and ask the musicians to listen to the Stravinsky score and then react to it. With the musicians, you’ve got voice, you’ve got keyboard, you’ve got violin, and then percussion. I played them the music and they said, ‘Oh, my God what is this!’” 

The result was a work of music that wraps her dance into a vibrant rhythmic package, pulsating with African music and dance. 

“What I wanted was to infuse the work with a dance from my South African heritage,” Masilo said. “It’s called Tswana, a traditional dance of Botswana. It’s a dance that is very much about rhythm. In fact, the whole thing is about rhythm. Not just rhythm, but also ritual—the rite of spring, the preparation of the earth and mating. I put ‘The Sacrifice’ in a South African rural context where there are so many different cultures and traditions…In South Africa, we have ritual celebrations for deaths, birth, for anything really, because ritual is very sacred. Even in ‘The Sacrifice,’ we have to honor our ancestors because that’s part of the ritual and the fact that in the African culture, ritual and religion are intertwined. They’re not two separate things. Working on this piece has been very interesting, but also very challenging and rewarding.” 

Asked what she wants the audience to come away with after seeing this new work, Masilo smiled and said simply, “You know in the beginning [that] when I started work on ‘The Sacrifice,’ I was very angry and I wanted to comment on the state of the world, and then I did a 360. ‘The Sacrifice’ is about grief and healing, and I want the audience to be moved, I want them to laugh, I want them to cry because I feel like we’re so desensitized that we don’t feel anything anymore. I want to touch people.”

For more info, visit www.joyce.org.

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The Amsterdam News interviewed Lisa McCorkell, one of the co-founders of the Patient-Led Research Collaborative, who has a background in public policy, public health advocacy, and research. She is a co-author of the article “Long COVID: major findings, mechanisms and recommendation.” This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

AmNews: Please tell us about your background and your work?

McCorkell: The Patient-Led Research Collaborative is a group of Long COVID patients who conduct research on Long COVID and do advocacy for people with Long COVID and associated conditions. I got COVID in March of 2020.

AmNews: Tell us about your COVID experience.

McCorkell: I inherently knew (I had COVID). I wasn’t able to get a test but I…felt different in my body than anything else I had before. It was right when  people were talking about it…I was at Berkeley at the time for graduate school. I got the alert that someone on campus tested positive and then that night, I started feeling symptomatic. I think I got it traveling, so I got it pretty early on and then wasn’t able to get a test because I didn’t meet all three of the main symptoms you had to have at the time: fever, cough, and shortness of breath.  

It wasn’t severe enough to be hospitalized, so I didn’t get a test. My doctor said I’d be better in a couple weeks—”Just isolate from your roommates and you’ll be fine.” I was annoyed at how long it was taking me to recover, but when I got to a month of not being better and actually feeling quite significantly worse than at the beginning, I really started to worry because this wasn’t being talked about in the media at the time.

Around this time, Fiona Lowenstein wrote an op-ed in the New York Times that described their experience having these prolonged symptoms from COVID. They started the Body Politic support group, so I joined that. A group of us who had [an] interest in data and data backgrounds put together a survey to document everyone’s experiences and the result of that survey was the first research on Long COVID. That was published—we just posted it as a Google doc in May of 2020. 

We documented [approximately] 60 symptoms. We showed that it wasn’t (just) a respiratory illness—that there were a lot of neurological symptoms. Things that I think became more commonly known in late 2020/early 2021, we identified right away.  

That work kept going and we ended up doing a second survey,  a longer-term survey, that was published in the Lancet eClinicalMedicine journal in July of 2021 and documented over 200 symptoms of Long COVID. We have been doing a variety of different research projects consulting on Long COVID research and advocating for people with Long COVID since then. Now we’re a full organization. I work there full-time now. 

AmNews: Given all the work that you’ve done, do you have thoughts about ultimately what Long COVID is?

McCorkell: It is likely several different things. I think we have good clues as to what some of the underlying mechanisms are. When we examine known persistent reservoirs of viruses, reactivations of old viruses, we see that in many other chronic conditions like MS that have some overlapping symptoms. I was able to get my blood tested for microclots and that’s something (found in) the small studies that have been done: 100% of Long COVID patients have microclots.   

That’s kind of a middle step, (but it’s) obvious that’s not the cause. Something is causing the microclots, but I think that’s going to be a good clue to what’s going on with blood clotting and endothelial dysfunction. I think it’s going to end up being a few different things. If we’re having endothelial damage consistently to our bodies because of these microclots, that’s going to potentially lead to fairly significantly bad outcomes later on.

AmNews: Where are we currently with Long COVID?

McCorkell: I think especially in the context of this study, it’s clear that  Long COVID is a very serious outcome of a COVID infection and other studies have shown that re-infection increases your likelihood of getting Long COVID. The best way to not get Long COVID is to not get COVID. 

AmNews: What else do you want our readers to know about COVID?

Especially if people aren’t online or don’t want to join online groups, there is a book called The Long COVID Survival Guide. It has stories and advice from 20 people with Long COVID, including myself, and it’s like a support group in book form. It also walks through how to get a diagnosis, common symptoms, best ways to treat, and how to deal with stigma, so I think this is a good resource and we’re trying to get it into libraries, so it’s more available.  

AmNEWS: Are there any final words you would like to say to our readers?

McCorkell: So many people are forgetting about Long COVID. In Black and brown communities, there’s a lag in terms of resources, so even if COVID were starting to dissipate, there would still be a lag in Black and brown communities. We would still need to keep up with it. It’s not going away. 

If you are recovering from #COVID19 or experiencing #LongCOVID, you can call 212-COVID19 to receive specialty care or visit www.nychealthandhospitals.org/services/covid-19 to learn more about NYC’s COVID-19 Centers of Excellence in Tremont, Jackson Heights, and Bushwick.For additional resources about COVID-19, visit www1.nyc.gov/site/coronavirus/index.page. COVID-19 testing, masks, and vaccination resources can also be accessed on the AmNews COVID-19 page: www.amsterdamnews.com/covid.

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* This article was originally published here