Dada Masilo’s Hamlet
Sadler’s Wells Theatre May 2026
Read it as a compliment: Dada Masilo’s extraordinary Hamlet is just like a prizefight. You can’t take your eyes off it for a minute, because every movement comes as a surprise, packing a carefully aimed punch that stuns you with its impact and leaves you reeling.
Masilo’s unexpected death at 39, in 2024, stunned the international dance community, which had quickly recognized her remarkable talent. Trained as a dancer in her native South Africa and at Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s school P.A.R.T.S. in Brussels, as a choreographer Masilo developed a unique blend of theatre, contemporary dance and traditional African dance.
While applying it to classics of the ballet repertory, notably Swan Lake, Giselle, and The Rite of Spring, she also used it politically to confront established attitudes about race and gender. “I don’t just want to be a body in space,” she declared. “I want to open up conversations about issues like homophobia and domestic violence…”
As a result, her social conscience and her country’s cultural history run through her theatrical language like nourishing streams of invention. She was particularly drawn to Tswana dance, which she said ”is from my heritage. The movement vocabulary is very elegant, very intricate. It’s inspired by little animals and little fast animals […] there is no music, so you’re making music with the rhythm and your voice […] for me it’s about finding the sensuality of the movement and the brokenness and the honesty of it.”
In Botswana and South Africa, Tswana dance informs the time-honored rituals surrounding weddings, funerals, initiation ceremonies and harvest festivals. It enables elders to pass on the stories that tie people to their ancestors and their roots, and it promotes their sense of belonging. For Masilo, it became the ground bass, the supporting foundation for a narrative that has proved timeless.
Distilling Shakespeare’s longest play into an hour, she bypassed haunting visions as superfluous and launched straight into the tale of identity, mortality and vengeance by opening the show with Hamlet’s “To be or not to be.” With one performer speaking the role, sometimes in an African language, and another dancing the role, she scattered the soliloquies through the action like signposts to a drama that came and went in startling flashes.
Not that it needed explanation. Or decoration. Or mimed gesturing or realistic props. Trusting that we knew the story—after all, Shakespeare’s audience knew the story when the play was first produced—Masilo presented scene after scene in bold, economical dance. We saw Claudius at prayer and nearly killed, Ophelia cruelly rejected and suddenly mad, swords tipped with poison slashing the air like silent threats, courtiers carousing until violence interrupted their jollity.
We saw the old king’s murder in shadow images, cutout silhouettes as sharp as words, viewed through a scrim. Gertrude and Ophelia shared a duet of crippling sorrow that rendered them equal; you forgot their relative status and saw only an entitled queen, played with imposing authority by a man, and a tiny girl, already fragile as a ghost. And through it all, the dancers stamped and shuddered as if the enveloping tragedy would eventually destroy them as it destroys Shakespeare’s characters.
The sense of communal bonding that emerges from Tswana dance permeates dance companies and the cast of a play and attentive audiences, uniting each group, if only temporarily, in mutual effort and pleasure. In her Hamlet, Masilo ignored the standard conventions that separate dance, theatre, artifice and nature, and united them too.
The listings that once appeared regularly in print, alerting the public to coming events, are long gone. So it would have been easy to miss Masilo’s striking work and the artists from Johannesburg’s Dance Factory who realized it in London. This time, they only materialized for two performances. Don’t miss them next time.