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.
A spokeswoman for her family, Bridget van Oerle, said she died unexpectedly in a hospital after a brief illness.
Ms. Masilo built a reputation as a fearless choreographer who deconstructed ballet classics and fused them with African dance styles. Her interpretations of works like “Romeo and Juliet,” “Carmen” and “Hamlet” intrigued critics and were admired by 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, referring to African dance and 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 had 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 movement and her witty handling of 19th-century ballets’ themes, through which she raised thorny issues involving race relations, feminist struggles and homophobia. She followed “Swan Lake” in 2017 with “Giselle,” another well-reviewed work that mixed African dance 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.
When she was 10 years old she began dancing with a neighborhood group called the Peacemakers, an initiative to keep young children off the streets. She later studied at the Dance Factory in Johannesburg, before moving on to the 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 2016. “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 she already knew that she wanted to move abroad. “When I was 14, I saw a video of Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker’s Rosas company,” based in Brussels, she said in the 2016 interview. “I wanted to dance like that.”
In 2004, she went to Brussels to audition for Ms. 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.” It was 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 works and began to tackle the classics: first “Romeo and Juliet “ (2008), then “Carmen” (2009) and “Swan Lake” (2010). She chose these works, she said, because the narratives “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,” she added.
As Ms. Masilo’s reputation grew internationally, she also began to collaborate on projects with the South African artist William Kentridge and with the South African choreographers PJ Sabbagha and Gregory Maqoma.
“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.
Ms. Masilo is survived by her mother and her sister, Xoliswa.
Ms. Masilo’s recent works included “The Sacrifice,” a reimagined version of Pina Bausch’s “The Rite of Spring.” Debuting in 2021 — and performed last year at the Joyce Theater in New York — the piece explores the original ballet’s themes of ritual and sacrifice by drawing on traditional Tswana dances.
At her death Ms. Masilo had been working on an autobiographical solo piece about the loss of loved ones, Ms. van Oerle said.
In early December, she was recognized by the City of Johannesburg with a star embedded in the wall of the Soweto Theater. Accepting the award onstage with her nieces, she said she was thinking of her aunt. Writing on social media, she said of the star, “It means so much coming from home.”
