In a way, the title of dancer Dada Masilo’s first full-length work as a choreographer is misleading. The World, My Bum and Other Big, Round Things is not a work about women coming to terms with their body mass at all. The work’s creator herself has no reason to make a self-conscious call for acceptance. She has a small, wiry frame that somehow does not detract from her presence on stage.
The World, instead, grapples with the unspoken war that takes place in the battle zones that are city sidewalks and taxi ranks — a war many in the show’s 16-member cast know all too well. The walk from the Dance Factory in Newtown to the Bree taxi rank is a life-threatening obstacle course, Masilo insists. The one-hour piece, she says, is symptomatic of this and other manifestations of the increasingly corrosive relations between the sexes.
‘How it started was I was looking at the different ways that men were looking at women. In Brussels and South Africa, it was very different,” says the 22-year-old, who returned to South Africa last year after a two-year stint at Belgium’s Performing Arts Research and Training Studios. ‘In Brussels, men open doors for you,” she says. ‘If you work with somebody’s body, before they touch you, they ask, ‘May I —’ It’s not like they can just come and touch whatever. Having been in Brussels, I noticed how bad things are here.”
The piece was initially conceived as a solo and was performed to critical acclaim in Grahamstown this year. But the more Masilo spoke to the Dance Factory Youth, whom she teaches, the more she realised that harassment was a collective experience. ‘I find that you can say things better as a collective,” reasons Masilo, who currently has an artist’s residency at the Factory. ‘I wanted to stress the fact that young girls are experiencing [abuse] and their mothers have experienced it before and there is not really much that they can do about it.”
Granted, Masilo does have feminist leanings, of the radical kind, but her latest work is about much more than being combative towards men.
‘You have men who are feminists, so it’s not about that,” she argues. ‘I have a lot of male friends and I sit and talk to them about harassment and what is interesting is that in these situations, they say: ‘Well, if I’m walking with you and somebody does that to you,
argues. ‘I have a lot of male friends and I sit and talk to them about harassment and what is interesting is that in these situations, they say: ‘Well, if I’m walking with you and somebody does that to you, I’m not necessarily able to interfere because I don’t know what that person is carrying. You can’t enter into a discussion with someone and then a gun comes out or a knife comes out.’ So they are also in a vulnerable position.”
Although The World is definitely combative and polemical, what is refreshing about it is the way in which it is rendered. Masilo, who started teaching at the Dance Factory at 16, is a prodigious talent who adds idiosyncratic and emotive flair to contemporary choreography. She has incredible agility and speed, which she can manipulate with unsettling results. She is fully aware of dance’s limited reach, as it takes place within a confined, privileged space.
In the beginning, we see Masilo confronting the audience with an ambiguous sexual persona. But there is no narrative here. Masilo and her clique rely on emotion, provocation and verbal sarcasm to subvert conventionally accepted notions of femininity.
Suzette le Sueur, director of the Dance Factory, who spotted Masilo at the age of 11 while she was a member of Meadowlands’ Peacemakers company, says it was obvious in her body language from that early age that she understood exactly what a theatre was. ‘What we did then was to give her access to some very good teachers and to make sure that we didn’t squash what she came with because it was very unique,” says Le Sueur. ‘If a child comes with so much, some methods of training can actually suppress that and you can’t put it back later.” This is Masilo’s first year as a professional dancer.
The World, My Bum and Other Big, Round Things will be shown at the Dance Factory from August 8 to 11, as part of the Newtown Women in Arts Festival