Cape Ballet Africa’s Salt, which includes Mthuthuzeli November’s Chapter Two. Dance & Physical Theatre
Venue: Guy Butler Theatre
Next performance: Friday 27 June 19:00.
Interview
Guest Writer: Keith Bain
The choreographer’s deepest desire is to instil in other dancers the joy
he himself has experienced by dancing – and, with that joy, to make
spirits soar.
Cue choreographer spotlight: the dreams & vision of Chapter Two
“As long as I can remember, I’ve been a dancer,” says Mthuthuzeli November, who was
recently recognised at the prestigious Benois de la Danse awards for Chapter Two, a work
he choreographed for Cape Ballet Africa’s inaugural show last year. He says that, all his
life, he has been able to lose himself in dance, felt cushioned and protected by dancing. It
may be his career, but it is his happy place.
Chapter Two forms part of Salt, a triple-bill which includes newly commissioned ballets by
Kirsten Isenberg and Michelle Reid. Since its Cape Town premiere, Salt has been
performed several times across South Africa, and forms part of the curated programme of
the National Arts Festival, where the programme will additionally include George
Balanchine’s Allegro Brillante.
Cape Ballet Africa founder and artistic director Debbie Turner refers to Benois de la Danse
as the “Oscars of the ballet world”. Mthuthuzeli was acknowledged with the prize for Best
Choreography while Joshua Williams, who performs in Chapter Two, shared the Best Male
Dancer prize with Dmitry Smilevskiy, who is Principal Dancer at the Bolshoi Theatre,
where the award ceremony was held on 17 June.
Grounded in a balletic language, Chapter Two incorporates an otherly energy, some
signature spirit that adds a dimension of newness, a layer of meaning that feels unique to
Mthuthuzeli’s work. There’s is an endless thread of innovation that stems from the
choreographer’s instinct for organic hybridisation, his way of infusing a sense of place, and
of his own culture and experience, into a form that’s primarily associated with Europe.
It is very powerful, very physical. And yet that strength produces tremendous lightness and
uplift; in its defiance of gravity, the work causes the soul to soar.
Blending with Ballet Black
These days, it’s a rare privilege to see Mthuthuzeli’s work on a South African stage.
Since 2015, he has lived and worked in the UK, where he won a scholarship to London’s
Central School of Ballet. He was spotted while performing as a student and invited to join
Ballet Black, a diversity-focused classical ballet company established specifically for black
and Asian dancers.
Having risen to become one of Ballet Black’s senior artists, Mthuthuzeli has in a decade
gone from emerging choreographer to being among the most sought-after voices in
contemporary-classical ballet. While not necessarily something he consciously set out to
do, Mthuthuzeli has naturally evolved a choreographic style that blends classical technique
with what he calls “our own traditional ways of dancing”.
By “our”, he means African. South African.
He says having a career in the UK has enabled him to achieve many things he “never
imagined possible”, but also to better appreciate his own cultural roots. “The more time I
spent away from home, the more I longed to come back home, and this started to
influence the way that I was creating. I started to be more interested in stories of South
Africa and in telling those stories using African dance elements and going back to the roots
of township dance and rhythmic and percussive movement.”
His ability is to naturally infuse classical ballet with African elements, so there’s a from-the-
heart-and-soul authenticity – an earthier idiom, some say. It’s had a profound impact on
audiences who come away with a sense of his capacity to capture deep-felt, visceral and
always very personal emotions.
Some say there’s an evocation of some kind of ancestral energy, a tapping into ancient
roots and rhythms, requiring his dancers to journey “beyond the polite constraints of ballet”
into something fiercer, more full-bodied – something that can still surprise.
It’s something that’s certainly evident in Chapter Two, a piece which is riven with a kind of
“from the earth” energy, and that possesses that special potency every great work has: it
makes the audience constantly curious about what’s about to happen next.
Set to a purpose-composed score by Peter Johnson, Chapter Two revisits an earlier work,
Visceral, which Mthuthuzeli created in Cape Town in 2017. For local audiences, it’s
evidence of just how far this emerging world-class choreographer has come since he went
abroad . “I feel that, in my career, I’m now in a new chapter and I’m starting to think about
creation in a very different way,” he says.
“I think the style of movement I’ve adopted over the years is relatively new and people
don’t know what it is,” says Mthuthuzeli. “At times even I don’t know what it is but I know
it’s influenced by where I come from.”
“I just always just loved what music did to my body.”
Before ballet, Mthuthuzeli danced to kwaito on the streets of Zolani, the township where he
grew up outside the fruit-growing town of Ashton in the Western Cape. “I would play music
or sometimes I’d be outside taverns in my township. I’d dance and people threw money at
me and I’d use that to buy snacks. I never danced because people gave me money. I just
always just loved what music did to my body. When I was introduced to ballet it just sort of
felt like a natural progression.”
That progression – from dancing with curiosity as a boy, to joining an outreach ballet
programme in Montagu, to twice winning gold at the South African International Ballet
Competition, to becoming an internationally sought-after choreographer – has simply not
abated.
He graduated from Debbie Turner’s Cape Academy of Performing Arts in 2014 and that
same year, before making the leap to London, he created his debut choreographic work on
the Cape Dance Company.
These days, he’s kept ridiculously busy, having created works around the world with a
diversity of companies, including the English National Ballet, The Washington Ballet,
Switzerland’s Tanz Luzerner Theatre, Charlotte Ballet and the Gibney Company in the US,
Staatsballet Karlsruhe in Germany, the Dutch National Ballet, Ballett Zürich and the Paris
Opera Ballet Company.
And at Glastonbury in 2019 he danced a duet with his Ballet Black dance partner, Cira
Robinson – they performed on the iconic pyramid stage in front of tens of thousands of
festival-goers as part of Grime artist Stormzy’s headline act.
Even the pandemic couldn’t hold him back. In 2020, amid the travel-restricted upheaval,
he choreographed Pergolesi Stabat Mater, a dance film created for on-demand online
viewing by Cape Town Opera. In 2021 he similarly created a dance film for Leeds-based
Northern Ballet, choreographed entirely remotely.
Despite huge demands on his time and the multiple engagements, he strives to be a
choreographer who helps people remember why they love to dance: “Because it makes
them happy,” he says.
Even before he discovered ballet at age 15, Mthuthuzeli danced for the pure joy and
exhilaration it evoked in him. He describes the feeling as a kind of escape. “I’d get lost in
dance. As if I were in a state of trance, where all my problems kind of went away. When I
danced, there were no questions, no scrutinising, no trying to reach for anything.”
He calls dance his “guiding angel”, something he has “simply always loved”. He say “it
feels impossible to love anything else the way I love dance”.
There must be something in the genes. In 2022, Mthuthuzeli’s younger brother, Siphesihle,
was promoted to principal dancer with the National Ballet of Canada in Toronto. He was 22
at the time.
Swapping shoes
It was Siphe who first introduced Mthuthuzeli to ballet, planted the seed that saw him
hanging up his soccer boots in exchange for the adventure of learning a new craft. Fiona
Sutton, who was Mthuthuzeli’s first instructor at Dance For All, an outreach programme
that took ballet to the townships, introduced him to classical technique in an environment
where different cultures were respected and shared.
Mthuthuzeli was never prompted to suppress his heritage, and he retained his love of
kwaito dance.
Nevertheless, ballet changed his life, took him and Siphe out of the township. The shift in
circumstances did not, however, remove the spirit of Zolani, nor the soul of that community
whose love Mthuthuzeli says enabled him to endure the hardscrabble circumstances of
childhood.
Mthuthuzeli, who turns 32 in August, says he’s constantly driven to do something new, “to
one-up myself”.
Certainly, he’s at a point in his career when the work is everything – and when demand for
his talent is relentless.
Accolades, too, have been fast and furious. In 2023, he won the Best Choreographer prize
at the Black British Theatre Awards for Nina: By Whatever Means, his dance-centric
homage to Nina Simone which included music by Mandisi Dyantyis and a performance by
the Zolani Youth Choir, all the way from Mthuthuzeli’s home town.
It wasn’t the first time he’d received such high-level recognition for his work. In 2020,
Mthuthuzeli won a prestigious Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Dance Production.
The prize was for Ingoma (“song”), which he created as part of a triple bill for Ballet Black.
The work, which fused ballet, African dance and singing, drew inspiration from the 1946 South African miners’ strike which saw nine miners killed by police and over 1,200 injured.
It was also named Best Dance Production by the Black British Theatre Awards.
Set to original music by Peter Johnston, Ingoma incorporated gestural and rhythmic
elements familiar to South Africans. With just six dancers and a soundtrack of call-and-
response mass singing, Mthuthuzeli brought a deep pathos to the dance: fluttering hands,
clutched chests, urgent vulnerability, gestural pleading, hints of defiance, all to convey
something of the hungering sadness he wished to evoke.
Significantly, Ingoma kicked off with the dancers symbolically and literally swapping their
ballet shoes for gumboots, readying themselves for their descent into the mines.
This exchange of one kind of footwear for another echoed to some extent Mthuthuzeli’s
own transition to ballet, when, as a teenaged boy in a community where traditional notional
of masculinity prevailed, he traded his soccer boots for ballet tights.
“When my friends saw me wearing tights the first time they thought it was strange,” he
says. Today, Mthuthuzeli wants ballet to be used to tell more stories that are relevant to
black audiences.
Echoes of home
It’s something he is putting into practice. At the Royal Ballet’s Festival of New
Choreography at the Royal Opera House in London last February, he debuted For What
It’s Worth, a piece inspired by singer Miriam Makeba. The work was infused with his
penchant for pushing dancers beyond the limitations of the classical dance repertoire,
highlighting his belief that ballet’s craving for rejuvenation and innovation can benefit from
an injection of African spirit.
Beyond the accolades and the attention, Mthuthuzeli says the highlight of his career so far
came in 2023 when Ballet Black toured to Toronto and he had the chance to perform with
his brother, who has been dancing in Canada ever since, at age 11, he took up a
scholarship to the National Ballet School in Vancouver.
In Toronto, the siblings created a duet that meant, for the first time since they were children
in Zolani, they danced together in a piece they called My Mother’s Son.
“We had been longing to perform together,” says Mthuthuzeli, “so that was really special.”
Not only was it special, but the intimate and muscular duet perfectly embodied that
precious freedom Mthuthuzeli says he gets only from dancing – that ability to lose himself
so thoroughly in the moment that everything else disappears.
* For more of Keith’s writing, follow him on Substack, here.
