Do Not Go Gently
The South African contemporary choreographer Dada Masilo, based at Johannesburg’s The Dance Factory, has re-imagined some of the most familiar works in the western canon, including “Giselle” and “Swan Lake,” through an African lens. In “The Sacrifice,” she takes a juggernaut of early 20th century modernism, “The Rite of Spring.” But it is more complicated than that; as Masilo writes in her program note, she is responding not to Nijinsky and Stravinsky but to Pina Bausch, whose punishing 1975 “Rite of Spring” for the Paris Opéra is a juggernaut of its own. (Bausch’s work comes to the Park Avenue Armory...
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