Encountering Dancing Shakespeare/s: José Limón’s The Moor’s Pavane, Dada Masilo’s the bitter end of rosemary and Gregory Maqoma and Helge Letonja’s OUT OF JOINT

Abstract

This article engages with three contemporary dance works, each representing a different Shakespearean encounter. Its starting point is Modernist American choreographer José Limón’s The Moor’s Pavane (1949), a seminal (and perhaps now iconic) instance of a choreographer negotiating narrative: Shakespeare’s Othello. It then discusses two contemporary and localised South African dance works that also ‘encounter’ Shakespeare: Dada Masilo’s the bitter end of rosemary (2010), in which a choreographer/dancer negotiates character (Ophelia); and the recent transnational work of Gregory Maqoma and Helge Letonja, OUT OF JOINT (2017), in which the choreographers respond to an idea derived from a ‘poetic’ Shakespeare. Shakespeare is navigated and ‘encountered’ by these selected choreographers in differing contexts as a type of intertextual – and embodied – site of recognition for making meaning. The article explores the intricacies of intertextual dialogue between a literary Shakespeare, choreography and the dancing body. It considers the layered potential for Shakespeare/s to be a site of localised and contemporary embodiment: a trigger or a touch point for contemporary dance-makers that allows ‘Shakespeare’ to be viewed as a dialectic, a space of tensions and revisions. This is framed by the author’s own ‘encounters’ with Shakespeare as a South African.