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

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.