Javascript must be enabled to continue!
Dada Masilo's Giselle: A Decolonial Love Story
View through CrossRef
This article presents a polycentric Africanist reading of Dada Masilo's Giselle, which debuted in South Africa in 2017. Although ballet was used as a tool of colonization in South Africa, establishing cultural and aesthetic norms from a European paradigm, while undermining Indigenous arts and excluding non-white artists, I argue that Dada Masilo's choreographic choices employ the narrative of Giselle to decolonize through ballet. Masilo's choreography indigenizes the ballet, transforming local and global practices through an Indigenous lens. Dada Masilo's Giselle embodies African philosophies such as ancestorism, as well as gender fluidity and complementarity. It mobilizes techniques such as signifyin(g), comedic resistance, code-switching, battling, shouting, and critically reappropriating Tswana and diasporic movements in order to convey a distinctly South African version of the European ballet. This work transcends the romantic love of Giselle in order to convey a decolonial love by centering South African ways of knowing and being in the world.
Title: Dada Masilo's Giselle: A Decolonial Love Story
Description:
This article presents a polycentric Africanist reading of Dada Masilo's Giselle, which debuted in South Africa in 2017.
Although ballet was used as a tool of colonization in South Africa, establishing cultural and aesthetic norms from a European paradigm, while undermining Indigenous arts and excluding non-white artists, I argue that Dada Masilo's choreographic choices employ the narrative of Giselle to decolonize through ballet.
Masilo's choreography indigenizes the ballet, transforming local and global practices through an Indigenous lens.
Dada Masilo's Giselle embodies African philosophies such as ancestorism, as well as gender fluidity and complementarity.
It mobilizes techniques such as signifyin(g), comedic resistance, code-switching, battling, shouting, and critically reappropriating Tswana and diasporic movements in order to convey a distinctly South African version of the European ballet.
This work transcends the romantic love of Giselle in order to convey a decolonial love by centering South African ways of knowing and being in the world.
Related Results
Courtly Love in Perspective: The Hierarchy of Love in Andreas Capellanus
Courtly Love in Perspective: The Hierarchy of Love in Andreas Capellanus
A constant thorn in the side of those who try to understand courtly love is Andreas Capellanus' De Amore. This disconcerting treatise provides us with the only true art of courtly ...
Dada as Politics
Dada as Politics
Abstract
European Dada can be read as a political force in its own right. A stubborn contradiction has been at work in Dada studies: European Dada has been instituti...
Computational Cut-Ups: The Influence of Dada
Computational Cut-Ups: The Influence of Dada
ABSTRACT
Can a tool designed to detect dogs detect Dada? We apply a cutting-edge image analysis tool, convolutional neural networks (CNNs), to a collection of page i...
Dimensions of Decolonial Future in Contemporary Indigenous Speculative Fiction: Louise Erdrich’s Future Home of the Living God and Rebecca Roanhorse’s Trail of Lightning
Dimensions of Decolonial Future in Contemporary Indigenous Speculative Fiction: Louise Erdrich’s Future Home of the Living God and Rebecca Roanhorse’s Trail of Lightning
Departing from the traditional representations of the colonial past and its aftermath, speculative fiction emerges as a new important trend in the North American Indigenous literar...
Perceptions of Love and Infidelity by Polish Youth
Perceptions of Love and Infidelity by Polish Youth
AbstractThe article presents results of research on academic youth attitudes on love, intimacy, and infidelity in Poland. The research goal was to determine how modern adolescents ...
Devětsil and Dada: A Poetics of Play in the Interwar Czech Avant-Garde
Devětsil and Dada: A Poetics of Play in the Interwar Czech Avant-Garde
In 1920, the Czech avant-group Devětsil, led by Karel Teige, put forth a leftist program that embraced a multimedial and transnational approach to art and poetry. This vision was a...
Gender and Ethnocultural Comparisons in Styles of Love
Gender and Ethnocultural Comparisons in Styles of Love
Ethnocultural background and gender were investigated as correlates of love styles in an ethnically diverse sample of university students in Toronto. Women viewed love as more frie...
Reciting Shells. Dada and, Dada in & Dadaists on the First World War
Reciting Shells. Dada and, Dada in & Dadaists on the First World War
Abstract
Dada's origin is generally associated with the protest movement against the First World War, yet scholarship on this issue is relatively thin. An examinatio...
Recent Results
Big Houses in Kano Emirate
Big Houses in Kano Emirate
Opening ParagraphIn 1971–2 I undertook research in part of the very densely populated farming zone around Kano city (often called the Kano close-settled zone) in order to compare i...
Feto-mone Gender Paradigm in the Culture and Architecture of the Dawan Tribe Settlement in Kaenbaun Village
Feto-mone Gender Paradigm in the Culture and Architecture of the Dawan Tribe Settlement in Kaenbaun Village
This article aimed to show the existence of gender concepts in the culture and settlement of the Dawan tribe in Kaenbaun Village, as indicated with its strong presence in the every...