Iziko SA Museum Amphitheatre
What drives women to madness, suicide and even murder? In this astonishing performance, Standard Bank Young Artist Award Winner Dada Masilo scrutinises the complex histories and motivations of tragic heroines from a female perspective.
With a company of women performers, including members of the Tshwane Dance Theatre, Masilo riffs Chilean writer Ariel Dorfman’s celebrated play Death and the Maiden. Taking as her starting point the poignant music of Franz Schubert, Masilo creates a fresh vocabulary of movement that fuses existing dance techniques to explore female anguish, desolation, oppression, marginalisation and, even, retaliation. Masilo’s “maidens” are not victims, and death is not necessarily masculine. In Death and the Maidens, Masilo continues an engagement with the heroines of literature and drama that began with her acclaimed solo work The Bitter End of Rosemary.
Performed by: Dada Masilo, with Kristin Wilson, Liyabuya Gongo, Laura Cameron, Ipeleng Merafe, Bafikile Sedibe and Nicholas Aphane
Lighting design by Suzette le Seur
