Joburg Ballet celebrates a quarter of a century this year and comes full circle with its genesis and birthday show.
Giselle, the classic ballet love story, was the company’s first production, and now the show marks a major milestone.
The company has weathered funding squeezes, theatre closures over the pandemic and a fickle public, but it’s still here, producing breathtaking ballet. Giselle will run from 12-15 February at the Joburg Theatre.
Producer Angela Malan is a South African-born former ballerina who danced internationally before returning home as a principal dancer and later becoming a coach and producer at the company.
And while she said that bums on seats are sometimes a challenge for ballet, the flipside is that few other art forms share a similar universality.
Ballet does not need words. “It is communicating with every person sitting in the audience,” she said. “Whether they’re speaking English or Afrikaans or Zulu or Italian or Spanish, they understand what you say.”
Ballet is a universal language
Giselle is a case in point. The story is easy to follow and tells of a young peasant girl who falls in love, discovers she has been deceived, loses her sanity and dies, only to return as a spirit who ultimately protects the man who wronged her. It’s Valentine’s month, too, after all.
Malan said it’s about time that ballet is revived in South Africa and that audiences return to the theatre en masse.
She said that post-Covid numbers remain lacklustre compared to previous years.
“There is nothing like a live performance,” she said. “It’s a once-off, in a way, and gives energy like no streamed show or movie ever could. There’s just something special about it.”
The unwavering faith in the power of the stage is shared by Karen Beukes-MacDonald, one of the company’s founding dancers and a former principal who later also served as artistic director.
Today, she spends most of her time teaching young dancers, shaping the next generation from her Randburg studio.
Keeping art’s most expressive form alive
It’s important to her that a pipeline of talented young South Africans continue to keep, what she said, one of art’s most expressive forms, alive.
She said that ballet gifts children something special long before they ever think about a career.
“It’s a discipline and coordination. It’s about creating positive movement,” she added.
And it’s more than that, too. Teachers can pick up early signs of coordination difficulties or imbalances, allowing correction long before they would otherwise be noticed, usually, she said.
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Ballet also teaches children creativity. Ballet classes move between imagination and structure, where a child might be a fairy in one exercise and a character in a story the next. Memory, musicality, and focus develop alongside that creativity, she said.
South Africa continues to produce dancers who often build careers abroad, lured by international contracts and stronger currencies. Others remain and build their futures locally, keeping companies like Joburg Ballet going in a challenging environment.
Malan said that it was about time that, just like in other countries, dancers were celebrated in the same way as sporting heroes or movie stars. Beukes-MacDonald agreed.
Dancers must be celebrated
The anniversary run of Giselle sees several of Joburg Ballet’s current principals on stage with different casts sharing the lead roles across performances.
The second act, with its line of white-clad Wilis moving in unison, remains one of the ballet’s defining images and a test of corps de ballet precision.
Malan said that ballet remained one of the few art forms where the connection between performers and audience happens in real time, with each show carrying a sense of occasion. This, she added, is why audiences should attend Giselle and subsequent shows.
Audiences will also be able to step behind the scenes during an open day at the company’s studios, where classes and rehearsals can be viewed, and dancers can be met.
It offers a glimpse into the daily work behind the glamour of performance.
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