Mthuthuzeli November — driven to create and push the boundaries of ballet

Mthuthuzeli November. (Photo: Helena Fagan)

23 Sep 2024

The choreographer from Zolani township in Ashton infuses ballet with rhythmic and percussive movement, bringing an African element to traditional forms. At the height of his powers, he’s come home.

Mthuthuzeli November’s deepest desire as a choreographer is to instil in other dancers the joy and lightness of being he himself has experienced by dancing.

“As long as I can remember, I’ve been a dancer,” November said from the UK, a week before the premiere of Chapter Two, the first new work he has choreographed on South African soil since before the pandemic.

These days, it’s a rare privilege to see November’s work on a South African stage. Since 2015, he has lived and worked in the UK, where he won a scholarship to the Central School of Ballet in London. He was spotted while performing as a student and invited to join Ballet Black, a diversity-focused classical ballet company established for black and Asian dancers.

Having risen to become one of the company’s senior artists, November has in just a few years gone from emerging choreographer to being among the most sought-after voices in contemporary-classical ballet.

Fusing two traditions

November has evolved a choreographic style that blends classical technique with what he calls “our own traditional ways of dancing”.

He’s known for infusing classical ballet with African elements, so there’s a from-the-heart-and-soul authenticity that leaves audiences with a sense of November’s capacity to capture deep-felt, visceral emotions.

Some say there’s an evocation of some kind of ancestral energy, a tapping into ancient roots and rhythms that requires the dancers to journey “beyond the polite constraints of ballet” into something fiercer, more full-bodied – something that can still surprise.

“I think the style of movement I’ve adopted over the years is relatively new, and people don’t know what it is,” he said. “At times even I don’t know what it is, but I know it’s influenced by where I come from.”

Precious Adams performing A Point of Collapse, a solo piece created for the English National Ballet in 2018. (Photo: Laurent Liotardo)

Before ballet, he danced to kwaito in the streets of Zolani, the township where he grew up outside the fruit-growing town of Ashton in the Western Cape.

“I would play music or sometimes I’d be outside taverns in my township. I’d dance, and people threw money at me and I’d use that to buy snacks. I never danced because people gave me money. I always just loved what music did to my body. When I was introduced to ballet, it sort of felt like a natural progression.”

That progression – from childhood curiosity to working with an outreach ballet programme in Montagu, then twice winning gold at the South African International Ballet Competition and becoming an internationally sought-after choreographer – has simply not abated.

Despite huge demands on his time and multiple engagements, he strives to be a choreographer who helps people to remember why they love to dance – “because it makes them happy”, he said.

Even before he discovered ballet at the age of 15, November danced for the pure joy and exhilaration it evoked in him. He describes the feeling as a kind of escape.

“I’d get lost in dance, as if I were in a state of trance, where all problems kind of went away. When I danced, there were no questions, no scrutinising, no trying to reach for anything.

“Unknowingly, I think it has cushioned me and protected me from a lot of things. In a sense, dance has been a guiding angel in my life, so I never dared question it.

“I’ve simply always loved it, and it feels impossible for me to love anything else the way I love dance.”

There must be something in the genes. In 2022, November’s younger brother, Siphesihle, was promoted to principal dancer with the National Ballet of Canada in Toronto. He was 22 at the time.

Joshua Williams and Camille Bracher in Chapter Two. (Photo: Oscar O’Ryan)

Fiona Sutton, who was November’s first ballet instructor, introduced him to classical techniques in an environment where different cultures were respected and shared. November was never prompted to suppress his heritage, and he retained his love of kwaito dance.

Ballet changed his life, taking him and Siphesihle out of the township. The shift in circumstances did not, however, remove the spirit of Zolani, nor the soul of that community whose love November says enabled him to endure the circumstances of childhood.

Neither sibling ever looked back, and November admits that dance consumes his life and that his love of dance means he is “sometimes a bit intense as an artist”.

“It’s because I feel like I’m still young,” said November, who last month turned 31. “There’s still so much I want to do. I’m driven, constantly, to do something new or to one-up myself.”

Urge to create

Certainly, he’s at a point in his career when the work is everything, when demand for his talent is relentless.

Last year saw the premiere of Nina: By Whatever Means, a tribute to the music and passion of Nina Simone by way of a series of vignettes, using his gift for finding movement that paints vivid pictures. The dance’s score combines music by Mandisi Dyantyis and November himself with Simone’s own songs, and features the Zolani Youth Choir, a chance to give back to his hometown.

The work earned him the Best Choreographer prize at the 2023 Black British Theatre Awards.

A scene from WASHA: The Burn from the Inside, created for Ballet Black. (Photo: Supplied)

It wasn’t the first such high-level recognition.

In 2020, November won a prestigious Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Dance Production for Ingoma (“song”), which he created as part of a triple bill for Ballet Black. The work was also named Best Dance Production by the Black British Theatre Awards.

Fusing ballet, African dance and singing, Ingoma drew inspiration from the Gerard Sekoto painting The Song of the Pick, and the 1946 South African miners’ strike when police killed nine miners and injured more than 1,200.

Though unquestionably weighty, November managed to temper the ambitiousness of the piece (the actual strike involved 60,000 mine workers) by zooming in on an emotional core, something he achieved through a visceral focus on the grief of the victims’ families rather than on political issues.

Set to original music by Peter Johnson, with isiXhosa text written by November, Ingoma incorporated gestural and rhythmic elements familiar to South Africans. With just six dancers and a soundtrack of call-and-response mass singing, November brought a deep pathos to the dance: fluttering hands, clutched chests, urgent vulnerability, gestural pleading, hints of defiance, all to convey something of the hungering sadness he wished to evoke.

Significantly, Ingoma kicked off with the dancers symbolically and literally swapping their ballet shoes for gumboots, readying themselves for their descent into the mines.

Changing the story

This exchange of one kind of footwear for another echoed to some extent November’s own transition to ballet – when, as a teenaged boy in a community where traditional notions of masculinity prevailed, he traded his soccer boots for ballet tights.

“When my friends saw me wearing tights the first time, they thought it was strange. I made it clear to them that that didn’t make me any less of a man. A lot of young people in the townships don’t know these things exist, and so, if we can use dance or ballet as a medium of storytelling and education, a lot of these stereotypes might be unlocked as a way of showing people that things are not necessarily what they seem.”

He says it’s all about perception. Ballet is something strange to most people in the townships; he says education would go a long way to reversing some of the perceptions. He believes ballet can – and should – be used to tell more stories that are relevant to black audiences.

It’s something he not only believes but practises. At the Royal Ballet’s Festival of New Choreography at the Royal Opera House in London in February, he debuted For What It’s Worth, a piece inspired by singer Miriam Makeba.

The work was infused with his penchant for pushing dancers beyond the limitations of the classical dance repertoire, highlighting the fact that ballet’s need for rejuvenation and innovation can benefit from an injection of African spirit.

And, in 2022, there was Wailers, created for Northern Ballet. It was based on the idea of community that he grew up with in Zolani – how the presence of township people made the hardships of life manageable.

It’s this reaching deep within, as if tapping directly from his own soul, that gives his work such an exquisitely emotive quality. He says the pursuit of those feelings he wants to express through the dancers is the thing that consumes him as a choreographer.

“It’s mostly just trying to discover what provokes that feeling for me and then to see how I can bring that feeling, that emotion, to life.”

Revisiting old work

The origin of Chapter Two, which is being performed as part of Salt, Cape Ballet Africa’s inaugural triple-bill production, harks back to 2017, when he created two new works in Cape Town, one of which was titled Visceral.

Set to a purpose-composed score by Johnson, Chapter Two is a revisitation of that earlier work. November describes it as “a place you have been to before, a musing on a previous time”, but, as with any attempt at updating something from the past, it is also to some extent the turning of a new page, a continuation that is also a shift forward.

For Cape Town audiences, it’s evidence of just how far this emerging world-class choreographer has come.

“I feel that, in my career, I’m now in a new chapter and I’m starting to think about creation in a very different way.”

He said having a career in the UK had enabled him to achieve many things he “never imagined possible”. “The more time I spent away from home, the more I longed to come back home, and this started to influence the way that I was creating.

“I started to be more interested in stories of South Africa, and in telling those stories using African dance elements and going back to the roots of township dance and rhythmic and percussive movement.”

Mthuthuzeli November. (Photo: Helena Fagan)

He believes that if he’d remained in South Africa, he might never have achieved this kind of African-classical fusion form that’s become discernible in his work.

“I still have a lot of work to do, but as of now it feels like the beginning of something. There are a lot more stories to be told and there are many different ways to tell our stories through a variety of dance practices.”

A driving force for him is creating work that helps to make ballet accessible to more people, whether that means telling a story about mine workers or incorporating the music of an African icon, or by instinctively and naturally incorporating elements of the dance forms – like kwaito – with which he grew up.

The point is that his choreography is infused with something to which people from the place where he grew up can relate.

“So there’s something that black people can see themselves in,” he said. DM

Chapter Two forms part of Cape Ballet Africa’s triple bill Salt, which runs at the Baxter Theatre until 28 September.

This story first appeared in our weekly Daily Maverick 168 newspaper, which is available countrywide for R35.

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South Africa

Fusing two traditions

Urge to create

Changing the story

Revisiting old work