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South African dance phenom Mthuthuzeli November commands the rehearsal room with gentle authority.
The choreographic language he’s created melds the controlled structure of ballet with the fluidity of contemporary movement where shoulders are loosened and the grace with which the feet touch the ground is infused with a stomping power.
At certain moments a body tap echoes a fleeting abstract emotion. At others there’s a submission to the affecting force of the ground — a quality of African indigenous dance.
The Olivier Award-winning choreographer has created his first full-length work and his first work in Johannesburg in the University of Joburg (UJ) Arts and Culture and Joburg Ballet’s The Bacchae: An African Choral Ballet, an original ballet adapted from the Euripides Greek tragedy The Bacchae.
The inventive production also brings together the creative strength of director and dance theatre maker, Jay Pather; and composer, librettist and sound artist Neo Muyanga with the UJ Choir. UJ’s Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture students, with the leadership of theatre maker and designer Jade Bowers, are also contributing to the design of the production.
The epic quality of the reimagining matches the weighty themes of the ancient play (produced in 405 BC) and how they speak to Africa, particularly South Africa today.
Euripides’s text looks at the arrival of Dionysus (the god of wine, vegetation, religious ecstasy and ritual madness) to avenge his banishment and to punish King Pentheus of Thebes and his mother Agave for slandering his mother (Semele, Agave’s sister) and denying his divinity.
The narrative contrasts Pentheus’s authoritarian rule with Dionysus’s instinctual leanings: his cult of women followers (the maenads or bacchae) break into states of murderous frenzy in honour of their god. This creates a juxtaposition of the ideas of freedom and control; chaos and order or excess and lack.
While The Bacchae: An African Choral Ballet is unique and new in its choreographic and musical composition, it is not the first engagement with The Bacchae from the continent. Nigerian Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka’s adaptation, The Bacchae of Euripides: A Communion Rite, produced in 1973 by the National Theatre in London, centres ritual and Yoruba spirituality to comment on the politics of colonial and post-colonial Africa. This helped shape the intent of Muyanga’s score.
“A number of years ago I found and read a translation of The Bacchae published by Gilbert Murray,” Muyanga says. “Later I was able to find versions of the story authored by Wole Soyinka and the poet, Anne Carson. Having access to these different versions of the same tragedy, which reflects on a time of social crisis and political turbulence, inspired me to write my own version of the story. This took the form of a libretto that would restate the ancient story of Dionysus and his followers to our context here in South Africa today.
“The story is about the concept of sparagmos: tearing each other apart from limb to limb and spilling blood on the streets so that social upheaval can be accentuated. The question is: What happens after that?
“We’re living in times of turmoil with political, racial, class and gender polarisation. It feels apt to find a way to tell the story of us, where we are now and to try and prefigure where we’d like to go.
“As a result, I set out to compose music that speaks to the elements of ritual, magic, violence and seduction that feature prominently in this story of public insurrection and upheaval.”
To achieve the epic sensibility needed to translate the story of The Bacchae, Muyanga composed music that features the full spectrum of timbres and colours of a modern orchestra, with the inclusion of woodwinds, various percussion, electric guitar, a string section and the 80-piece UJ choir.
He is adept at fusing classical and African music sensibilities and modes with explorative vocal work.
The fusion of the classical with essences of African identity and idioms is also a mode with which November explores dance. He continues what Dada Masilo had exemplified and brings himself to his ballet training.
As a street dancer from Zolani in Ashton, Western Cape, November was introduced to ballet at the age of 15 through an outreach programme headed by Fiona Sutton, a former dancer with London City Ballet.
“In wanting more kids to get into ballet, my first ballet teacher asked me to choreograph a few Kwaito moves and she would put a few ballet steps in it. In this way, kids had something to lean back on while being challenged in a different way. So, my introduction to ballet was always about mixing worlds from the beginning. I continued that as a dance practice,” November says.
He’s also trained in African traditional dance and contemporary movement and attended the Cape Academy of Performing Arts.
He joined London’s Ballet Black in 2015. His choreography in Ingoma (2019) won the Lawrence Olivier Award for Best Dance Production. He left Ballet Black in 2023 and continues to create visceral and lauded works for Western stages.
For his approach to The Bacchae, he takes from the internal turmoil and inherited trauma of having been born in 1994 South Africa and what that means now, thinking about leadership and unfulfilled promises.
“A lot of the language is mostly inspired by the movement of the toitoi,” November says.
On the revelations of his choreographic vision for the work, he says: “I’m learning that dividing things limits our imagination of the world and the stories we want to tell. For a long time, we have thought of ballet existing as something we did not have access to. The more I choreograph and the more I’m exposed to different cultures, the more I have this pull to tell African origin stories. Stories of who I am. Those stories come with me having been trained in ballet, contemporary dance, musical theatre and drama.
“This has created access to a broader way of thinking about dance. In Thebes the idea is that this world is ruled by someone that’s like a soldier. The strict structure of classical ballet then feels like the right thing to put in the world of Thebes. When the character of Dionysus comes in — with the ambiguity — people start to loosen up. And eventually it becomes this plague of movement and chaos.”
Director Pather, known for his deep thinking in his interdisciplinary work which spans dance, performance, architecture and visual art, leans on the cohesion of the
text, dance and music for accessible storytelling and a dramatically driven work.
“The Bacchae is essentially Dionysus coming back to Earth to remedy a tightness of rules and regulations that have favoured one class of people and made a large group of people disenfranchised. This is resonant with South Africa in that despite our freedom in 1994, we’re still the world’s most unequal society because we didn’t have a redistribution of land and wealth,” Pather says.
One of the key subversions Pather, November and Muyanga came up with was to develop Dionysus as a woman to resonate with the critical patriarchal violence of South Africa.
On the discoveries of the process, Pather points to the use of young singers in the UJ choir; mature soloists in the dance; and November’s choreographic approach to ballet as exciting.
In recent years since the appointment of Joburg Ballet CEO, Elroy Fillis-Bell, the company has expanded on its movement proficiency and repertoire with seasons such as Scarcity (2024) and DreamScapes (2025), with the potential to shift audiences’ perspectives of what ballet can be. The Bacchae: An African Choral Ballet extends the conversation on a grand level.
“I’m hoping we can see in Neo’s composition using choral singing, which is the bedrock of our music in this country and Mthuthuzeli’s choreography, the capacity that we have for these forms to shift, unform and reform. And how we can take institutional structures and bend them to speak to some of the most pressing issues of our time, in a framing that is our own,” Pather says.
The Bacchae: An African Choral Ballet runs at the Joburg Theatre from 3 to 12 July 2026.
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