That Dada Masilo’s last work was Hamlet and she played Ophelia is tempting to read as a portent. The irreplaceable dancer-choreographer died unexpectedly a few months after the dance-drama premiered, in 2024. She was 39. For the last 15 years, the Sowetan had made a breakneck career of exposing ballet classics’ dirty, or at least soft, underbellies. In her Swan Lake, Siegfried’s dark desire, the Black Swan, Odile, was a total queen—queer, male, and over-the-top. With her Giselle, the villagers revile our eponymous peasant heroine after the two-timing nobleman Albrecht rejects her—a real pile-on. For Hamlet, Masilo gave pride of place to the taunted and discounted Ophelia. In Europe and the States, revision that foregrounds the classics’ pitiable losers has become de rigueur just in time for the taboos to lose most of their charge. For every cross-dressing Odile, there’s a Drag Race All-Star. But Masilo’s dance theatre is steeped in her South Africa: not just the song, the indigenous dances, and a choral imagination, but the traditional village values from which she extricated herself, against the odds. —Apollinaire Scherr