I can think of other arts from South Africa I might see before ballet, but so can Dane Hurst, Joburg Ballet’s well-traveled new director. Included in the Johannesburg troupe’s mixed rep program for London is the brilliant, syncretic choreographer Dada Masilo’s Salomé—the Oscar Wilde source long an inspiration for choreographers, given the infamous Dance of the Seven Veils. It is one of the Sowetan’s last pieces before her sudden death this past December at age 39. Raised in the mounting heat of apartheid’s collapse, Masilo made a vocation of adapting classics—Romeo and Juliet, Swan Lake, Giselle—to Black South African terms. Counting no less than the polymath William Kentridge as an admirer, she shared his gift for indelible stage images; for finding the right idioms (in dance, in her case) for the drama; and, most of all, for locating the exact point in the classic plot that would illuminate her own post-apartheid world. —Apollinaire Scherr