South Africa’s news ballet company, Cape Ballet Africa, is giving expression to choreographer November’s latest bold works
Long before discovering ballet at age 15, Mthuthuzeli November danced. He did it for pure exhilaration — it filled him with joy.
Now, as a sought-after London-based choreographer, his greatest thrill is walking into a rehearsal studio knowing that what he does brings that same joy to the dancers with whom he works.
Before ballet, he danced to kwaito in the streets of Zolani, the township where he grew up on the outskirts of Ashton in the Western Cape. He often danced outside taverns where people would throw money at his feet. “I never danced for money, though, I just loved what the music did to my body.”
Dance was an escape, a way of losing himself completely in the moment. He says it also cushioned him from the rigours of township life. Ballet, he says, felt like a natural progression from something he’d instinctively always loved.
November says his younger brother, Siphesihle, is his hero. It was Siphe, now a principal dancer with the National Ballet of Canada, who sparked his curiosity, planting a seed that saw him leaving the pavement for the barre and exchanging his football boots for tights.
Fiona Sutton, who ran a ballet-in-the-townships outreach programme, was his first instructor; she taught him classical technique without discouraging his love of other dance cultures. November, who last month turned 31, says he was never directed to suppress his love of kwaito nor to abandon the moves he’d gleaned from the streets.
As a choreographer, he has naturally evolved a style that leans into other, non-classical styles assimilated during his pre-ballet days.
His career evolved rapidly since he moved to the UK in 2015 to take up a scholarship at London’s Central School of Ballet. In a student show, he was noticed by the artistic director of Ballet Black, a redoubtable company of black and Asian dancers, and was invited to join their ranks.
Within a year, he choreographed his first work for the company, and in 2017 he was commissioned to create two new works for a Cape Town dance company. One of these, Visceral, was made around newly composed music by Peter Johnson.
That dance piece has now become the basis for a new work, Chapter Two, that November has created as part of Salt, a triple bill that’s the inaugural production of Cape Ballet Africa, founded earlier this year.
Set to another purpose-composed Johnson score, Chapter Two expands on Visceral, signalling what November says is “a new chapter” in his career, when he has been thinking about creating dance differently.
He says it’s his absence from South Africa that primarily has enabled him to create work that expresses something of his longing for home. “Being in the UK has made me more interested in South African stories and in telling those stories using African dance elements and by revisiting the roots of township dance and of rhythmic and percussive movement.”
He believes that if he’d remained in South Africa, he might not have achieved the natural African-classical fusion that’s become discernible in his work. November believes he’s edging towards a personal style that’s centred on his love of two different, but not incompatible, dance worlds. He wants to incorporate a diversity of dance practices and make ballet more accessible.
“The reason there’s this idea that ballet only exists for a certain group of people is because the stories that are told through ballet are not necessarily our stories,” he says. “But if we use the classical form to tell more stories that we want to see — or the stories we want our children to see — it becomes more inclusive, something that can inform a broader range of storytelling, beyond the classic Swan Lakes and Giselles.”
November is approaching that goal by creating the work he wants to see — work that grapples with stories and issues that are near to his heart.
In 2020, November won the Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Dance Production for Ingoma (Song), a work he created for Ballet Black that fused classical ballet with elements of African dance and singing. November managed to transform the monumental story of a 1946 strike involving some 60 000 South African mineworkers into something intimate and heartsore with just six dancers expressing the yearning sadness and scale of the tragedy.
In 2022, for Leeds’ Northern Ballet, he created Wailers, which celebrated his childhood memories of community and how the hardships of township life seem to recede into the background thanks to the people who shared his environment.
It’s this ability to reach deep, to feel into his own soul, that makes November’s work so viscerally emotive. He says his choreographic process revolves around having a strong sense of a certain kind of feeling.
Once this feeling is aroused, his work in the rehearsal room centres on a desire to chase that feeling — the work becomes an attempt to capture that feeling in movement.
“I want to see how we — me and the dancers — can achieve that feeling by putting our ideas together,” he says. “And to see how music can influence what that feeling is.”
He goes into the choreographic process with a blank slate, nothing preconceived or scripted. “I don’t plan the steps; I usually arrive in a space and when I start moving … that’s the first time I have an idea of what’s going on. I pretty much learn the choreography at the same time as the dancers learn it.”
The process consumes November. “That is all I think about most of the time. It’s really hard for my brain to switch off. It’s a constant ticking going on in my head. I am always seeing or hearing things in my mind, be they rhythms, ideas or images.”
Fortunately, he derives tremendous joy from what he does. “I love dance so much and I love the work. By expressing that love through dance, I hope that the joy it has always brought me can be felt by somebody else, too.”
Chapter Two is part of Salt, a triple bill produced by Cape Ballet Africa. It’s at Cape Town’s Baxter Theatre, 21–28 September.