Ballet arrives in the townships, as Soweto learns classical dance

In a Soweto dance studio with yellowing mirrors, enthusiastic ballet students practise their first positions and plies in socks at the barre.

Classical dance, for decades confined to South Africa’s white minority, is finding its feet in the country’s black townships.

Twenty-two years after the end of apartheid, “We have beautiful contemporary dancers but not classical dancers,” said Dirk Badenhorst, head of the South African International Ballet Competition, seeking out rising stars across the continent.

The dearth of black talent is at least in part because historically “ballet was only for white people ... and the ballet was only taught in the traditional white areas,” said Badenhorst, who is trying to shake things up with a new project to train township dance teachers in classical ballet.

Lessons take place in the heart of Soweto, a hop and a skip from the Hector Pieterson Museum dedicated to a key moment in the fight against apartheid, the uprising led by high school students in 1976.

“Up, up, up. Stomach, more, back,” says classical teacher Maria de Torguet, pointing at a less-than-perfectly-poised back or a lazily-held head among her eight students, all black adults.

“When I grew up ... there was no ballet in townships. We had to go out in the town and pay for the lessons,” says one of them, Mmule Mokgele, taking a break between exercises at the barre.