Johaar Mosaval, a charismatic South African ballet dancer who left the racial barriers of apartheid to become a celebrated principal at London’s Royal Ballet, and believed to be the first South African of color to do so, died in August 16 in Cape Town. He is 95.
His death, in a hospital after a fall a few months earlier, was announced by his family.
Mr. Mosaval was a magnetic performer whose solo roles – and the pyrotechnics he brought to them – were praised by critics and loved by audiences over the years he performed in England. A small man, he is the prankster Puck in “The Dream,” Frederick Ashton’s one-act ballet drawn from Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”; the puppet Petrushka in Michel Fokine’s ballet of the same name, set to the music of Igor Stravinsky; and the Blue Bird in “The Sleeping Beauty,” with music by Tchaikovsky.
“His wild, faun-like humour, projected with great power, was unlike anything previously seen at Covent Garden,” declared Fernau Hall, The Daily Telegraph’s dance critic, in 1970; a few weeks before this, he was described by Mr. Hall as a “great artist.”
In 1965, when Mr. Of Mosaval’s Bootface, a clown, in “The Lady and the Fool,” Gerald Forsey of The Guardian said he “stole the show — as if he did, every time he stepped on stage.”
In the early 1960s, when the Royal Ballet toured South Africa, the company left Mr. Mosaval, who explained that his Malayan heritage meant that he was considered “coloured” under the racial laws of apartheid, and that he was likely to be barred. from performing in his home country.
The company’s director, John Field, said the decision was intended to save 29-year-old Mr. Mosaval, whom he described as “one of South Africa’s best ambassadors,” from “an embarrassing position.” But the decision has sparked outrage in Britain, denounced by Labor Party leaders, who are furious that their own Conservative-led government has not intervened. In Cape Town, thousands protested and threatened to boycott Royal Ballet performances.
Mr. Mosaval left the Royal Ballet in the mid-1970s to return to South Africa, where he opened a dance school and took a government position. But it was almost 15 years before the company staged a performance without an all-white cast. In 1990, Christina Johnson and Ronald Perry of the Dance Theater of Harlem became the first dancer of color to appear with the Royal Ballet since Mr. Mosaval, playing the roles of the Sugar Plum Fairy and the Prince in a production of “The Nutcracker.”
At home, Mr. Mosaval was the first person of color to dance at the Nico Malan Theater, now known as Artscape, where in 1977, at the age of 49, she performed again as Petrushka — even though her contract stipulated that she could not be touched by a white person dancer with his hands, according to the South African website The Everyday Maverick.
In interviews, Mr. Mosaval, always gregarious and charming, will take note of the obstacles she faced as an aspiring dancer in South Africa. He is a Muslim of South Asian descent — “a Black boy,” he says, “from District Six,” a once vibrant multiracial community in Cape Town that in 1966 was reshaped into a whites-only zone. (In the early 1980s, its original homes were destroyed and 60,000 people displaced.) Her religious parents disapproved of her ambition to become a ballet dancer, and her country’s racial laws of that time meant that he would not perform for a white man. audience.
However, she trained at the ballet school of the University of Cape Town, brought there by its director, the prima ballerina. Dulcie Howes. And there he was spotted by two famous British dancers, Anton Dolin and Alicia Markova, who invited him to study at Sadler’s Wells Ballet School in London. He joined its company, which became the Royal Ballet, in 1951.
While studying at the University of Cape Town, she recalled, she had to stand at the back of her dance classes, behind the white students. He wondered at that time, “Should I give up?,” he told a reporter in 2019. “But,” he added, “I was very determined to ride, and I think I did it with flying colors.”
Johaar Mosaval, the eldest of 10 children, was born in District Six on January 8, 1928, to Cassiem and Galima Mosaval. His father was a builder, his mother a seamstress.
Her family dropped their objections to her dancing when she won over two sheikhs from her local mosque. As she said, the boys saw a magazine article praising one of her performances at the ballet school and summoned her.
“They asked me, ‘Show us what ballet is all about,'” she said The University of Cape Town News in 2019. “Luckily for me, that morning I was doing my agility exercises and I showed them. They were stunned.”
“My sheikhs told my parents that they were fascinated by me,” he added. “They told my mother and father that if there was an opportunity for me to train abroad, they should let me go.” His parents agreed, he said, but “they asked me to promise that I would always remember my religion.”
The Muslim Progressive Society helped raise enough money to send him to London to study.
In 2019, President Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa awarded Mr. Mosaval received the Order of Ikhamanga in Gold, an honor given to South Africans who excel in the arts, journalism or sports.
Mr. left Mosaval is survived by his sisters, Moegmina Esmael and Gadija Davids.
“It’s a very, very difficult life,” Mr. Mosaval once said of ballet. “It’s not easy. Everything you’re doing is against nature. You’re torturing yourself. But if you want to get to the top, it’s up to you.”