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Johaar Mosaval (b. January 8, 1928, Cape Town, South Africa – d. August 16, 2023, Cape Town, South Africa) was a South African ballet dancer who rose to prominence as a principal dancer with the Royal Ballet. He was among the first "persons of color" to perform major roles with an internationally known ballet company during the 1960s.
Johaar Mosaval was born in Cape Town, South Africa. He was the eldest of ten children. His family lived in District Six, a largely Coloured community made up of descendants of former slaves, artisans and merchants, as well as many Cape Malays, descendants of South-East Asians brought to South Africa by the Dutch East India Company during its administration of the Cape Colony. Like the vast majority of Cape Malays, Mosaval's family was Muslim.
When Mosaval was a youth, he was noticed by Dulcie Howes, the doyenne of South African theatrical dance, while he was performing gymnastics. She invited him to attend the University of Cape Town Ballet School. Despite the disapproval of his Muslim parents and the white ("European") community, Mosaval accepted her invitation and began his dance training at the ballet school in 1947. In the classes of Jasmine Honore, Mosaval advanced quickly, as his strong, flexible physique and iron determination to succeed reinforced his natural facility for classical ballet technique.
Apartheid prevented Mosaval from pursuing a dance career in his home country, but in 1950 he was noticed by visiting ballet celebrities Alicia Markova and Anton Dolin, after he was smuggled into Cape Town's Alhambra Theatre for an audition. They arranged for him to receive a scholarship to attend the Sadler's Wells Ballet School in London. Travel to London was paid with money gathered from friends and fundraising by the local Muslim Progressive Society. His parents never paid a cent towards his education in dance, either because they were too poor or because they never approved of it.
In 1956, Mosaval was promoted to soloist in the company, which was soon renamed the Royal Ballet. He became a principal dancer in 1960 and a senior principal in 1965. Mosaval toured extensively with the Royal Ballet, dancing in continental Europe, Australia, New Zealand, the Middle East, the Far East, Canada, and the United States as partner to such famous ballerinas as Margot Fonteyn, Svetlana Beriosova, Elaine Fifield, Lynn Seymour, Merle Park, Doreen Wells and fellow South African Nadia Nerina in ballets choreographed by Frederick Ashton, Kenneth MacMillan, Ninette de Valois, and two South Africans, David Poole and John Cranko.
Noted for his performances as Jasper the Pot Boy in Pineapple Poll and as Bootface in The Lady and the Fool, both choreographed by Cranko, Mosaval was also acclaimed as the Blue Boy in Les Patineurs and as Puck in The Dream, both choreographed by Ashton, as well as the Blue Bird in The Sleeping Beauty. He developed a global reputation as a brilliant character dancer with impeccable technique.
After twenty-five years with the Royal Ballet, Mosaval retired from performing and returned to Cape Town, settling there permanently in 1976. He made a guest appearance with CAPAB Ballet in the title role of Michel Fokine's Petruskha, thus becoming the first black dancer to perform on the stage of the Nico Malan Opera House. He was also the first black South African to appear on local television. He opened his own ballet school in 1977 and was employed as the first black Inspector of Schools of Ballet under the Administration of Coloured Affairs. When he discovered that he could share his expertise only with a certain segment of the population, he resigned this position. Subsequently, his school was shut down by apartheid powers when it was discovered to be multiracial. Following the principles of his mentor, Dulcie Howes, Mosaval wanted to share his knowledge and love of ballet with students of all races, so he continued to find ways to dance and to teach.
In 1975, Mosaval was the first dancer to earn a Professional Dancer's Teaching Diploma at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. Then, receipt of a Winston Churchill Award allowed him to travel to New York to study modern dance at the Martha Graham School and jazz dance at the Ailey School. In 1977, Mosaval received a Queen Elizabeth II Silver Jubilee Medal for his services to ballet in the United Kingdom. Other awards came to him in recognition of his contributions to South African arts and culture. For his contribution to the performing arts, he was given the Western Cape Arts, Culture, and Heritage Award in 1999; for exemplary conduct, he received a Premier's Commendation Certificate in 2003; and for lifetime achievement, he was awarded the Cape Tercentenary Foundation's Molteno Gold Medal in 2005. For his contribution to the performing arts, and to uplifting young dancers through his teaching, the City of Cape Town then awarded Mosaval its Civic Honours. It had taken almost three decades of exile and personal, artistic triumph in faraway lands before he was allowed to dance in his own country for his own people.
The Arts and Culture Trust bestowed on Mosaval a Lifetime Achievement award for Dance in 2016.
Johaar Mosaval died on August 16, 2023, in Cape Town, South Africa, at the age of 95.
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Johaar Mosaval, Who Broke Free of Apartheid for Ballet, Dies at 95
Of South Asian descent, he was discriminated against as “colored” in South Africa, but he flourished in London as a principal dancer with the Royal Ballet.
Johaar Mosaval, a charismatic South African ballet dancer who left the racial barriers of apartheid behind to become a celebrated principal with London’s Royal Ballet, and who is believed to be the first South African man of color to do so, died on Aug. 16 in Cape Town. He was 95.
His death, in a hospital after a fall a few months earlier, was announced by his family.
Mr. Mosaval (pronounced MO-sah-val) was a magnetic performer whose solo roles — and the pyrotechnics he brought to them — were praised by critics and beloved by audiences for the many years he performed in England. A diminutive man, he was 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 music by Igor Stravinsky; and the Blue Bird in “The Sleeping Beauty,” with music by Tchaikovsky.
“His wild, faun-like humor, projected with great power, was unlike anything previously seen at Covent Garden,” Fernau Hall, the dance critic of The Daily Telegraph, declared in 1970; a few weeks earlier, Mr. Hall had described him as a “splendid artist.”
In 1965, when Mr. Mosaval played Bootface, a clown, in “The Lady and the Fool,” Gerald Forsey of The Guardian said he “stole the show — as he does, it seems, whenever he sets foot onstage.”
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Yet early in 1960, when the Royal Ballet toured South Africa, the company left Mr. Mosaval behind, explaining that his Malayan heritage meant that he was considered “colored” under the racial laws of apartheid, and that he would in all likelihood be barred from performing in his home country.
The company’s director, John Field, said the decision was intended to save the 29-year-old Mr. Mosaval, whom he described as “one of South Africa’s finest ambassadors,” from “an embarrassing position.” But the decision drew outrage in Britain, denounced by Labour Party leaders, who were furious that their own Conservative-led government did not intervene. In Cape Town, thousands protested and threatened to boycott the Royal Ballet’s 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 would be nearly 15 years before the company staged a performance that did not have an all-white cast. In 1990, Christina Johnson and Ronald Perry of Dance Theater of Harlem became the first dancers of color to appear with the Royal Ballet since Mr. Mosaval’s departure, performing the roles of the Sugar Plum Fairy and the Prince in a production of “The Nutcracker.”
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Back home, Mr. Mosaval was the first person of color to dance at the Nico Malan Theater, now known as Artscape, where in 1977, at age 49, he performed again as Petrushka — though his contract stipulated that he not touch a white dancer with his bare hands, according to the South African website The Daily Maverick.
In interviews, Mr. Mosaval, ever gregarious and charming, would tick off the obstacles he faced as an aspiring dancer in South Africa. He was a Muslim of South Asian descent — “a Black boy,” he said, “from District Six,” a once-vibrant multiracial community in Cape Town that in 1966 was reshaped into a whites-only zone. (By the early 1980s, its original homes had been destroyed and 60,000 people had been relocated.) His deeply religious parents disapproved of his ambition to become a ballet dancer, and his country’s racial laws at the time meant he would never perform for a white audience.
Yet he trained at the University of Cape Town’s ballet school, brought there by its director, the prima ballerina Dulcie Howes. And it was there that he was spotted by two celebrated British dancers, Anton Dolin and Alicia Markova, who invited him to study at the 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, he recalled, he had to stand at the back of his dance classes, behind the white students. He wondered at the time, “Should I be giving up?” he told a reporter in 2019. “But,” he added, “I was utterly determined to get on, and I think I did it with flying colors.”
Johaar Mosaval, the eldest of 10 children, was born in District Six on Jan. 8, 1928, to Cassiem and Galima Mosaval. His father was a builder, his mother a seamstress.
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His family dropped their objections to his dancing when he won over two sheikhs from his local mosque. As he told it, the men had seen a magazine article praising one of his performances at ballet school and summoned him.
“They asked me, ‘Show us what ballet is all about,’” he told The University of Cape Town News in 2019. “Lucky for me, that morning I was working on my agility exercises and I showed them. They were stunned.”
“My sheikhs told my parents that they were enchanted by me,” he added. “They told my mom and dad 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 to 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 the Order of Ikhamanga in Gold, an honor given to South African citizens who have excelled in the arts, journalism or sports.
Mr. Mosaval is survived by his sisters, Moegmina Esmael and Gadija Davids.
“It’s a very, very strenuous life,” Mr. Mosaval once said of ballet. “It’s not easy. Everything you do is against nature. Torturing yourself. But if you want to get to the top, it’s up to you.”
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