The first dancer of colour to join the Sadler’s Wells Theatre was a Muslim boy of Malay descent who left Cape Town behind during the Apartheid. He broke racial, gendered, religious, legal boundaries during his career that spanned seven decades and multiple countries. Johaar rose to become the senior principal dancer at the Royal Ballet where he danced for 25 years. One of his many outstanding performances was in Benjamin Britten’s opera Gloriana for the royal coronation celebrations in 1953 at the Royal Opera House. From the same place, Johaar later became the first dancer to complete the Professional Dancer’s Teaching Diploma and was the recipient of the Winston Churchill Travelling Fellowship award to study jazz and contemporary dance in the USA. Johaar as Puck in “The Dream,” a one-act ballet from Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”, as the puppet Petrushka dancing to Igor Stravinsky’s music, and as the Blue Bird in “The Sleeping Beauty,” with music by Tchaikovsky were heralded as some of the significant performances of all times by a solo ballet dancer.
