‘I dance what I like’

As April gave way to May, and the city entered its familiar season of celebrating Africa in carefully curated ways, Mamela Nyamza returned onto The Baxter Theatre’s main stage; a company of black artists behind her, both productions carried on her own back, her own funding, and her own terms. Hatched Ensemble and The Herd/Less unapologetically presented and premiered on her home stage.

She had spent decades being told she was “too black”; “too masculine”; “too unwilling to soften herself into legibility”. She arrived not to relitigate any of it, but without the faintest interest in making anyone comfortable either. Nyamza came to celebrate herself.

She danced exactly what she liked

“Our work is regarded as community work” Nyamza said. “It is community work, because we come from the community and there’s nothing wrong with the community. Because even this community work has travelled the world.”

Sixteen countries. The Venice Biennale Danza Silver Lion, the first ever awarded to a woman from South Africa. A nomination among the top five artists worldwide for the Salavisa European Dance Award. And before Cape Town, four sold-out nights in Lyon and a run in Paris.

“For me, this is about power” she said. “This is about showing strength. And also, as a queer woman, saying we can do this.”

Nyamza also opened the rehearsal process to students and young artists in a free session where learners could sit with her, ask questions, and understand the work before the curtains went up.

Reclaiming the ballet body

Hatched Ensemble began as a solo in 2007 and by 2023, that solo had become a company: 10 ballet-trained dancers from different backgrounds. A live opera singer, and have you ever heard a maskandi song during a ballet performance? Have you seen ballet dancers move to maskandi? The song Ngesab' Igazi Lomuntu by Amatshitshi Amhlophe roots everything in a tradition that predates every institution that tried to reshape these bodies into something more palatable.

The props are doing the arguing. Ballet shoes as what Nyamza calls: “colonialism, the Western world, confinement – they are like tools of oppression”. White tutus for the ballet world and marriage and for every black dancer trained to the standard and still told the stage wasn’t theirs. And the pegs, attached directly to the costumes, moving with the dancers, making the sound of water.

“We grew up seeing our mothers or grandmothers hanging clothes using pegs, and those pegs are attached to their bodies,” Nyamza said. “So, it’s using domestic chores to talk about not being accepted but expressing our artistic freedom on stage as black women in the classical forms that did not accept us. To actually say: we are going to do it our way. Like Steve Biko said: I write what I like – I dance what I like.”

Between ballet and ritual

The scene is a farm. The costumes jingle. Somewhere between the arabesque and the isiXhosa song and the opera singer holding a note that won’t resolve, the categories press against each other, not dissolving, not merging neatly, but insisting. “It’s not mocking ballet – it’s creating a work that speaks to two forms: the African and the West. Our dance structures, our rituals, our African dance fused with ballet.”

The Herd and the Nation

The Herd/Less opens without music.

A man in white crosses the stage carrying a spear balanced on his open palm – the kind of balance that requires everyone else to hold still. Behind him, a vibrant procession of dancers follows in formation; feet on upturned tin cans strapped tight, dressed in their rainbow-hued Sunday bests. You don’t register the sound at first. Then it is the only thing in the room. It sounds almost like the heavy rhythm of drums or the collective stomp of bodies moving through a chant. It sounds like a toyi-toyi.

They follow because that is what the structure demands. Because that is what herds do.

Then after some time, one dancer turns and screams: voetsek!

What follows is not a clean rebellion. It rarely is, as South Africa’s history certainly proves. The group fractures, reassembles, splinters again, each dancer briefly finding their own rhythm before being pulled back into formation, then breaking away again.

As the song “Paradise Road” by South African band, Joy, begins, it breaks the long stretch of tin cans, breath, and movement that had carried the performance until then. The performers move freely through the space, and the stage suddenly opens into something more hopeful and expansive. The moment recalls the history of the song itself, long associated with longing, resistance, and the promise of “better days” during apartheid.

Carrying the weight of the country

Nyamza said the work emerged from a growing frustration with the State of the Nation Address, “the annual ritual where artists sit and wait for their labour to register in the priorities of a government that is consistently elsewhere”. The question that shaped the production – who is leading us, and where – expanded through a residency in La Réunion, a preview in Maputo, and a year of development while touring, until the work outgrew South Africa itself.”

Nyamza does not offer resolution. “I don’t have an answer. As an artist, you need to find your own. You need to find the puzzle.”

Dancing an African archive

Nyamza insists on the refusal to be measured solely against dominant frameworks of performance: “I was consistent in what I was doing. I didn’t give a hoot [about who] was telling me that my work is ‘not dance’, or that I’m ‘killing dance’ because I knew my goal,” she reflected.

“I’m trying to create freedom,” Nyamza noted, “because we are always confined into doing things the way we were taught, the way things must be done. So, I’m trying to reclaim something that we have studied.”

Nyamza did not return home to be celebrated into comfort. She arrived at The Baxter, a theatre that continues to welcome her boldly and wholeheartedly, with two uncompromising productions, a company she built herself, and the certainty of an artist who already knows the value of her work.

The Herd/Less makes its European premiere at the Venice Biennale Danza on 19 July 2026.

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