Mamela Nyamza

Mamela Nyamza was born in 1976 into a large family living in Gugulethu, Cape Town in South Africa.[4] Growing up in Gugulethu had an enormous influence on Nyamza's career as a dancer. She explained that the environment in which she was immersed "did not give (her) a choice but to love dance. There was music and sound, all day long, and even in the streets the noise became the music". Dancing became a way for Nyamza to understand all that was happening in the world around her, "I used my body as the instrument to react to all forms of sound, whether it be playing, crying, or watching all sorts of things that one can imagine happened in Gugulethu in the '80s".[4]

Since childhood, Nyamza has continued to use dance as a means to interpret, cope with, and reconcile her life's events. When her mother was raped and murdered in 1999, dance gave her the inner strength to face this experience. In the future, her mother's death greatly would come to influence her abstract style of dancing: "After my mother died, I could feel her in my dreams telling me to use my dance to tell real stories. I also later came out of the closet, and I started experiencing discrimination in society and that's when I thought, 'You know, I'm an artist, so let me be the voice that addresses all these issues'". Nyamza’s childhood has continued to influence her dance through her choices to use her platform as a means of amplifying the voices of her female family members onto an international stage. As with her mother, she choreographs pieces that display the trauma of the women in her life.[6]

Mamela Nyamza began her training as a dancer at the Zama Dance School under the Royal Academy of Dance while also attending Fezeka High School in Gugulethu.[4] She continued her training at the Pretoria Dance Technikon where she received a National Diploma in Ballet.[7] In 1998 Nyamza was granted a one-year fellowship to dance at the Alvin Ailey Dance Theatre in New York. The Alvin Ailey school provided Nyamza with an opportunity to dance alongside other black ballet dancers, which was an experience she did not have in South Africa.[8] Upon graduation, she joined the State Theatre Dance Company with whom she did performances both nationally and internationally.[7] Additionally, she has attended various intensive workshops and classes including a choreographic workshop at the Vienna International Dance festival, ballet training with Martin Schonberg through the Pact Dance Company, African Dance workshops in Soweto with Jamaine Acogny, and a course in directing at London's prestigious Sadler’s Wells Theatre.[4]

Nyamza believes that others too, can use dance as a means to heal themselves by using it to express experiences they may find too difficult to put into words. It is this belief that has motivated her to take on various volunteer and community outreach projects—including ballet teaching in Mamelodi, volunteering at Thembalethu Day School for the Disabled, and launching a project at the University of Stellenbosch that uses dance therapy to educate the public on issues relating to HIV/AIDS, domestic violence, and drug abuse.[4] Nyamza’s own past has continued to influence the outreach that she chooses to do, as she herself used artistic output as a means of coping with trauma: "Art has developed me, and opened a totally different book for me to explore the impossible which is now possible…Giving back to the community is helping those that come from where I come from, and showing them that this art…can heal a lot of them that are born out of issues just like myself".[4]

Nyamza has created her own style of dance which is easily identifiable as her own. Her self-choreographed ballets take on contemporary aspects, which has allowed activists such as Nyamza to explore cultural problems in society. As a consequence of her contemporary style, her choreography is able to blend modern and traditional forms of music. Her use of ballet as a building block for her style of dance is powerful due to the fact that black ballet dancers have not fit into the historically-driven image of a ballet dancer.[9] Due to her style of dance and choreography, Nyamza has become immensely popular in the South African dance scene, as she continues to critique the ways in which ballet enforces idealized forms of the female body and shows how perspectives of womanhood are changing.[10]

Thus far in her dance career, Nyamza has held the role of dancer, choreographer, and teacher. In her early career she performed in various major international musicals including The Lion King in Den Haag, Netherlands in 2004,[4]We Will Rock You in South Africa in 2006 Africa,[4] and African Footprints.[7]

Since 2006, Nyamza has mainly focused on her own choreography, which she makes political by amplifying the voices that have long been silenced through systematic racism. The South African ballet scene has historically been a white, Eurocentric scene in which black dancers were segregated. As such, Nyamza’s choreography focuses on the narratives of black women. Some of the topics she examines are domesticity, traditional roles of black women in society, and commodification of female bodies. Her work also portrays the violence that women in South Africa face, displaying scenes of corrective rape and murder that would be avoided in most traditional ballet choreography. By inviting conversation that has long been ignored, Nyamza’s choreography holds a mirror to society, uplifting the perspectives that have long been absent.[11]

One of Nyamza's most known choreographic pieces is Hatch. Hatch was choreographed in 2008, and has since been performed at the Out The Box Festival, the Baxter Dance Festival, and at the World Population Foundation. Additionally, Nyamza did informal studio performances of Hatch in Brazil and Vienna and at selected schools in the Eastern Cape, Durban and Cape Town and at the South African Domestic Violence conference in Johannesburg. She has also performed the piece in various shelters for abused women in the Netherlands.[4] The choreography of Hatch served as a means for Nyamza to connect with her murdered mother, and she has often performed the piece with her son, Amukele.[12]

In 2009 Nyamza was selected to be the South African representative to travel to Los, Angeles, United States and compete as one of eight countries and six different continents in Superstars of Dance—a show on the NBC television network. There she performed a tribal piece entitled Afro-fusion, which told the story of a woman deeply frustrated with her marriage and life. Although she did not win the show, the judges loved her piece and awarded her 58 points. Nyamza also served as a choreographer for the American television show So You Think You Can Dance? in 2008.

In 2011 Nyamza was honoured with the Standard Bank Young Artist Award.[13] Along with the other Standard Bank Young Artist Award winners, Nyamza showcased her work at the 2011 National Arts Festival in South Africa. There she performed the pieces Isingqala and Amafongkong, which featured a solo work by Nyamza and was a collaborative production with the Adugna Dance Theatre Company from Ethiopia.[4] Nyamza said that her intention in creating Amafongkong was to use an open space to explore the notion of "collaboration" by "seeing how and where similar and different bodies could meet in movement".[4] Nyamza choreographed Isingqala to be a personal, biographical narrative surrounding the rape and murder of her mother. She both shared the story of her mother to bring light to the phenomenon of female violence, while also juxtaposing it with South Africa as a traumatized nation. The sorrow behind these two narratives is made visible through darkness and through crying out. Crying and crying out are used repeatedly by Nyamza throughout Isingqala in order to demonstrate experiences of pain. In her choreography, crying in pain is deeply personal, but is also able to encompass the feelings of an entire community, namely the black women of South Africa.[14]

Mamela Nyamza collaborated with UK-based artist, Mojisola Adebayo, to create I Stand Corrected. The powerful piece addresses issues of homophobia and rape that Nyamza describes as "Dark, strange, witty and absurd".[4] In it, Nyamza is killed for being a lesbian, and is coming back to "correct herself".[4] The piece premiered in South Africa and successfully ran for three weeks at the Ovalhouse in London, where it was met with full houses and fantastic reviews. Additionally, I Stand Corrected recently received six Off West End Theatre nominations in London.[7]

I Stand Corrected was also performed at the Soweto Theatre in South Africa. This was a major accomplishment for Nyamza because of the difficulty she has experienced securing a spot in national theatres; "I have performed in Soweto, and because of that I'm the proudest artist ever". Obtaining funding from South Africa has also proved to be a barrier for Nyamza, "It's sad that we still have to struggle for funding here at home, while internationally we don't even have to apply, we just get invited".[13]

In March 2013 she performed at Infecting the City in Cape Town, South Africa. This project "places exciting new artworks in unexpected spaces in the middle of the City (to) challenge Cape Town's ideas of art and public space".[15] Nyamza is excited for her future and plans to continue creating work that shares African stories and experiences with the rest of the world for as long as she can.[13]

In 2013, Nyamza choreographed 19-born-76-rebels. Her choreography considers South Africa’s past in relation to its present by recreating the Soweto riots and massacre in 1976. The narrative she develops focuses on lack of good education available to black South African children at the time. She again brings her personal experience into her choreography to take a political stand against the effects of poor education in the country. Some of the issues highlighted by the choreography, and by extension the riots, were the problems resulting from overcrowded classrooms, ill-equipped teachers, and the implementation of Afrikaans as the compulsory language of instruction. Nyamza herself was born in 1976, the same year as the rights. Her mother had been pregnant while involved in the riots. Nyamza therefore uses her personal experience to show the legacies of intergenerational trauma through choreography.[16]

• Performance at Dance Umbrella
• Zama Dance School
• Infecting the city
• State Theatre
• Martin Schonberg
• Sadler Well's Theatre
• Out The Box Festival
• Baxter Dance Festival
• Standard Bank Young Artist Awards
• Adugna Dance Company
• Mojisola Adebayo
• Soweto Theatre