Mamela Nyamza returns to Cape Town with her acclaimed production, 'Hatched Ensemble'

By Saranya Devan

South African dancer Mamela Nyamza, who was recently awarded the Motlopi Award, returns to her city of birth this week with her multi-award-winning production "Hatched Ensemble", showing on April 28 and 29 at Cape Town’s Baxter Theatre.

I have always wanted to better understand the influences shaping a choreographer who has pushed through adversity to become one of South Africa’s most uncompromising artistic voices.

Thus, I recently pinned her down to relate her journey in performance, her provocations and what lies ahead.

2026 marks Nyamza’s 50th birthday. This milestone year sees her returning home to the Mother City, not just physically, but spiritually.

She arrives with numerous accolades under her belt and now also embraces the role of grandmother. It signals a different kind of “hatching” for the choreographer - one rooted in legacy, reflection, and renewal.

A recipient of the prestigious 2026 Biennale Danza Silver Lion and nominee for the World Salavisa European Dance (SEDA) Award, Nyamza cites the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater as a major influence on her creative reawakening and cultural reillumination; a space centred on black excellence that profoundly shaped her artistic worldview.

She speaks vividly about how blackness was celebrated during her time in the United States, where she encountered a dynamic fusion of church traditions, American modern dance and jazz.

It was there that she began to interrogate form, questioning who ballet is for, who it excludes, and how it can be reshaped. That experience became a turning point, inspiring her to fuse her own cultural roots into her work while resisting the pressure to assimilate.

I was privileged to watch "Hatched Ensemble" in Durban at the "JOMBA! Contemporary Dance Experience" in 2023, where Nyamza was recognised as the Legacy Artist.

What struck me then, and the admiration still lingers, is her refusal to remain comfortable. She does not simply “sit on her eggs” - instead, after careful incubation, she cracks them open, revealing something raw, unsettling, and entirely new. Her work doesn’t ask for permission; it demands attention.

In "Hatched Ensemble", Nyamza actively decolonises ballet. Dancers speak, sing and breathe audibly on stage, collapsing the illusion of effortlessness often associated with classical form. African music intertwines with Western classical compositions, while African instruments sit alongside recorded scores, creating a layered sonic landscape that mirrors the complexity of identity itself.

The stage becomes a site of negotiation, tension, and ultimately, reclamation.

Nyamza is fearless in breaking boundaries and redefining what ballet can be in 21st-century South Africa. Winner of the 2018 Standard Bank Featured Artist in Dance award - a first of its kind at the time - her work invites audiences into a more expansive understanding of beauty, discipline, and belonging.

She is particularly committed to seeing women on stage who reflect the country’s diversity, including those who have been excluded through body politics or rigid aesthetic ideals.

With South Africans currently captivated by the television show "The City Makoti", it is worth noting that Nyamza explored similar themes as early as 2003 in "The Modern Makoti", interrogating the confined and often prescriptive expectations placed on married women.

Her “hatching” journey continued with her seminal solo works "Hatch" (2007) and "Hatched" (2015 and 2018). Now, after years of gestation, "Hatched Ensemble" emerges as a culmination, layered, textured and unapologetically bold.

Described by Nyamza as a work of liberation, "Hatched Ensemble" is deeply autobiographical. It carries the weight of her lived experiences from the loss of her mother to motherhood, from vulnerability to defiance, and her journey of coming out.

Yet it resists being confined to a single narrative. Instead, it peels back layers, revealing what it means to exist as a black, female, queer body within historically exclusionary spaces.

The cast of "Hatched Ensemble" is carefully hand-picked, each performer contributing not just technical skills but lived presence. Through an intensive workshop process, Nyamza pushed them toward stillness and honesty, away from performance as spectacle, and toward performance as truth. It is a slow, demanding process of unlearning.

Props are not decorative but become extensions of the body, while the influence of Butoh is evident in the deliberate pacing and introspective quality of the work.

An unflinching deconstruction of expectations of both Western classical and traditional African dance forms, the 70-minute performance is not just something to watch; it is something to sit with, to feel, and at times, to wrestle with.

And audiences are in for more. Over the Workers’ Day long weekend, Nyamza will also premiere her latest work, "Herd-less", at The Baxter on May 2. This multi-layered, politically charged piece is expected to resonate deeply with South African audiences.

Its origins trace back to her 2012 work "19 Born 76 Rebels", rooted in the politics surrounding the year of her birth, the tumultuous 1976.

If "Hatched Ensemble" is about emergence, "Herd-less" seems poised to ask what happens when one refuses to follow, to conform, or to belong unquestioningly.

Undoubtedly, the most tender moment in our conversation came when she spoke about "The Dying Swan". In 1999, while three months pregnant, she performed the iconic solo, a work already steeped in fragility and endurance.

That same year, she lost her mother, forever intensifying the emotional weight of the piece that earned her the Dance Umbrella Award for Outstanding Performance by a Female Dancer in Contemporary Style in 2000.

"The Dying Swan" has a very special place deep within Nyamza, often taking her into a hypnotic state. When asked who she would most want to be sitting in the front row for "Hatched Ensemble", her answer carried both simplicity and depth: her mother.

And as our conversation drew to a close, it became clear Nyamza is far from finished. If anything, this chapter feels like a beginning. With Mamela Nyamza, the work is never just about what has hatched but what is still waiting, quietly, to break through.