Arts Review

Written by: Luso Mnthali, Cape Town

Dance is a cornerstone of Cape artistic expression and with dancers from around the Western Cape taking part in the festival each year it is steadily gaining ground as the place to view students and seasoned practitioners of dance. Having been staged over the last five years, it seems the Baxter Dance Festival is maturing, and allowing dancers with not only skill but theatrical presence and ability to take a turn on stage. These ranged from a stunning multi-media rendition choreographed by Levern Botha that dealt with the scourge of the Western Cape, the drug Tik; to a surrealist, somewhat scary marionette piece choreographed by Abeedah Medell for the EOAN group.

Some of the pieces were emotionally moving and spoke on issues of identity – which is probably, for South Africans, the most done dance theme. For those who are used to seeing representations of dance, the student pieces were sometimes cluttered, like the piece Tik Off! by Levern Botha. Even though the story was a difficult one, it deserved to be treated with cleaner lines perhaps. Having said that, these dancers have an energy and a verve that will continue to serve them well. The cleanest, most arresting pieces were inevitably by more established performers, most notably the pièce de résistance of the evening – Mendi.

Critically acclaimed dancer and choreographer Mamela Nyamza staged what was arguably the most exciting and visually challenging production of the entire festival. Having been given the task of producing and directing the only commissioned work of the festival she set about turning dance on its head. In the touchstone performance of the entire week, she confused and numbed an entire audience. Although people seemed receptive, some sat there as if they’d seen ghosts. She has said that dance can be used as a medium to inform and entertain at the same time, and with the commissioned piece, she has surely done that. She explored the central theme of ‘men’ in the piece Mendi and is sure to have set tongues wagging – mostly in the “what was that about?” direction. According to the festival programme, the work was “inspired by an event during 1917, involving a group of South African men of diverse descent who came together for a common cause. The work aims to look at the multifaceted nature of men gathering as subscribed by society…men waiting, lingering, losing, leaving…the absence of men…men who are missing…men who we miss.”

There was minimal movement and maximum expression, and her directorial powers came to the fore, so much more in this piece, than what have been described as her exceptional powers of dance. This deliberate attempt to be daring, to be different and innovative, is surely somewhat ahead of her time. She challenges the status quo by daring to recall an old South Africa which for her is gone but not forgotten. There are shades of histories well-known and unknown, men famous, men whose names we shall never know. While the old-school practitioners of the medium are playing it safe, she may be one of the few in the country that dares to question and elevate the current state of what could partially be described as African modern dance. One might say we’ve surely been waiting for this kind of contemporary exercise in artistic expression.

Mamela Nyamza started dancing when she was eight, and later went to study at Pretoria Dance Technikon and graduated with a National Diploma in Ballet in 1996. After a slew of awards and star turns in a number of local and international productions, including at the State Theatre Dance Company in Pretoria, she came back to Cape Town. She is a choreographer at ZAMA Dance School in Gugulethu, creates dance pieces for various dance schools in the city and last year Mamela performed her show ‘Hatch’ at the On Broadway Theatre in Cape Town. This autobiographic story deals with the problems she encounters as a Xhosa woman, dealing with customs and traditions, and having the will to forge her own path. She recently performed with her son Amkele the follow-up to “Hatch”, called “Hatched”, in Joburg.

She has been described as brilliant, a polemicist, beautiful, poignant and difficult to understand. All these things may be true, and unequally deserved. This woman’s artistry goes beyond dance and its traditional milieu. She is interested in the ritualistic, and she’s subtle, expressionistic and soulful. If you have seen her interpretation of the Dying Swan, you know that this soul is expressed in a uniquely African way. Not only does she weave a story together that is not just the sum of its whole parts, but is likely to be thought of as poetic. She seems to have created a dance milieu that’s sui generis in South Africa, where less is more and it doesn’t begin or even end on stage. The choreography of Mendi is so captivating that the dancers hold you in their emotional thrall. The movements are sparse and strongly executed, and once again, as has become Mamela’s trademark, the body is celebrated. This is what the best dance should do.

Mamela Nyamza described her process to Arts Review:

“I had to ask myself what I can do that’s different. I needed to do something that I could relate to as an African and as a black woman. I need dance to have soul or I won’t be moved. The story of the SS Mendi is our story and I am challenging people to go and find out more about it.” The story of the SS Mendi is one that South Africans themselves are just waking up to even though the highest award for bravery in South Africa is called the Order of Mendi. The story of the ship that sunk off the coast of the Isle of Wight is well-known to people along that coast, but people in the home country know little about it. Mamela exhorts her fellow South Africans to find out more about this little-known part of their own history, which was likely deliberately suppressed during the Apartheid era.

She describes doing background research and is almost reverential, like an observer with a very keen eye. “I watched men, watched them waiting, men lingering, men fighting, [I researched] men going to prison for us, men dying for us,” she says. It’s a method of research that I’ve rarely heard a dancer employ, unless it has been fielded already, and taught to them. Mamela just seems to have a keen intellect and a natural curiosity about life and its various states. “When you bring a story to the stage it has to move something in you before it can move the people. I preached to my dancers that they must be moved by the story before they perform it for people.”

It seems a curious contradiction. Here is a choreographer that wants her dancers to be moved inside and in turn she wants them to move an audience emotionally, but there is hardly any movement going on in the piece. And to some, that might be the essence of the piece: a completely African experience. A walking contradiction. She changes your ideas about dance and brings back the theatricality, the strength, power and beauty of it into high prominence. In her efforts to create a new language in dance, she might be seen as an interloper who appropriates and dares to turn Western dance traditions on their head. But if one examines her process, you begin to understand why she is so interested in changing the landscape. “They’re playing it safe,” she says of her counterparts in South Africa. “I am going deep into the tissues of the body, asking what the body can do and exploring the abstract.”

“It was tough to teach dancers that wanted to dance, and I had to tell them that we’re going to dance, but not the language that everyone else has. Why not paint a different picture? Who came up with the technique that we must all move? Just as there’s a Picasso there, and another painter there, why can’t I as a choreographer be different from the next one?” Indeed, Mendi as a performance is really almost a pictorial representation in dance of themes that run through the South African story. A montage of loss and yearning, it takes you to places you have not been before as far as dance is concerned. The stillness reaches into your chest cavity and pulls something out you didn’t know dance could give you.

Mamela stresses that as an African she has a different shape, technique and form from other dancers. This precise interest in difference is perhaps shaped by her experiences with dance growing up. “As a woman from Gugulethu I grew up with dance. It was all around me,” Mamela says. She describes the painful process of living with a dancer’s body that was not appreciated by mainstream “white” dancers or teachers. “When I got to dance school, they told me ‘you’ll never make it as a dancer’. I think they didn’t know what to do with my body, and [I was told] to tuck in my bum, ‘tuck it in!’ to the point where I asked where’s that gonna go?”

These and many other experiences of being feted in different parts of the world, but not so much in her home country, or even home town, have shaped the woman who can create such symbolic, arresting and developed modern work. Mamela cites one of her dance heroes as Judith Jameson who has, for many years, been the artistic director of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater in New York where Mamela spent a year at the Company on a scholarship.

This rising star of dance says there was no-one in South Africa to teach her the ropes as a black female dancer. “I didn’t know any black choreographers, who could do what I could relate to” she says. “When I met Judith Jameson, I was beaming. I felt that my life was written inside me. When I went to New York, for the first time I felt that they knew how to work with my body. For the first time, no one said ‘you have a big bum’ and for the first time I felt the essence of being light as a woman. That’s when my language of dance changed, and I started to appreciate myself as a black woman. I realised that I have soul, and others don’t have that. It was a moment of truth about my body and me as a dancer. When I came back home, I was more confident.”

We’re hoping that young dancers are watching, listening and learning. After the performance a group of young women students gathered around the soloist, who wants to start her own dance company, and said “Wow, we love your work. We’re your biggest fans, truly.” Mamela feels she’s opened some doors for young dancers, and will continue to do so. It is clear that this ‘dance activist’ will leave a mark that will be indelible.