Mamela Nyamza

Mamela Nyamza is a dancer, teacher, choreographer, curator, director and activist in South Africa. She is trained in a variety of styles of dance including ballet, modern dance, African dance, the Horton technique, Spanish dance, jazz, movement and mime, flying low technique, release technique, gumboot dance and Butoh. Her style of dance and choreography blends aspects of traditional and contemporary dances. Nyamza has performed nationally and internationally. She has choreographed autobiographical, political, and social pieces both on her own and in collaboration with other artists. She draws inspiration from her daily life and her childhood growing up in Gugulethu, as well as her identity as a homosexual, Black, South African woman. She uses her platform to share some of the traumas faced by South African lesbians, such as corrective rape. Additionally, she has created various community outreach projects that have spread dance to different communities within South Africa, 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...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". 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. 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. Nyamza plans to continue creating work that shares African stories and experiences with the rest of the world for as long as she can.

Nyamza is formally trained in ballet, and got further training at the Alvin Ailey New York School of Dance as visiting scholar. This is where Nyamza began to tackle the classical genre of dance, by deconstructing the traditional methods and logic of ballet and contemporary dance. Her ground-breaking works, “The Dying Swan” – innovation in the dance in 1998; “Hatched” – against patriarchy in 2007, and “The Meal” – against elitist ballet in 2012, are autobiographical works that trample on the norms of the classics. Her other works include: “Black Privilege” – against injustices of women; “Pest Control” – miscarriage of justice within the arts formalized institutions; and "Grounded" - reflection of contemporary narratives and dramaturgy behind political discourses of dialogue and performance between the contemporary artist and audience. Mamela Nyamza received these awards: chosen as the Featured Artist of the Grahamstown Standard Bank National Arts Festival 2018, a first of its kind for the dance art genre; awarded the FNB Dance Indaba Award for Outstanding Performance by a Female Dancer in Contemporary Style for “The Dying Swan” in 2000; chosen in 2011 as the Standard Bank Young Artist for the Dance; in 2016, awarded the Imbokodo Award for Dance; and, in 2022, Nyamza received an award from Burkina Faso Festival International de Danse de Ouagadougou (2022), the Marraines FIDO 2022. Nyamza was also identified by the Daily Review article by Shawn Lent in 2018: http://www.dailyreview.com.au. of Australia as one of the 30 International Artists to track in 2018, that are positively changing the world. Nyamza was invited to take part in the Dance Future 11: Focus Pina Bausch 2017 in Germany, in which Pina Bausch, was celebrated. For the 2020 and 2022 seasons, Nyamza was temporary based at the Theatre Chatelet, Paris in France as a choreographer for the African production Le Vol du Boli, under the direction of Abderrahmane Sissako of Mali. In June 2022, Nyamza was appointed a curator for the artistic programme Africa, by the Staatstheatre Mainz in Germany, for the Tanz Kongress 22, under the theme "Sharing Potentials". The ultimate vision for Nyamza, is to make dance as the genre of the performance art, to convey body politics on all social issues, and not to entertain but to "edutain".

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