Mamela Nyamza

Tuesday 21 July, 7 pm
Teatro Piccolo Arsenale, Venice

La Biennale di Venezia will present the Silver Lion to the South African dancer, choreographer, director and activist Mamela Nyamza.

“Bodily thought that delves its roots in the collective memory and is moved by the currents of history, gender, society and politics, underpins the work of the South African dancer, choreographer and activist Mamela Nyamza. Her Afro-descendant roots merge with her training in classical and modern dance, jazz, gumboot and Butoh to speak a new language. From the exciting 2008 solo Hatched which revealed her to the world, and was later re-choreographed for ensemble, to Afro-fusion, Isingqala and Amafongkong, I Stand Corrected and 19-born-76-rebels, Black Privilege and GroundeD, Nyamza creates her deeply personal and political narratives to shed light on traumatic issues such as the corrected rape inflicted on South African lesbians, or the Soweto riots and massacre in 1976, drawing from her own life and upbringing in Gugulethu. An advocate of initiatives in favour of social justice and raising awareness of gender issues, Nyamza was a co-Director and Collaborator of the University of Stellenbosch’s Project Move 1524, which employed dance therapy to address HIV/AIDS, domestic violence and substance abuse” (from the motivation for the award).

Mamela Nyamza will make her debut on the stage of the 20^th International Festival of Contemporary Dance on July 19^th at the Teatro Piccolo Arsenale with the European premiere of The Herd/Less, a work about phallacy of a beautiful world evoking violent realities of continuous vulnerability and that explores the double meaning of “the herd”: the symbol of collective harmony, as well as control and submission.

Mamela Nyamza (1976, Gugulethu – Cape Town) is a South African dancer, choreographer, director and activist. From the age of 8 years whilst learning Ballet at the Zama Dance School in Gugulethu, Nyamza that her love of body movement will eventually bring both prejudice and prestige to her career as a dance-theatre performing artist. Ridiculed by her childhood peers for her athletic built toned body, to the ultimate rebuke and rejection of her natural body structure by her classical Ballet Teachers at tertiary level, Nyamza inevitably was drawn to the politics of the body. Nyamza boldly proceeded to graduate from the Tshwane University of Technology with a National Diploma in Ballet in 1994. Nyamza started to think of radically deconstructing the normative expectations of who qualifies to be a classical ballerina. In this process, she duly won an audition in 1999 for a scholarship to study further at the Alvin Ailey International School for Dance in New York, where she co-created and performed The Dying Swan in 1999, which subsequently won her the Dance Umbrella Award for Outstanding Performance by a Female Dancer in Contemporary Style in 2000. By 2007, Nyamza’s fresh innovations had taken shape which led to the creation of the highly acclaimed Hatched, her first work to kick-start her art programme of unapologetically demystifying, deconstructing and trampling on the norms and standards of the dance/classics.  Nyamza won the Standard Bank National Young Artist for the Dance in 2011, due to her refreshingly innovative choreography and performance in the art of dance. Her newest work, Hatched Ensemble, inspired by her solo work, has already been labelled as a “strikingly original piece, an art installation, a dance performance with communal liberation its chief underlying theme” (The Times, United Kingdom). Through her newly formed non-profit company Mamelas Artistic Movement, Nyamza has proceeded to fulfill her long held wish to provide a creative home for those unemployed dance artists who have been marginalized due to body politics.  Nyamza was recognized by being awarded a Marraines Fiddo Award from Burkina Faso Festival International de Danse de Quagadougou in 2022. With her newly established Non-Profit Company, Nyamza’s vision is to make dance, as the genre of the performance art, to convey body politics on all social issues.