“HATCHED ENSEMBLE” is a triumph at JOMBA!’s opening night!
by Thembela Sibiya
What a privilege! What an experience! What a way to celebrate the opening of the 25th JOMBA! Contemporary Dance Experience Festival with Mamela Nyamza’s dance piece “HATCHED ENSEMBLE”. A dance piece inspired and adapted from her 2007 solo work “Hatched”. The work explores issues around intersectionality and identity, challenging conventions in tradition and gender norms within classical dance and various issues around identity and belonging.
9 performers are seated in a semi-circle, their backs to the audience, they are bare chested with white tutu-skirts embroidered with clothes pegs. There are wire handmade props: a car, flowers, chickens and windmills, and a large A-frame ladder leaning against the cyclorama upstage and to the left.
The scene took me to a homestead environment and with the dancers not facing the audience it hit me that, that could be the gesture of “memory” the intangible thought of remembering that has been recreated into tangible memory.
The dancers slowly begin to put on their pointe shoes, tying the ribbons around their ankles, opera singer Litho Nqai wears a bell on her hand (like a church bell) which could symbolise time. She could be a mother figure who gives right of way and orders to the dancers — at least this is how I read her presence in the work.
Nqai starts to pick flowers and she’s singing what seems to be a lullaby as the dancers start to move swiftly on pointe with the wire props held in various positions. She then gives each dancer a flower, an acknowledgement of their presence. They exit the stage on both sides, their pointe shoes creating a hurried rhythm on the stage floor, when they re-enter they carry red laundry on their heads.
A washing line overhead, just out of reach — the dancers start trying to reach for the line with little success, until they work together lifting one another. They start to hang the red dresses on the line and Nqai appears on stage again, singing “Awuyazi oyifunayo” (you don’t know what you want). The dancers attempt to dress, with the dresses still hanging on the washing line they start to climb into them. They look like puppets, hanging uncomfortably from the washing on the line, dressed in the hanging red dresses.
A change in song, Nqai begins an aria and the dancers one-by-one drop onto the floor like toddlers who are being refused candy — there’s a stubbornness in the movement. They roll on the floor and start scraping the red dresses on the floor, almost like they are doing laundry, or scrubbing clean the floor, vigourously.
Following this, there is a rapid dance of identity conflict, they are putting on cocoon-like red plastic jackets. From the safety of these red plastic cocoons, the dancers call out their names. The song “Nithi angimbulale” (You say I should kill him/her) plays abruptly through the speakers. The dancers react, and turn away, scared, running all over the stage. They come back to the audience smiling but then turn away again. I could not help but relate to the scene, I got the sense that it offered a comment on societal expectations placed on individuals. We are expected to act and behave in certain ways, often, we have to put on a mask, like all is well but we are dying inside and depressed.
When the song dies down the sounds of live instruments, masterfully played by instrumentalist Azah Mphago, fill the auditorium. The dancers spin, uncontrollably… falling to the floor they remove their pointe shoes. Barefoot now, they begin to dance as if they are celebrating being free of the constraints that their pointe shoes and tutu-skirts impose.
They each hang their shoes and tutu-skirt on the washing line, a memory of rigidity, now stripped away to reveal fluid identities. They start “UKUGIDA” (an African dance) back and forth on stage until finally Nqai appears again from stage left, and they dance together celebrating their freedom in their newfound identities, until the light fades.
“HATCHED ENSEMBLE” has its second and last performance tonight at the Sneddon Theatre. The show is at 19.30 and tickets are available via computicket or at the box office one hour before the show.
