Hatching a fresh and brave mind

A table lamp with a lampshade covered by a vast cloth dominates the stage. The sound of the two pianos and cello of Saint-Saëns’ Swan dominates your senses.

As your eyes become accustomed to the gloaming, you realise there is someone lying on the floor near that lampshade. A child. With no attempt to be still or contained, he’s lying on his tummy, drawing, ensconced within the protection of the fabric.

Then your vision draws back to embrace the scene. He’s Mamela Nyamza’s 10-year-old child, Amkele Mandla. His mother stands on the margins of the stage, her naked back to the audience, her skirt a mass of pegs. She wears pointe shoes and, at one moment, on her shaven head, an aluminium bucket containing sand and red clothes. She’s hanging the washing.

Visionary choreographer
Nyamza is a choreographer who does not reuse what might have worked in the past. In her early 30s and having recently turned freelance choreographer after establishing herself as a dancer in big musicals, she teeters on the edge of her comfort zone, pushing her personal boundaries relentlessly.

She is also a choreographer who has the uncanny ability of rendering the commonplace searingly moving. The vision of a woman scrubbing a floor, on her knees, is central to parts of the work: it has the effect of grabbing your heart and squeezing it.

A single parent, Nyamza does not live her life according to society’s rules. She makes it up as she goes. It is these challenges and sacrifices upon which Hatched is premised.

Nyamza stitches together music unlike any other choreographer on local stages right now. She selects material from all over the discipline, the world; silences punctuate her work just as poignantly. She doesn’t dance to the music; it underlines, accents her narrative.

Beautiful simplicity
The work is simple in its design and articulation, but it resonates with the sparks of a fresh and brave mind in the associations it offers. As the piece unfolds, we realise that the fabric under which the child lies is a skirt – a massive encumbrance of a skirt that Nyamza dons, and which entwines her body debilitatingly.

She must escape it. In doing so, she will forego her domestic responsibilities. The child, exposed by the shifted womb-like fabric, must cope alone. One by one, and matter-of-factly as only a child will, he arranges the clothes pulled from the washing line in a diagonal across the stage, replacing them with his drawings, pegged up childishly.

Having escaped the strictures of the peg skirt, the dancer sits on the floor, centre stage, while her child continues rearranging the domesticity onstage.

She appeals to the audience – “Has anyone a cigarette for me?” – thus pushing the audience/performer relationship in a different direction, leaving you stunned and not knowing whether to laugh or cry.