The Cape Town choreographer certainly has a point, but it has been overtly smothered by its agonising opening and inexplicable choreography
The history of Black ballet dancers is certainly a troubling one, tightly intertwined with a colonial past. Even just a decade ago, you couldn’t even see one single Black ballerina or a Black male dancer in Royal Ballet. Developed from her solo piece Hatched in 2007, Mamela Nyamza’s Hatched Ensemble questions and confronts this legacy, eventually transformed into a celebration of South African culture and dance traditions.
While this is a valid point to address, the overall choreography appears as rather perplexing and tortuous. It starts with the soundscape’s repetitive loop of Saint-Saëns’s Le Cygne, and the ten dancers take time to put on pink pointe shoes. Later, they slowly traverse towards the centre stage, back to us. Some of them hold high peculiar props —models of chickens, cows, or trees.
This tableau lasts for 25 minutes under the relentless looping of Le Cygne, which has already been playing before the show officially begins. This prolonged repetition feels like an endless wait for the proverbial other shoe to drop, awful and excruciating. Nyamza seems to be illustrating Western colonialism’s impact on local culture by overusing Le Cygne, but this approach appears irresponsibly executed, slightly slacking off.
However, the costume design by Nyamza and Bhungane Mehlomakulu is a highlight. The dancers wear long white skirts adorned with a multitude of rigid, noisy protrusions that strikingly contrast their bare, shiny torsos. Accompanied by soprano Litho Nqai’s humming (yet again, Le Cygne!), the ensemble starts to do traditional ballet movements like pas de bourrée and bourrée en couru. Gradually, these classical techniques are fused with more earthbound, coiled movements. Amid this, the dancers remove their scruffy white skirts, hanging them on an eye-catching wash line placed on central stage, and change into vibrant vermilion outfits.
The climax arrives as musician “Azah” Mphago comes to stage left, starting to play traditional African instruments, and an emblematic African pop song syncs with the ensemble’s vigorous and energetic movements, obviously inspired by the spirit and expressive power of African dance. The message here is clear: while Western culture has tortured them into half-dead Saint-Saënsian ballet pieces, they can only assure their liveliness and selfhood through their own cultural heritage.
Hatched Ensemble resembles a poorly versed essay where the point has indeed been made, but it is weakly structured and articulated. The celebration of cultural reclamation is undoubtedly necessary and legitimate, but as a dance piece, it showcases as being more predictably pedagogic than compellingly vibrant. After all, what remains haunting in my mind even the day after, is not the exuberant physicality of the last few minutes, but some classical ballet music composed by a white man over two centuries ago.