HATCHED ENSEMBLE

Thursday 22 April / 8:00 pm

70 minutes

Adults

Hatched Ensemble builds on Hatched, the autobiographical solo Mamela Nyamza created in 2007 drawing on her experience as a mother, a woman and an artist trained in ballet. This new version brings that research to a group of ten dancers and sets the codes of Western classical dance against song, music and different South African bodily traditions.

Pointe shoes, academic forms and references such as Saint-Saëns’s The Swan coexist with voices and movements that question those very conventions. The piece addresses the relationship between training, identity, gender and belonging, and looks at how each body can take ownership of an inherited tradition to find, within it, its own way of being on stage.

Mamela Nyamza is a South African dancer, choreographer, director and activist. Born in Gugulethu, Cape Town, she began her training in ballet and later expanded her studies to modern, African and other contemporary techniques. Her work uses the body to revisit the conventions of academic dance and to address issues linked to gender, race, violence and South Africa’s social structures. Since Hatched, one of the pieces that brought her work international recognition, she has built a career combining creation, performance, teaching and activism.

In July 2026 Nyamza received the Silver Lion of the Venice Dance Biennale, one of the leading international honours of her career, and she is also nominated for the European dance SEDA Awards. Hatched Ensemble had its British premiere at the Barbican in London, opening Dance Umbrella 2024, and has featured in the programming of Tanz im August in Berlin, the Belgian festival KFDA and La Bâtie in Switzerland.