Nyamza’s hatchling comes into his own
at my mom, I think of the art form Dada. It’s stronger than abstract [art]. If you ask her what it means, she won’t give you an answer. She’ll ask you what you think.”
After a performance of Hatched, Nyamza sits cross-legged in an oversized purple jersey, leggings and what looks like special mittens for her feet while nursing a hot-water bottle. She urges us to come closer and answers all our questions in a tone that speaks of simplicity, broadening access to the arts and dismantling ideas of her work being too complicated for those without an artistic eye.
She is asked what advice she would give to first-time theatregoers who are not familiar with her work. “With my work I think it’s better when people come, not once, but twice to understand it,” she responds. “Because the first time people think: ‘What is she doing?’ I get a lot of that and I’m used to it. The advice that I have is: follow my work! If you have seen it before, I would like to hear what you think.”
She adds: “I’ve allowed my body to express itself the way it wants to be, not the way I was taught. I come from structures. I come from frames and I’ve actually deleted all those structures. I am expressing. I’m not interested in structures anymore. My history of dancing and ballet spoke of people I did not know and could not relate to. That made me feel odd in class and I did something about that on stage. It was 1994, [when] it was hard to get into the institutions to study dance. I needed to get that paper to defy the stigma that I could not graduate. After that, it was away with the structures,” says Nyamza to an audience that responds with mmh-mmhs.
Nyamza began performing Hatched with her son in 2008, three years before the dancer-choreographer was named the Standard Bank Young Artist for dance. In the beginning, the eight-year-old Amkhele would sit on stage in his mother’s costume, drawing with crayons. Soon the crayons were exchanged for paintbrushes, then Amkhele grew too tall and pubescent for the dress and so he “hatched” from the safety of her skirt.
Today, he brings his live charcoal sketching and his rhymes to the work, rapping: Can’t handle the pressure/ I ain’t even on my lesson/ I’ve done some reflecting, on my past life/ My family labels me as that guy whose dad lies and he acts like shit is all good when it ain’t though/ Mama happy cause she got a woman and I saw it happen; I can deal with it but I still feel it/ It’s still different; it’s life though and I ain’t really trippin’.
These lines come from a song titled Thozama, named after Nyamza’s late mother, in which Amkhele address the pressures around him. He says: “My mom travels a lot. The way schoolkids made my mom being lesbian shit for me, that song was my autobiography.”
Today, Amkhele stands as physical proof of how much Hatched has grown since its debut 10 years ago. “We used to joke about how one day we would be doing Hatched and I would be a man. Now it’s happening,” says Amkhele, grinning at the sky at the thought of his mother seeing him as a man.