Review: Mamela Nyamza's DE-APART-HATE is First Rate Dance Theatre from a Visionary Artist

Upon entering the theatre as DE-APART-HATE begins, one is met with the sight of director-choreographer Mamela Nyamza and Mihlali Gwatyu as they dance in the space. The music, movement and costume (formal clothes, church clothes) lend an immediate religious context to the piece, a patriarchal context that inextricably linked with the oppressive political system invoked by its title. This episode draws you into the space, investing your attention into the performers and their bodies. It also serves as the foundation upon which Nyamaza and Gwatyu, through the use of dance, movement, stillness, spoken language, allusion, symbolism, sound and silence, will build an intensely emotional experience.

Much of what follows in DE-APART-HATE takes place on or around a wooden bench with each slat painted a different colour, like a rainbow. The bench is unsteady, hinged in the middle so that every shift of weight affects its stability. Nyamaza and Gwatyu scramble to keep things balanced, but the bench moves in reaction to them as though it has its own independent agency, which of course it does not. It is a construct. Like apartheid. Like the rainbow nation. Like colonialism. Like reconciliation.

It is human beings that give a construct the agency that it appears to have. Sometimes we give all of our power to an ideology that people use to bend us to their will. When we try to dismantle a construct, it may transform; when the bench is separated from its hinge, it becomes variously a barrier, a crutch, a trap, maybe even a grave.

But as prominent as the bench and whatever it may represent are central to DE-APART-HATE, the piece is even more focused on what we do with, on or in it, here and now. Whatever we do, we will come face to face with the oppressive legacies of racism, the patriarchy, religious oppression and homophobia, in the forms in which they exist both outside of and within us.

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In one of the many powerful images in DE-APART-HATE, Nyamaza sits with her legs spread, a grand plie in second position. A Bible covers her vagina. It is an impenetrable barrier. She flips through the pages, referencing Leviticus 18:22, having already cited similarly bigoted verses from Ephesians and Deuteronomy. When she pulls down her dress, the Bible disappears between her legs once more - something to be lived with and endured.

But that is not the end of it. Employing an ever-increasing web of taxonomies that embeds multiple layers of meaning into both imagery and narrative, Nyamza offers some ideas throughout DE-APART-HATE about what we can do with the things to which we cling, that we keep clenched in the most vulnerable and intimate parts of ourselves.

It is difficult to discuss what DE-APART-HATE means - might mean - in any succinct fashion, because it means a lot. It meant everything to me as a queer theatre-maker trying to recover a queer voice that became too tired to speak out in a commercial world where straightness makes it easier to be heard. It meant everything to me as a queer person who was taken in by a society that works very hard to pretend that a queer voice has the same value as a straight voice, and who consequently has to learn how to speak all over again. I think DE-APART-HATE will mean a lot to everyone who is trying to engage with what is going on in our country at the moment. Because the mystery of what will rise once what must fall has fallen, what lies beyond decolonisation is what is at the heart of this piece, and Nyamza's recognition of that makes her a visionary.

DE-APART-HATE completes its run at the Cape Town Fringe today, with one last performance at 18:30. Bookings are through the Cape Town Fringe website.

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