Decolonial Spectatorship and Performances of Contemporary Dance in South Africa:Mamela Nyamza’s Choreographies of Embodied Politics of Race and Gender in Place
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
The struggles for dance spaces, for festivals, for recognition of the dancers have long undergirded contemporary dance in Africa in general and no less so in postapartheid and covid-controlled South Africa where governmental institutional structures refuse to prioritise the arts sector and particularly independent dance practitioners despite the unique role they hold in the public space with performances embodying activist politics of race, gender and place. Focusing on artist-activist Mamela Nyamza, what follows takes in the various locations of her culture of activism: in and on the body; in relation to perpetrated violence in gender and race relations; in displays of counter-dance in public places and with Black [women’s] bodies on stage; in institutionalised seats of power. It traces her decolonial choreographic practice that layers personal and socio-political issues into distinctive artistic expressions and intellectual exercises for her audiences. Performed through de-centered corporeal positionalities and dance vocabularies that carry her conceptual signature use of words, cloth and clothes, everyday objects, and spaces, moving and flexing across dance genres, language paradigms, relational exchanges, her works call out the violence and wounds that injustices perpetuate by challenging representations of women, human relations and race and gender positionalities in place, historically and within postapartheid South Africa and beyond.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it