Decolonial Spectatorship and Performances of Contemporary Dance in South Africa:Mamela Nyamza’s Choreographies of Embodied Politics of Race and Gender in Place
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.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.014 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 0.001 |
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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".