A Headless Society: When
Moving Differently Becomes Resistance
By Amahle Sangweni (from JOMBA! KHULUMA 2026, Edited by
Clare Craighead)
When last did you
watch something so absorbing that you stopped trying to understand it? Not
because it made no sense, but because explanation suddenly seemed less urgent
than experience.
That was what
happened to me during Mamela Nyamza’s The Herd/Less, performed by MAMELA’s
ARTISTIC MOVEMENT at Durban’s Elizabeth Sneddon Theatre on August 28, 2026, as
part of the 28th JOMBA! Contemporary Dance Experience. Somewhere in the
performance, the room around me seemed to disappear. I stopped reaching for the
right words and allowed the choreography to speak first.
Long after the
dancers had bowed, it was still speaking.
It begins with
sound.
Bodies march across
the stage in metal shoes, their footsteps striking out a hard, insistent
rhythm. The repetition is almost hypnotic. Many bodies begin to resemble one
body; many footsteps become one sound. Before anyone has explained the idea of
a herd, we can hear it.
And then, slowly,
difference starts to appear.
As the lighting
reveals costumes, gestures and individual ways of carrying the body, the
apparent unity begins to fracture. I found myself reading figures within the
group — a churchgoer, a clubber, an activist - not because Nyamza handed me
these identities, but because costume and movement invited the associations.
The choreography
creates an immediate contradiction: these dancers belong together, but they are
not the same.
That contradiction
becomes impossible to ignore when one performer breaks from the collective
rhythm.
Until then, the
group has established its own logic. Move together. Keep pace. Stay inside the
pattern. But this performer chooses another route. Away from the shared rhythm,
their movement becomes freer, almost defiantly self-directed. The herd
continues behind them. Then come sounds of disapproval.
Suddenly, moving
differently has consequences.
It is a deceptively
simple moment. Nobody needs to announce a rebellion. There is no manifesto, no
placard, no dramatic declaration of independence. One body simply refuses, for
a moment, to behave like the others.
And the entire stage
changes.
This is where The Herd/Less found the heart of JOMBA!
2026’s curatorial provocation, Choreographies of Activism: Moving Bodies as
Disruptive Presencing, for me. Activism does not arrive as a subject layered
onto the choreography. It happens through choreography itself.
A body chooses
another rhythm.
A body becomes
visible because it will not disappear into the pattern.
A body says no
without speaking.
But Nyamza does
something more difficult than simply turning the individual into a hero and the
collective into a villain.
The herd is not only
oppressive. There is pleasure in moving together. There is rhythm, proximity,
protection and the possibility of belonging. Watching the dancers operate
collectively, I could understand why anyone might want to remain inside it.
And freedom, by
contrast, does not look entirely comfortable.
To move alone is
also to become exposed.
The separated
performer gains independence, but also the attention - and disapproval - of
everyone around them. That complication kept pulling me back into the
choreography. What exactly do we surrender in order to belong? And what does
belonging give us that makes surrender tempting?
The question becomes
even more interesting when the performer eventually returns to the group.
Something seems
different.
The ensemble appears
looser now, less tightly-contained, more expressive. For a moment I wondered
whether one dissenting body had changed the herd.
Then another
possibility occurred to me.
Perhaps the herd had
not changed at all.
Perhaps I had.
Once I had watched
one performer choose another way of moving, I could no longer see the
collective as simply collective. Every apparently unified gesture now contained
the possibility of refusal. Every body moving with the group was also a body
that might have chosen not to.
That is the
discomfort The Herd/Less leaves
behind.
Nyamza does not ask
us simply to celebrate individuality or mistrust community. Instead, she places
us somewhere more difficult: inside the unstable relationship between the two.
A herd can shelter
us. It can give us rhythm, identity and a place to belong. But it can also
teach us which direction to walk, how quickly to move and what kinds of
difference it is willing to tolerate.
Perhaps this is
where the title becomes most unsettling.
To be part of the
herd is not necessarily to be powerless. To stand outside it is not necessarily
to be free. The real question may be whether we can recognise the moment when
belonging quietly becomes obedience.
I began the evening
trying to find words for what I was watching.
By the end, The Herd/Less had made me more
interested in the rules I had been watching bodies negotiate.
Sometimes activism
arrives loudly.
Sometimes it begins
almost invisibly: with one body changing direction, breaking rhythm, and making
everyone else notice that there had been a rule in the first place. - Amahle
Sangweni
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