Dance Umbrella – THE HERD/LESS

South African artist Mamela Nyamza is a vital choreographic voice in contemporary performance. Following critical acclaim for HATCHED ENSEMBLE, which opened the 2024 Dance Umbrella Festival and now the recipient of the 2026 Venice Biennale Silver Lion, she returns to London with THE HERD/LESS, a searing new work. Internationally acclaimed for her fearless choreography, Nyamza continues to push at the boundaries of form and convention.

THE HERD/LESS draws on the dual meaning of the ‘herd’: a collective moving in harmony and a group controlled, shaped and directed by cultural and physical forces. Power emerges through ritual, repetition and the quiet surrender of the individual to the group. Cloth and cultural sticks – traditional southern African objects associated with masculine authority – become both symbols of position and tools of control.

This breath-taking ensemble’s movements generate a live, percussive score, creating a sensory landscape that is as immersive as it is disquieting. Beneath the promise of unity and abundance lies a more violent reality: a collective stripped of agency, bound by systems that sustain both beauty and brutality. Nyamza exposes the fallacy of a beautiful world, revealing the tension between harmony and control that sits just beneath the surface of our day-to-day existence.