When describing their performance practice, queer South African artist and choreographer Tandile Mbatsha often references an evocative Xhosa phrase: Intyatyambo Iyaphuma Engxondorheni (roughly, the flower that emerges from a rocky, arid place). Born in 1993, a year prior to the country’s first postapartheid election, Mbatsha emerged alongside the aspirational and contradictory culture of South African democracy—one that constitutionally recognizes sexual diversity and freedom of expression but yet remains one of the world’s most socioeconomically divided societies. Mbatsha’s performances probe these tensions, using their Black, Xhosa, nonbinary body as a source of excavation and revelation. Their site-specific interventions resonate across multiple registers: the postcolonial landscape, always contested; their body, claimed by/for masculinity; and the generational histories of both pain and desire that the body carries with it and evokes in others.
Mbatsha’s marquee performance, I AM, which debuted in March 2022 as part of Cape Town’s Institute for Creative Arts (ICA) Live Art Festival, explores these tensions in quadruplicate. Beginning with a performance installation in the theatre’s lobby that sees Mbatsha partially buried under large cement rocks, the performance then moves into the theatre proper, where a square structure with plastic siding, evocative of a house, dominates the stage.
The next two segments symbolically (re)enact aspects of uwaluko, the complex coming-of-age ceremony of the Xhosa ethnic group that involves a monthlong process wherein a teenaged boy is circumcised and trained to be a man. Mbatsha’s parents join the performance from the audience, reminiscing about raising a feminine boy as their father shaves Mbatsha’s head. Finally, alone onstage, Mbatsha performs a stylized erotic solo with a bucket of butter that both lubricates and imperils their motions; gendering rituals take on new meaning when (re)enacted by a body that refuses to be gendered. Mbatsha emerges from the box, breaking through the plastic siding and entering into the world. The piece ends with an eighteen-minute projected video of Mbatsha engaging sensually with the natural world around Cape Town, both dwarfed and embraced by the boulders, rivers, and mountains of the landscape.
Having made their international debut in 2017 as part of photographer Zanele Muholi’s performance ensemble at the New York Performa 17 biennial, Mbatsha continues to develop work across genres that merge art and activism. When we met for this Zoom conversation in November 2024, they had just returned, tired but energized, from the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, and Intersex Association’s annual conference hosted by Gender DynamiX, an NGO focusing on transgender rights in South Africa. Mbatsha views this advocacy work as a necessary complement to their performance practice, an ever-evolving choreo-activism rooted in queer visibility and joy.
The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
April Sizemore-Barber: I am struck by the way that your work complicates rituals of masculinity. You counter the narrative that says queerness is “unAfrican” with your unapologetic expression of femininity while still claiming your own experience as someone who was raised to be a Xhosa man.
Tandile Mbatsha: That is a memory my body will never forget and is something that I still hold: of being “him.” Being raised a boy and being raised Xhosa. These are the complexities that I am working through as a gender nonconforming person with pronouns they/them/theirs. We like to act as though we’re linear and clean. We aspire so much to neatness: You are this, that, and nothing else! And queer goes exactly against that. It is ever in transition; it is ever-moving. It is not static at all. I like to bring forward those contradictions in my work, and how I reconcile them with my body, with my mind, with my community. My body is a walking contradiction that I am very happy to celebrate! I am really happy to bring those differences up and celebrate them and work through them. Because they are all here, right? (gestures to body) They are all held here. I can’t do away with them. And why would I even want to? The body remembers.
I am interested in localizing myself and asserting my indigeneity as an African, a Black Xhosa person. Now I identify as just a “person,” but I was raised a boy, one who has undergone the whole rite of passage, uwaluko. I don’t know if you saw the film Inxeba?1 That whole situation. But even now, when I am talking about my experience—there’s a secrecy, you know? Like, “Oh, no, you can’t talk about what happened there!” And I am here to be like, I am calling this kak [shit] out, because I feel like I have license, you know? I am Xhosa, I was socialized as a boy, I went through it. I can speak until I’m blue in my face about that experience and nobody’s going to tell me how to tell it. I also need to do something for the next person, the next queer boy. I am obsessed with the journey of a queer Black boy, a Xhosa boy or any other Black and Brown boy who has strong cultural and traditional practices and being socialized in that way. We always have to queer that stuff! And that is what my performance work has been enamored with.
ASB: I would love to talk about I AM, the piece you did in 2022 that evokes all these tensions we are discussing across multiple media and performance modalities: performance installation, dance, film, and, I suppose, family drama, since you actually put your parents in the show. Could you walk us through making that piece? It seems to bring together so many of these different themes in your work.
TM: I AM is a four-part work, running about 120 minutes. The short film that ends the show was actually a precursor to I AM, part of an earlier project for my master’s at the Institute for Creative Arts (ICA) at the University of Cape Town. I was very influenced by performance artist Ana Mendieta.2 I was looking at the elements: I am air and water, I am earth. I am of this land—that is what that film is saying.
My ancestors walked this land before me, and they were queer. They were queer! If there is anything that is un-African, it is heteronormativity and heterosexuality as a standalone. We know for a fact that this was the case before colonization and before the Bible—not to romanticize that era, because a lot of same-sex sex was also a punitive thing or for just one person’s enjoyment, especially in the regime of kings. But same-sex sexuality was often quite a revered act. People who partook in it were the “Honorables,” citizens in a village who were of high spirituality, and it was done to conjure good fortune or a good harvest. It was a really beautiful thing. Then the colonists came, and now we’re sitting here today with this big lie that is so tired.
Engxondorheni (2021), dir. Dani Kyengo O’Neill.
My work wants to unearth and excavate myself from the quagmire of being told that I’m not of this place. That is what the film was really saying on a macrolevel: I am of this earth. And I am, literally, getting into those spaces. I went out to the edges of Cape Town to explore this notion of marginalization and us being in the margins. I went to a river and found rocks. I went to Signal Hill for the sunset—kind of light or heat. Fire. Then we went out to Boulders Beach, which is another edge, between water and land. I was just playing and teasing out how my body feels in these spaces and how my body responds to the space. Like materially, meeting these hard boulders and harsh sun, the gravel on my feet and then moving. I am in freezing water in the early morning. Yet none of these spaces rejected my body. Yes, they were hard. It was hard when my body met the space of the cold water, or, viscerally, the hard boulders around me. But nothing regurgitated me. The earth made space for me to just be in that space. That’s what the film was trying to do.
It is also a me thing, right? There are reparations due. I speak of queer people as forced late-bloomers, robbed of experiences that other young people were having. I couldn’t have my first boyfriend in my teens and be out. It sounds frivolous—a boyfriend—but it impacts how I look at romantic relationships and how I look at myself as desirable. That translates to a lot of things. That is why my work starts with me: I need to replenish myself because of all the years of erosion that has happened to my psyche, to my being; to my body, physically, having something chopped off my body because I’m a boy-child! Sorry, that is quite grotesque. (laughs)
ASB: It’s flesh. We often think of culture in the realm of the abstract or symbolic, but with uwaluko and ritual circumcision, you are quite literally marked in the flesh by gender, in a very concrete way.
TM: Yes, in very concrete ways. In ways that I cannot undo.
I was also very interested in memory work. Like I was saying earlier: The body remembers. This is all the work of replenishing self or, rather, paying reparations to self-development. Trying to repair and restore my development. When I was working on I AM, I was drawing on memories of being othered, of feeling othered. The first image that you see when you enter the theatre lobby is me, literally, under rocks. Quite self-explanatory. One can interpret anything from them—I don’t want to be very prescriptive around it—but the image is viscerally there. You can feel them heavy on my body. There was nothing between me and the rocks. I had scars! (laughs). With performance art, there is always an aspect of self-harm. As someone with a history of self-harming because of mental unwellness . . . I don’t know. I don’t have an answer for it.
ASB: That makes a lot of sense to me. A productive way to take a self-destructive urge and transform it into something that is visible rather than just internal.
In the past you have described your work with the Xhosa phrase Intyatyambo Iyaphuma Engxondorheni: the flower that emerges from a rocky, arid place. That seems to be quite literal here.
TM: There are many ways that the metaphor speaks.
ASB: And you are the flower?
TM: (laughs) Yeah! Making it bloom into a beautiful thing. I was self-harming, but now, look, I’m making art!
Anyway, I want to talk a little bit about that second image of I AM, of my dad shaving off my hair. I had really horrible experiences with haircuts as a young boy. It was the one thing my dad and I would do together. He always tried to do “dad-and-boy” stuff with me, and I was just not interested. I needed to get my hair clean-shaven at least every two weeks, but it was a painful experience for me. I would sit on my dad and then he would hold me, and then the barber would shave me very hard. I didn’t have a lovely experience with it. Then, fast-forward to about 2020 and I met this barber. I would literally fall asleep when he shaved my head! And because I really like a chiskop [clean shave], he would have to caress my scalp to feel that there’s no hair, which he did with so much care. So much care. I put these memories together—this experience now, that experience then—and it made me think of homoeroticism as well. Or hetero-eroticism? That space of the barber shop.
ASB: It is such a masculine space, but also a space that then can have intimacy and gentleness and care. Men grooming each other.
TM: Grooming each other, exactly. I wanted to open that up in my work. In fact, my dad was not in the original cast. The original cast was somebody else, and he and I would play around with this thing of care, of softness, using the haircutting as image, as symbol, as impetus or springboard for us to start teasing out these acts of care. The intimacies that happen in a barber shop, between the barber and the person who is being cut. The intimacy I experienced with my barber. Because the person I was originally going to do the performance with was really masculine, we wanted to play around like with this . . . not erotic, but romantic perhaps, tenderness. Men experiencing softness with each other.
The haircut is the second image that comes up, following rocks in the pre-set. Then my parents have a little bit of a recollection, live onstage. They have this famous story they always tell now, I guess, as evolved parents that understand that their child is queer. They can talk about it and tell other parents how to come to terms.
ASB: That is a long journey from where they started!
TM: And it continues to be a journey, because my queerness is ever-changing. I see myself as a trans person now as well, in that I am gender nonconforming. But also, I am just always in transit with my expressions of gender and sexuality. I don’t identify as a gay man anymore. But I digress.
So there we were: Mom is sitting in the auditorium in the audience with a spotlight on her and my dad is onstage, having just shaved me. My parents tell a story about when they started feeling “our child is different from other kids.” We were in a supermarket in the toy aisle and apparently I wanted teacups. My dad was like, “Ag, man! Get the kid the teacups!” And Mom was like, “No, no, no! Why not a car or something else?” And so on.
And then it moves to me doing a solo where I use the image of butter or margarine. This is very specific to the Xhosa boy-into-manhood practices that are done on the last day of uwaluko when you are about to leave the mountain. They put butter on my body the morning when I am about to go back home. All the elderly and young men come up to the mountain and they put butter on your body. And while they are putting this butter on, they are also telling you a lot of things about how to be a man: “This is how you should be,” “This is how you must behave,” “This is how a man is,” “This is what we expect from you,” etc., all while they are touching my body. The different men touch my body. And some of them are mean and they just splash the butter and kind of hit you, because apparently you will be a hard man if they inflict some pain on you. Others are really gentle. Others are just like, “Oh, whatever, we are just doing this because we have to.” All different. The ritual has this unspoken—or rather, actually quite loud—curriculum: While they are putting it on your body, they are telling you how to be a man.
ASB: All while they are oiling you up?
TM: Mhmm. And the experience was quite specific for me, because I was known to be a gay boy. When I was sixteen, I came out to my mom, and then my mom came out to my family on my behalf. It was both good and bad. But the main thing is, she said, “Look here! This is my child and I’m telling you that they’re gay. It’s not open for discussion!” However, my uncles thought that going to the mountain would be my saving grace and I would come back straight. In my mind, I was just like, I am going to beat you at your game! I am going to do this, and I am going to do it so well—of course, again, these are traumas—that I am going to beat you at your game. And I did. I was healed in seven days, beating my cousin who was there weeks before me.
I was just the star of the show! I was putting myself through the hard time, going through the hard thing just to come out beautiful and shining at the end. There’s that metaphor again. It is loaded, because of how LGBTQ+ people were brought up and raised in a society where we are rejected, and then we go on to be these super successful people who are obviously overcompensating for something.
ASB: You need to be twice as good to be taken even half as seriously.
TM: And that was my journey in theatre as well. When I trained in ballet, I was short and small-bodied, so nobody could partner with me. I had to be in the front if we were dancing in a group. I had to be a soloist! I never did a pas de deux, ever, because I’m not strong enough, so I had to be agile and superb. The jeté must jeté! you know?
But back to the image of the butter, and how it made it onstage. In 2018, when I did the first iteration of the piece, it was called JunXure [Indibano].3 Then I asked queer and trans people and women to come onstage and put butter on me. In dance, we speak about this thing called engram, or muscle memory: I don’t have to teach my body to do a piqué if I have been doing a piqué for six months, for instance. I was really interested in doing a counternarrative to my body remembering those men putting butter on my body like that. I specifically wanted queer people to participate. Again, it is reparative. I am restoring my body.
In the 2022 iteration of I AM, I was focused on trying to love myself.
Trying to be erotic with myself. How can I love myself? How can I be sensual with myself? Making performance and art allows me to come back to my body, to learn my body, to be with my body again, to remember with my body again. And so there I am, buttering myself lusciously! But the floor is getting slippery. I’m falling and getting up; I’m giving in and I’m getting up, and I’m giving in and getting up. Again, we are grappling with this notion of blooming in a very horrible or unfavorable environment. I have made the environment unfavorable for myself in real-time, in terms of practicality onstage. But that is also my daily life. I have to think, am I taking Uber? Is my mom dropping me off somewhere? Or am I taking a public taxi? Am I going to the taxi rank? What am I wearing? I need to mentally prepare myself. And this is a daily conversation I have with myself. (Gestures to outfit, a sleeveless blouse with pink and purple floral accents, long ribbons of baby blue beadwork dangling from their earlobes, complemented by funky tortoiseshell glasses). Am I going to the spaza shop dressed like this? No! I’m going to take this off after this call, and I am going to walk to the spaza dressed differently. Grappling again with that slippery slope of these moments. It is code-switching and I am hyperaware of what am I doing, where and how to make my body safe. But I also enjoy taking up space lushly and beautifully.
ASB: I want to return to the slipperiness of that butter as a symbolic object: the ways self-love can be restorative and celebratory, but the extra labor it creates. So much emotional labor and work happening in that performance in order to just not fall down. To stay still. It requires all that extra muscular tension, which is in some ways mirrors the trauma queer people carry in our bodies when we are in those public spaces and have to make those calculations: Am I safe? Am I not? What do I need to do to protect myself?
TM: Precisely. The trauma of staying on my feet and holding my chest up. Speaking about the falling and getting up: Jay Pather,4 my MA supervisor, at some point had to say, “Tandile, allow yourself to fall! If you don’t, you are going to hurt yourself. You are fighting this. We see you and we already know you’re going to fall at some point. Just give it up.”
ASB: Especially if you are an overachiever and already trying to be so much to so many people.
TM: All my body knows is how to swim, never to sink. I had to sit down with myself and be like, girl, calm down. Nothing is going to go the way you want it to all the time. I have always battled with perfectionism—though I would rather call it an obsession with beauty and elegance. I have had to come to terms with myself as being quite straightforward and orthodox. And yet I am queer. All these contradictions exist within my body. I grew up in the Anglican Church as an altar server. I studied classical ballet, I studied Western history. These are the super-codified spaces I grew up in. I have had to come to terms with the fact that as much as I exist in a world or within theory-and-practice, a space that is constantly shifting, I like order. Being queer was a blessing in my life. I think I would otherwise be some boring bishop now, obsessed with order. (pause) Art and queerness saved my life. They made my life more interesting, and they made me more daring. I would have been a boring, clean, obsessed-with-neatness person without them.
ASB: This brings to mind the messiness and the unpredictability of performance art, especially the sort that takes you out of the theatre and into the street. In the past you have done a number of site-specific interventions where you show up in public spaces wearing fabulous costumes, which can be hard to control. You set it up, but you never know what will happen or whom you might encounter. That is the exciting part—the art as the interaction—yet it seems to run counter to your urge to keep things in some kind of in order. How do you see these performances fitting into your broader repertoire?
TM: My work always speaks to various sociopolitical and social economic issues that impact persons of color, especially queer people. You know, E. Patrick Johnson has this configuration of queerness as quare? Q-U-A-R-E.5 People go on about Cape Town being a gay capital, etc., but we know that they are only speaking about the Green Point gay bar with a white male owner, not everybody else.6 I am always interested in the specificity of how we come in quare, in contraposition to the Euroamerican white gay experience. My work has always been interested in bringing those things to the fore. For instance, in 2019 when the Social Justice Coalition was celebrating the right to protest when a bill was passed, I was one of many performers.7 One performance would start, people would come to watch, and then the performers would join the march and move to the next performance, all the way down to Parliament. This sort of performance is always about interaction, always trying to get people involved. You don’t know who is going to join in, who is going to throw eggs at you, or who is going to actually sit down and watch. That is a precarity that speaks to our daily lives, but it has now been curated. And even then, you cannot curate everything; people interact differently when you are in the public domain, and anybody could do as they want. But there is also safety there. Like I was saying earlier, I watch how I dress when I am going to certain places every day, but there is a safety about being in public while in performance.
ASB: That reminds me of how Judith Butler described the difference between theatrical performance and everyday performativity: Everyone loves the drag queen, but the moment that same person is on a bus, they become the object of scorn.8 Because the framing is different.
TM: Truly. There is no frame in public. Just imagine that drag artist being on the bus, but they are expressing their own gender.
ASB: The safety of the frame of performance—the this is just-a-performance—is gone. The audience, the people in the bus or in the taxi, feel destabilized because their binary categories have been thrown into disarray. And then that becomes physically unsafe for the person who is just living their life and doing their everyday gender.
TM: Maybe we can ask questions like, are we still in 1960-something? Are drag artists in 2025 only performing to live their true self for an hour or a moment? Thinking about this now, I am feeling a little bit of despair. Of course, there are economic and financial considerations. (pause) Is it because drag has become safe?
ASB: Or, another question: What would drag look like in a world where safety was not an issue? Of course, as you say, drag is many things. But, I think, for many people it is still an outlet for something they don’t feel safe expressing elsewhere in their life.
TM: Safety, yoh, we just went deep. When I was doing an intervention in Gqeberha [Port Elizabeth], I actually had to have two bodyguards in Walmer Township looking after my body and the filming equipment.9 It is something I have been thinking about. I am there for a couple of hours—I cause a ruckus and upheaval when I go there and protest—but I also have security around me. What happens when I leave and I have aggrieved some men? Who takes the brunt of it in the evening at the shebeen [beer hall]?
ASB: Performance can disrupt power, but it also can reinforce a power imbalance between an outside performer and the community they come into. What is the fallout of that disruption?
TM: Exactly.
ASB: Which is not to say that it is on the performer to be a therapist or provide resources for people to cope afterward. I am glad that you brought it up, though, because it is not something people always consider. Here, I am thinking of Steven Cohen’s 2001 intervention Chandelier at a squatter camp in Johannesburg as a definitive example of this.10 On the one hand, it was an extremely powerful juxtaposition and commentary on South Africa’s racialized wealth divides. But on the other, he got to go home to the suburbs afterward. And that performance footage arguably launched his international career. Whom does the footage benefit? Meanwhile, they cleared the squatter camp to build the rainbow-hued Nelson Mandela Bridge in its place. There is no trace. Or rather, the trace is in the footage, which is now also part of the performance. Without that documentation, we would never know that the performance even happened or that there had ever been people living there at all. But it does not benefit everyone equally.
TM: Exactly. Who has access to that documentation? Even in advocacy work, I am always worried about this pop-uppy nature of the work we do. “Oh, let’s do an activation there! Oh, let’s do a sensitization here!” We are always just ripping scabs open, especially performance art, because it can be confrontational, provocative, and triggering. I open up wounds zabany’abantu [of other people] and then . . . what is the end goal? I am left sitting with these questions.
ASB: What is next for you? How are you thinking about your work in the future?
TM: I am still touring and continuously deconstructing and reconstructing I AM. I have become more and more interested in how queer artistic collaborations travel, are shared, and influence different parts of the world as well as how art circulates across borders. As part of the annual PAC (Performing Arts in Context) conference, Romanian artist Cat Jugravu and I are co-curating The Digital Soiree,11 which draws from an international network of educators, researchers, and artists working in higher education. Of course, the dream is to realize this digital space in a tangible space, where queer, trans, and gender diverse creators can convene, play, and co-create on the hills of South Africa’s Eastern Cape, our ancestral land.
I am always interested in the ways I perform gender when I observe traditions and rituals in this context, in and through my queer and gender diverse body; the ways I catch myself overcompensating and when I remind myself to quare. I have an idea bubbling right now, interrogating the notion of a trickster: as a mediator, as a constant mover, as a code-switcher, as a conduit in navigating the various spaces that I occupy. I want to observe how my body navigates the space of home—my body as home—and the ways I come in and out of “home.”
ASB: I look forward to seeing what comes next! Thanks so much for taking the time to reflect on your work with me, Tandile.
TM: Thank you!
Footnotes
1. The 2018 film Inxeba (The Wound) explores intimacy and masculinity among initiates and caregivers partaking in the ukwaluko rite. At the time of its release, the film was highly controversial for its depiction of same-sex desire as well as the circumcision ritual itself. Accusations of cultural insensitivity and raucous protests at screenings led to the Film and Publication Appeal Tribunal assigning the film an X18 rating, essentially classifying it as pornographic. Although this classification was eventually challenged and overturned, the controversy served as a point of heightened discussion about queerness, blackness, and Xhosa traditions.
2. A Cuban-American feminist performance artist best known for her “earth-body statue” video performances, Ana Mendieta frequently placed her naked body in conjunction with wild landscapes and the elements to comment on vulnerability and violence.
3. From Mbatsha’s artist statement: “JunXure represents an intersectional framework of patriarchy, violence, gender conformity and oppressions of class, race and culture: It encapsulates the process of learning and unlearning using my body as decolonial art. Dibana nam xa ndidibana.hesiqu’sam (meet me when I meet myself).” Arcade: Curated by Gavin Krastin program, May 11–12, 2018, https://liveartarcade.co.za/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/Arcade2018-programme-booklet.pdf.
4. Jay Pather is a leading South African choreographer, longtime curator of Cape Town’s Infecting the City Public Arts Festival, and an associate professor at the University of Cape Town’s Institute of Creative Arts (ICA), where he supervised Mbatsha’s MA thesis and project.
5. Johnson, a leading scholar in Black queer performance, developed quare theory, “a vernacular rearticulation and deployment of queer theory to accommodate racialized sexual knowledge,” centering the Black queer body in its context(s). E. Patrick Johnson, “‘Quare’ Studies, or (Almost) Everything I Know About Queer Studies I Learned from My Grandmother,” Text and Performance Quarterly 21, no. 1 (2001): 1.
6. One of Cape Town’s historical gayborhoods that remains largely economically and spatially inaccessible to the city’s Black majority.
7. The performance marked the anniversary of a 2018 Constitutional Court verdict that ruled the previous year to no longer require state permits for protests or other gatherings. Its organizer, the Social Justice Coalition, is a membership-based social movement representing primarily South Africa’s disenfranchised communities.
8. Judith Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory,” in The Performance Studies Reader, ed. Henry Bial and Sara Brady (Routledge, 2025), 186–96.
9. Walmer, like other South African townships, is a remnant of apartheid-era segregation policies. These locations, home to approximately half of South Africa’s population, experience the brunt of the failures of postapartheid attempts at economic and social transformation, including unemployment rates upward of 33%. Crime is a serious concern and LGBTQ+ residents are particularly at risk for targeted violence due to challenging cultural and gender norms.
10. Steven Cohen, one of the first South African performance artists to gain international prominence, wore the titular Chandelier as a gown in a 2001 filmed intervention at a Johannesburg squatter camp. His statuesque performance and white body interfacing with the displaced Black residents of this temporary community critiqued the ongoing presence of white wealth in the new democracy. For more commentary on this performance, see April Sizemore-Barber, Prismatic Performances: Queer South Africa and the Fragmentation of the Rainbow Nation (University of Michigan Press, 2020).
11. Performing Arts in Contexts (PAC) is an international organization that supports and connects scholars and practitioners of applied theatre, theatre pedagogy, performing arts, community theatre, theatre in education, and drama teaching. Mbatsha’s co-curator, Jugravu, is a nonbinary Romani performance artist/director based in Berlin.