Nikita Baloyi is putting Black women’s trauma where it lives — in the body. At 26, the Johannesburg-born director is using breath, movement, voice and live music to explore the violence women carry long after the visible wounds have disappeared, asking what happens when words are no longer enough.
By Sandile Memela
In the week that Gauteng headlines screamed again — woman found in Kempton Park, woman found dead in Dawn Park, woman found dead in Springs — a small theatre in Makhanda went dark, and then very, very quiet.
On stage, there were no words for a long time. Only breathing. Heavy breathing. A shoulder that would not drop. A foot that kept tapping. A hum that turned into a wail.
That is Nikita Baloyi’s theatre: timely and intuitive in its response to the plight of women, and deliberately uncomfortable.
Her new play, Uxanduva Olungapheliyo, has just finished a well-attended run at the Rhodes Theatre in Makhanda. The title, in isiXhosa, loosely translates as The Unending Responsibility — the responsibility women carry to hold trauma, to hide it, to survive it and to heal from it.
For Baloyi, this is not research from afar. She has said that the production is based on her lived experience, her own suppressed fear and her observation of patterns in society. Most importantly, it draws on the brutal violence to which women are subjected, often by those within their close circles and communities.
At 26, Nikita Baloyi is an emerging voice that South African theatre cannot ignore. Born and raised in Johannesburg, and later living in Port Elizabeth, now known as Gqeberha, she is a Master’s candidate in Drama at Rhodes University, currently specialising in directing. She is also a part-time lecturer and tutor — teaching by day and rehearsing by night.
Her thesis is titled The Body Remembers: Staging the Lived Experiences of Black South African Women of Trauma and Healing. It investigates how trauma can be (re)presented on stage through physical embodiment, vocal expression and live music, using practice-led research and autoethnography as guides to the creative process.
In other words, she puts her own body on the line.
“Am I healing or am I confronting, facing my own demons?”
I have known her for some time, from before she joined the Rhodes Drama Department. She is soft-spoken but precise. She does not perform being a director.
“My practice is both an artistic and personal process of encounter,” she says. “Theatre has become a space in which I do not always know whether I am helping to heal wounds or confronting experiences that I may have previously avoided or left unexamined.
“The uncertainty is part of what continues to draw me towards practice. I am interested in what becomes a site of exploration, expression and knowledge.”
Ask her what her work is about, in its simplest form, and she does not hesitate.
“In its simplest form, being a Black woman in South Africa.”
That simplicity is deceptive, because Uxanduva Olungapheliyo is anything but simple.
The play has no linear plot. Four Black women share a space that is at once a kitchen, a bedroom, a church and a shebeen. They do not tell their stories. Their bodies tell them. A neck stiffens when a man enters. A laugh comes too loud and too quickly after a touch.
“Uxanduva Olungapheliyo explores the trauma that lives within the bodies of Black South African women who have experienced gender-based violence, particularly violence perpetrated by those within their close circles and communities,” Baloyi explains.
“The work explores how trauma is stored in the body, how the body remembers and expresses it in different everyday lived circumstances. Through embodiment, movement and voice, it seeks to make visible the often invisible traces of trauma and the complex journey towards healing. How can trauma be expressed when words are no longer enough?”
How indeed? In a country where, at least, nine women are murdered every day, where words such as GBV, femicide and 16 Days have become exhausted.
Nikita’s answer is: Don’t say it. Show where it lives. In the jaw. In the womb. In the feet that cannot stay still.
The audience in Makhanda, mostly young Black women, did not clap immediately at the end. They breathed. One woman was heard saying, “Yho, ndiyiva emzimbeni wam” — “I feel it in my body.”
Not Spectators, but Witnesses
South African theatre is in a moment. From the Market Theatre to the Baxter Theatre to the National Arts Festival, which Makhanda hosts every June, there is a surge of work by young Black women directors. Theatre that is no longer begging to be allowed into the canon, but building its own.
Nikita places herself in that lineage.
“South African theatre seems to be growing incredibly,” she says. “I see my work developing into bigger stages and continuing to challenge the traditional norms of theatre, creating an environment to allow the audience to not simply be spectators but individuals who can consider what they have witnessed and how it might relate to their own experiences, relationships and understanding of the world. I want my work to be remembered not because of how it looked but because of how it made one feel.”
That is why she uses live music — a rainstick, a djembe drum, naked voices without microphones. In Uxanduva, the sound score is performed by the Rhodes University Chamber Choir, directed by Sibusiso Njeza, on stage. No recorded track. The trauma has a sound. Healing, too, has a sound. Sometimes it is off-key.
Her supervisor at Rhodes, Dr Nkululeko Sibanda, describes her work as “intuitive, rigorous, and frighteningly disciplined for a 26-year-old. It provides a foundation for continued artistic and scholarly development beyond [the] Master’s programme.”
She runs rehearsals like a lab. Actors journal. They bring their mothers’ stories. They do not improvise violence. They improvise aftermath.
This is not trauma porn. That is important to her. She is not interested in showing a woman being beaten. Every South African has seen that on the news. She is interested in what happens at 6 am the next morning, when that woman has to make tea for the man who beat her, go to work and smile at her colleagues.
That is the unending responsibility. Uxanduva Olungapheliyo.
Why Now?
Her play is timely because the news is timeless. Gauteng this August: 15 women killed in 10 days. The police say “mysterious deaths”. Women say they know exactly who killed them.
Baloyi’s work refuses mystery. It says: Look at the pattern. Look at the proximity. The killer is not a stranger. He is in the close circles and communities. And the body knows before the mind admits it.
“I carry my own suppressed fear,” she says quietly. “Every Black woman does. Walking from campus at night, getting into a taxi, saying no to a man who thinks yes is his birthright. My theatre is where I put that fear, so it does not sit in my body alone.”
After Makhanda, what’s next? Maybe she will take Uxanduva Olungapheliyo to Johannesburg — home — and to Gqeberha, where she grew up. She wants to perform for her community, not just middle-class audiences. She wants women who will never buy a ticket at Rhodes Theatre to see it and say: That is my body on stage.
And she wants to finish her Master’s. And lecture. And tutor. And explore her potential. Do a PhD. And be 26.
Nikita Baloyi is not shouting. In an industry that rewards loudness, she is working in breath, in muscle memory, in the things we carry without words.
In South Africa, where women’s bodies are battlegrounds, that may be the most radical act of all: to say the body remembers. And the body can also heal.
And to make an audience feel it, long after the lights have come up.
At A Glance: Nikita Baloyi
Age: 26
From: Johannesburg / Gqeberha
Currently: MA Drama (Directing) candidate, Rhodes University, Makhanda; part-time lecturer and tutor
Play: Uxanduva Olungapheliyo — recently staged at Rhodes Theatre
Research: Physical embodiment, vocal expression, live music, autoethnography, trauma and healing of Black South African wome