In a dramatic retelling of her formative years, award-winning theatremaker Ndayola Ulenga is swinging on a partition gate in her childhood home, singing songs from ‘Annie’ at the top of her voice.
Decades later, Ulenga has recently won the Namibian Theatre and Film Awards’ best directing honour for her adaptation of Morgan Lloyd Malcom’s ‘The Wasp’.
She is fresh from Theatertreffen in Berlin following an acclaimed showing of ‘Koko’, her superb semi-(auto)biographical solo.
“I like to say music was my first language and musical theatre was my first friend,” Ulenga says. “Remember those cassettes our parents bought us as children and you’d watch them 100 million times? ‘Mary Poppins’ was one of them. ‘The Wizard of Oz’, ‘Annie’, ‘The Sound of Music’, ‘Anastasia’. I have so many memories of being young, at home after school, and I’m just singing.”
Ulenga says her love of singing, acting and performance has always been there. As a child and in her teens, she honed her craft through ballet, training with celebrated dance teacher Jenny Schuster.
Inspired by a play she saw at a youth group, she then went on to rally the creative troops at Emma Hoogenhout Primary School to stage the production during an assembly. At St Paul’s College, Ulenga was part of a thriving pupil-driven drama club.
While she considered pursuing a career in ballet and got into the dance stream at the University of Cape Town (UCT), Ulenga ultimately decided on a bachelor of social science degree with a major in drama.
Later, Ulenga went back to UCT to earn a postgraduate diploma in management and marketing.
Much like many creatives trying to juggle their creative pursuits with the need to make a living, upon returning home, Ulenga began working in marketing and advertising.
“There was the understanding of needing a certain level of stability and that our industry in film, arts and beyond is not as robust as we would like it to be. So getting a nine to five is a wise idea,” Ulenga says.
“But, absolutely, from the jump, I had begun seeking out opportunities in the arts. Literally asking people, seeing things on social media or in the newspaper.”
Ulenga also trained with opera singer Emily Dangwa to strengthen her singing while performing at Café Prestige’s open mic nights and The Wolfshack’s karaoke evenings. Eventually, Ulenga performed ‘Dancing Queen’ at Drag Night Namibia with a friend from high school and built on the momentum of that positive reception.
“Drag Night is a very important part of the cultural scene in Namibia. And I got to meet a lot of the film, music and acting people. Then it was just networking,” says Ulenga of her time performing on the platform.
“You go to audition here and they don’t like you for it. But they think you’re kind of cool so they call you for the next one. You don’t get that one, but you get this other one. And now you know Senga Brockerhoff, Marinda Stein and Martha Mukaiwa. It really is about putting yourself out there,” Ulenga says.
Today, she is a sought-after local film actress and an award-winning theatremaker. Her filmography includes ‘The Funeral’, ‘Penda’s Dilemma’, ‘Hand-holder’ and ‘Wrong Generation’. At the same time, she has solidified her spot as local theatre’s brightest new star.
Unequivocally bursting onto the scene as a playwright and solo artist with ‘Stories from Childhood’ during the Otjomuise Live Arts Festival in 2022, Ulenga reworked her mother and father’s triumphs and tragedies set in Donkerhoek and during the apartheid era to present ‘Koko’, in collaboration with Owela Live Arts Collective Trust, last year.
Transporting the audience into the past through an exuberant blend of narration, song, agility and play, Ulenga presented ‘Koko’ as a reclamation of her Namibian identity and a celebration of the everyday, homegrown stories we often don’t see as valid.
“‘Stories From Childhood’ was very important to me because I had always experienced people challenging my identity growing up. I am not black enough. I’m trying to be white. I struggled a lot with my identity, growing up,” says Ulenga, who describes her upbringing as multicultural, especially after having lived in the United Kingdom at a young age.
“But then I would think back to the stories my mother told me about Donkerhoek and how these stories are part of my life as well, from an epigenetic perspective. I wasn’t born in Donkerhoek. But these stories very much shaped and formed me. So ‘Stories From Childhood’, which became ‘Koko’, was a reclamation of that.”
Ulenga describes both her parents as natural storytellers as is her sister, Nesindano Namises, an acclaimed performance artist and cultural worker in her own right. Like Namises, who often performs in Germany, Ulenga’s own career recently led her to the country.
Selected from more than 800 applicants from around the world, Ulenga was invited to join the International Forum at the Berliner Festspiele’s Theatertreffen, the world’s largest German-language theatre festival.
“It was really enriching to see the amazing German theatre that they had on. It strengthened my theatremaking capacities and my way of critically examining theatre. It also showed me, in very practical ways, that if you have the resources and strong technical skills, the sky is the limit when it comes to theatre. So that was very exciting,” Ulenga says.
“But I think my greatest takeaway from the experience is that the key difference between ourselves and the German theatremakers is resources. We are not in any way less talented, less capable, less original or less intelligent.”
Ulenga says it was very important to come to this realisation and decisively dispel any myths of creative inferiority to the West before the start of an exciting new chapter.
She has been accepted into the prestigious London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art (Lamda) and will begin her master’s of fine arts in professional acting in September.
“I think a really important thing for me, prior to my studies, has been to spend a lot of time solidifying my identity in my Namibianness. Sometimes we think or feel our story is small and insignificant but it’s not. Because whoever you are, you are part of humankind,” Ulenga says.
“I really want to use the networks that I’m going to gain studying at Lamda for Namibia’s benefit. I intend to take up space in these rooms as a Namibian first and as an African to advocate for us as artists and for our stories.”
Ahead of her September move, Ulenga has been doing some fundraising and plans to stage a musical performance in July as well as a ‘reinvigoration’ of ‘Koko’ in August to continue these efforts. While she has received some support, she says securing funding has been challenging.
“Our means for developing our nation do not only lie in our natural and tangible resources like diamonds, uranium or oil. They also lie in our stories, which should be treated as natural resources that we can use at local, regional and international levels,” Ulenga says.
“There are a lot of artists who want to upskill and gain access to international markets through study,” she says. “I really hope that corporates and Namibians at large can come to the party and get behind the arts.”
Meanwhile, Ulenga will continue to invest in a dream she says has been crystal clear since she was a child singing in her kitchen.
“I don’t know if it’s stubbornness or if it’s something else, but nothing and no one can tell me otherwise,” she says before sharing what’s next.
“We’re going international.”
– martha@namibian.com.na; Martha Mukaiwa on Twitter and Instagram, marthamukaiwa.com
