Introducing Ndayola Ulenga
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 […] The post Introducing Ndayola Ulenga appeared first on The Namibian .
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.
