Owela Live Art Biosphere (LAB)
The OWELA LAB is a mobile residency programme aimed at the conceptual development of works of art as well as the professional development of practicing artists. The OWELA LAB is hosted through different formats such as studio residency, strategic workshops, travel and field trips.
Artists in Residency
(February 2024 – August 2024)
David Indongo
Ndayola Ulenga
Performances
KOKO, written and performed by Ndayola Ulenga
Developed through the conceptual development of Owela Live Arts Biosphere (LAB)
Staging a docu-theatre piece in three parts, Ulenga performs her parents’ childhood stories from the apartheid period. The play deals with childhood joys, ethnic tensions, as well as personal loss, in the context of a township and an armed struggle. Koko is a piece about reclamation of identity, commenting on the fluidity of identity and how it is inherited through story. It also touches on the phenomenon of epigenetics and generational trauma; silently probing how much of our parents’ stories do we carry with us, both in memory and in our physiology.
Using a non-acting approach, the performer centres narration as a method of memory work by performing the self, relying on text, music and physicality. The stories are woven together with selected songs that were prominent in Ulenga’s childhood, bridging her parents’ formative experiences with her own. Ulenga puts her own spin on these songs.
The storytelling places emphasis on walking, signaling the journeys travelled and the ways in which mobility in a context of containment was marked by survival. Making reference to walking through the Namibian streets, bushes, mountains and other landscapes, KOKO is about home, identity and the making of the Namibian.
(Photograph by Peke Haindongo)
- Untitled: REDTAPEONBOTTLENECK – On Dictatorship and Other Extreme Tropes of Authority (2nd Crusade: Close Proximity in the very Site of Specificity) Quoting Articles, Gazing back, Calling Forth. Benard Akoi-Jackson, 2019, Owela Festival at the National Theatre of Namibia.
- WATER – Muningandu Hoveka, Jo-anne Sitler, Diolini Uiras, and Gift Uzera, 2019, Owela Festival at the National Theatre of Namibia
- Ondaanisa yo pOmudhime (Dance of the Rubber Tree). Nashilongweshipwe Mushaandja, 2019, Owela Festival at the Ruhrfestspiele Recklinghausen (Germany). Photographic credit: Ana Córcoles Siegersbusch.
- KINA (2024) –
A performance curated by Dr. Nashilongweshipwe Mushaandja and performed by Owela Live Arts Collective (Justina Andreas, Kuzajatu X Maamberua, Bupe Chiwala, Julia Hango, Tuli Mekondjo & Felipus Negodhi).
Kina /ˈkiːnə/ *a verb; dance, move (in multiple Southern African/Isintu languages).
KINA is full length piece that moves between live art, museum theatre, and physical theatre in form of a choreopoem inspired by Namibian and African drumming, drum making cultures and associated rituals. The work is named after an Oshiwambo dance that responds to the beating of drums and clanging of hoes (metal blades) usually performed in Efundula, a women’s initiation rite. KINA is a practice of shapeshifting bodies, queer initiates called oihanangolo (brides) also known as ovamati (boys). These figures are performed as ‘otherwise’ descendents of migrant labourers navigating and negotiating their ‘otherwise’ selves. We meet the Mbwiti (urban groovist from the north), Kwela (jazz player from the south), Kru Child (palm wine musician from the west coast) and The Hoe (moonlight dancer from the east). The overall performance combines text, sound, movement and cultural objects. the musical score composed and recorded by the Tschuku Tschuku musical ensemble borrows from African and its diasporic drum languages, highlighting how the drum has travelled from and back to the continent.
This Performance-as-Research calminates from a research project (2023-2024) titled Dancing Instruments, which seeked to raise questions about restitution of an ongoma, an Oshiwambo indigenous drum in the Das Museum am Rothenbaum – Kulturen und Künste der Welt (MARKK), Hamburg, Germany. During our travels to Namibia’s regions of Kavango, Ohangwena and Oshana, we observed and participated in rites that involved making, tuning, playing drums, and dancing associated to ongoma.
Performance duration: 50 mins.
- MY KOEK IS MOEG –My Koek is Moeg, written by Nashilongweshipwe Mushaandja, performed by the South African actor Abby Molz, and directed by Obett Motaung. A monodrama portraying “a young woman’s quest for acknowledgement and the kind of basic ordinariness that comes of marriage and babies in a world fraught with abuse, sexual interference, utter loneliness and other irrevocable and intimate disruptions…” (Robyn Sassen). This work was hosted by Owela in August 2024 in celebration of women’s month. prior to that, it was performed in Johannesburg, South Africa (2017) and Zimbabwe (2022). Prior to that, it was performed at the Theatre School (2012) and National Theatre of Namibia (2014).