User:BlueKali

Aletia Upstairs hails from South Africa, the daughter of a pastor. As a child she sang in the church, in a national choir and was a bit of a child star in Cape Town’s production of The Sound of Music. However from her early teens she chose to spend most of her time in her room painting or directing her siblings in pretend theatre productions.

It became prominent that she had a love for the arts, so much so that when she was 7 her Dad invested in piano lessons but she quit after a few years as she hated her piano teacher. It was evident that Aletia was a free spirit, which really came into play later on in her life. Aletia enrolled herself into Drama school, in hope that it would install some confidence in her talents. In hindsight it did, and after finishing her studies she jetted off to Italy on an exchange programme. Following that Aletia headed to London to concentrate on her music. After befriending a house full of musicians she began to explore songwriting. Coming from a girl who never thought she had the ability to express herself verbally, songwriting was quite a challenge.

Aletia Upstairs is a cabaretist and a singer-songwriter in the jazz and chanson tradition with a background in theatre and World Music. She uses stand-up comedy, puppetry, original music, poetry and fairy tales references in her work. As a graduate from the prestigious Cabaret Conference at Yale she has entertained audiences in Italy, Germany, Portugal, South Korea, Japan, Qatar, South Africa, the USA and India. She has a ardent interest in World Music and sings in Portuguese, Italian, German, Spanish, French, Korean, Japanese, Sepedi, Zulu, Swahili and Afrikaans.

She wrote, composed, recorded, produced her album Possibility (2006). The EP Urban Gypsy Singles was released in 2011. The music video to ‘Fall So Far’ is the latest edition to her repertoire.