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‘Cast and crew’ is the usual way of putting things, but because this is my blog i’m gonna start with the technical crew and introduce the ‘Crew and cast’.
Last year when we found the theatre, unused and slightly broken down at the old Pretoria showgrounds (now Tshwane events centre) my soontobe wife Carol and myself couldn’t resist the opportunity to give it a go and took a lease on the place.
That was about the last time i remember having a Saturday morning to myself. When word got out that the venue was up and running again it wasn’t long before we were approached by At Meyer of the National Youth Developement Trust about running a junior stunt and entertainment educational programme at the theatre. Next thing i knew i was knee deep in kids calling me ‘sir’ and wanting to learn stuff.

Carol is a dance choreographer and real good teacher so off she went with the girls (mostly) and started teaching them to dance which left me with the wannabe D.J.’s and stunt hooligans, all of them wanting to do dangerous stuff – well you did say STUNT school didn’t you sir?

We abseiled, learnt fight coreography, fire danced, set the kids on fire (really), taught them how to use a stage, trained up some technical crew (o here he goes again) and generally had so much fun sharing knowledge with young enquiring minds it’s still amazing. A year later some of those first kids are still with us. When i figure out how to put photos on the blog, i will. (next week)

Theatre (or theater, if you like) is the branch of the performing arts defined as what “occurs when one or more persons, isolated in time and/or space, present themselves to another or others.” (Bernard Beckerman)

By this broad definition, theatre has existed since the dawn of man, as a result of the natural human tendency for storytelling. Since its inception, theatre has come to take on many different forms, utilizing speech, gesture, music, dance, and spectacle, combining the other performing arts, often as well as the visual arts, into a single artistic form.

The word derives from the Ancient Greek theatron meaning, “the seeing place.”

The West End Theatre at Tshwane events centre in Pretoria, South Africa, formerly known as the Piet van der Walt theatre, built in 1964 and currently being managed and revived by Magic Stunts is indeed a “seeing place”.

Since May of 2008, the management of the West End Theatre has been dedicating every Saturday to education through entertainment by hosting a junior entertainment school project, teaching kids from all walks of life to perform in various disciplines and giving them the opportunity to learn about the operation of a real theatre. The theatre has hosted workshops in dance, voice training, poetry, drama, fire dancing, percussion, stunt and movie set safety, technical rigging and sound engineering to name only a few.

Throughout the ages, the arts have always been closely linked to education. Entertaining subjects will always hold the attention span longer and generate more interest from a student. Over the next few weeks we’ll be introducing our crew, the extended family we’ve adopted over the past year.

You can see more of what we do at the Magic Stunts website