In order to create high-quality theatre for young audiences, Magnet Theatre (in partnership with the Goethe Institut) hosted Barbara Kölling - artistic director and teacher at HELIOS Theatre in Germany. Barbara was stationed at The Magnet Theatre in April 2016 to run a two-week long series of workshops and an incubation process with ten young South Africans and eight guests from four other African countries (Nigeria, Cameroon, Kenya and Zimbabwe) at the Magnet Theatre in Cape Town. Barbara Kölling is a theatre director from Germany who has extensive experience in the area of theatre for young audiences. She is one of the artistic directors of the internationally acclaimed and award winning HELIOS Theatre in Hamm, one of the most important free theatre groups in Germany. HELIOS Theatre consider themselves to be a “children’s-theatre-house” that creates theatre FOR and WITH young audiences. As a result of this incubation process, the Magnet Early Years Theatre Company went on to create AHA!'

 

 

Credits
Director: Nwabisa Plaatjie
Designer: Asiphe Lili

 

Cast
Beviol Swarts, Zizipho Quluba, Luthando Mvandaba, Emmanuel Nkosipendule

 

Synopsis
A box arrives in an empty space! What could be inside? Aha! Wool! Pulling out the thread, the actors weave themselves and the children into the wondrous world of wool. This playful performance explores what wool can do, what we can make from it, how we can play with it and how the shapes that it makes can stimulate the imagination.

 

 

Presenter
Magnet Theatre
Magnet Theatre is an award winning physical theatre company that has been operating in and outside of South Africa for the past 28 years. They have created 30 new performances about South African stories, foregrounding the language of the body as a means of communicating across the multilingual boundaries in South Africa. An NPO, they run mutli-layered educational processes aimed at unemployed township youth facilitating their entrance into tertiary institutions of education and employment in the theatre industry. Recently they have focussed on performance for early years audiences and have created 4 new South African works for under sevens.