Left off the Highway...

A few days ago I took off my wedding ring and typed in the coordinates for the Windybrow Theatre in Joubert Park to hand in my forms for the festival in June... Only to discover that the theatre is honestly one turn off the highway - and therefore not that scary a drive at all... They are in the midst of drastic restoration renovations. The inner city of Johannesburg... in the shadow of Ponte tower... a stones through from Hillbrow... lies a magic not-so-little theatre. So if you are brave - like me - I think you too should venture one turn off the highway and come and see this spectacular old theatre whose lights are being turned back on.

So, here when we're on...

Tuesday 14 June at 6pm

Wednesday 15 June at 7pm

The festival poster. How pretty. And funky. And Joburg.

Weekend Special... Christ Church from Jenine Collocott on Vimeo.

For those of you for whom it would take more than one turn off the highway to come see us... here is another little clip of the show we did for Christ Church high school. We adapt the play to perform it in school halls without lighting... and it works. If they can't come to the theatre - take the theatre to them xx

Weekend Special at the Windybrow Theatre

This week I got the very exciting news that my play Weekend Special will be performed at the Windybrow Theatre in Joubert Park... the daring dangerous heart of Johannesburg... in the shadow of Ponte Tower! So excited.

Weekend Special is set on the streets of a Johannesburg Township. It tells the story of the relationship between a daughter and her single young mother, her best friend and the local gossips... And the actresses Deborah and Yule rock. I made it especially to perform for a youth audience - where it does really well. It's relevant, it's funny, it's wacky - They dig it. In South Africa we don't have a massive theatre going audience - and by taking good work into schools we hope to convert even just a few to darken the doors of theatres in the future. Mmm.


I'm your Weekend... Weekend Special! from Jenine Collocott on Vimeo.
This was the show we did for Dainfern College and one of the students in the front row filmed it - I think she did a fab job!

The shows are on the 16 and 18 June 2010 at 6pm - Come! Yay

our little play

Yesterday morning we all tore through to Krugersdorp, to St Teresa's School... which is far from Parkview... to do our 'little play' Weekend Special for a bunch of matric girls. Kay - who arranged it - described how she came to discover Weekend Special... Deborah told her on a previous schools show that we have a 'little play' and she should watch it sometime as she may be able to help us sell it to schools. Kay thinking she was doing Deborah a favour came to watch our little play... she laughed like a drain and then cried till her shoulders shook. Since then she has sold us a number of shows - Thanks Kay. Spread the love. x

What we meant was Senior Primary...

We arrived at Botlhale Primary school one very hot morning in Gaborone, Botswana - there is nothing quite like the Botswana heat - its dry and close - as if the sun were almost touching you - fine dust sits in the air the way salt hangs in the air at the coast. And it's 6am.

Our two cars packed to the roof with props, set pieces and costumes... We were shown into the school hall where the performance was due to take place in about an hour. I casually checked the number of students... and - just cos I'm pedantic - the grades of the students. 150 junior primary students! The average age was between 5 and 7... We had never performed to such a young audience. We set up as quickly as possible and reworked the show - to completely simplify the story line.

We were competing for their attention not only against the heat, with the fairly complex story line, but a small bird had managed to get itself trapped in the hall and flew from window to window desperate to get out... but amazingly we managed. I love in the small clip we got on my stills camera - hence the quality of the footage - how they all go quiet when 'Theodore' tries to get 'Lerato's' attention.

It was such a liberating show actually... we were able to do things that you can't normally do - like ask the kids if they're following the story... let them ask questions in the middle of scene... negotiate who is going to come up for the audience participation...

It was fun - but the show is still really for older kids!

Youth Theatre Rocks...

This is a small movie from the performance we did yesterday at Dainfern College in Johannesburg. The students filmed it and did the lights and the sound. Such fun!

Polystyrene, paper mache and a bit of paint...

We built the shadow set for Weekend Special - it was so much more complicated than what I'd initially thought! We worked with Alida Van Deventer who is much more logical and plans thing carefully 'if you want to do them properly' - which we really did! It was a bit like making a dress...

First we started with the visual references - always a very good place to start... to get the general vibe, shape and colour of a township... Alexandra in Johannesburg

Then we made the pattern of how it should look - the size, number and character of the different buildings - then we went through so many different options of material...

and arrived back at the beginning with trusty old polystyrene...

which we sanded, paper mache'd, layered with cardboard and painted...

All this while Jaap (Alida's husband) spent hours looking at a clothing rail that the broken up pieces of structure had to fit on... and then of course come off again... he had to make an impossible puzzle!

And of course he did... and here is our set... it took us 4 full weeks to make.

All the little windows light up... it's very sweet... This is the choir scene...

My sisters favorite line is "...Lerato, get out of the wheelbarrow."