The Hartbeespoort Aerial Cableway is one of those venues where the audience changes every fifteen minutes — families come up the cable car, spend a few hours at the top, and head back down. Which makes it a fascinating place to perform.
The Easter long-weekend programme
The Cableway has been booking me for Easter and other long weekends for several years now. The 2025 Easter programme followed the format we have settled on: a thirty-minute magic show to start, then a few hours of stilt walking around the venue with games and interactive moments built into the route.
The show went up to the usual mix of laughter and small gasps. The trick is reading the room when half the audience has just arrived and the other half is about to leave. Keeping the energy high enough that someone who walks in at minute eighteen still gets a complete moment to enjoy.
Stilt walkers and games around the venue
After the show, the team took to the stilts. Two of us in costume, towering over the crowd, working a long loop around the venue — the deck, the lookout points, the play areas. We carry small interactive games we can stop and run with passing kids: simple challenges, magic tricks scaled down for one-on-one, a few quick punchlines that work better the closer you are.
The Cableway also booked two professional face painters for the day. The face-painting station became its own queue within about ten minutes — butterflies, superheroes, bunnies, the inevitable dragon requests from the older kids.
Why long weekends and family venues are a natural fit
A family venue on a public holiday is a particular kind of event. The audience is forgiving and excited, but they are also moving. The performers who do well in that environment are the ones who can give a child a complete, satisfying interaction in two minutes — not the ones who need a full thirty-minute build-up.
That is exactly what stilt walking, walk-about balloon art, and roving magic deliver. Quick, repeatable bits of joy, threaded across the day, with one bigger show as the centrepiece.
Planning something similar?
If you are running a family-friendly venue, a public-holiday programme, or a festival in Gauteng and the surrounding area, the magic-show-plus-walk-about combination is built for crowds in motion. Get in touch and tell me what you are putting together.
From the event
