Tamryn Escalante
Director: Social & Professional Circus
7 min read
September 2026
I have stood in the Zip Zap Circus training space at our academy in Salt River, and others before, more times than I can count. As a young performer, figuring out what my body could do. As a coach and mentor, helping and watching someone else figure out the same thing. And more recently, as the person now directing Zip Zap’s circus division, making sure every element of a show like this comes together.
I’ve produced more shows than I can count at this point, but Full Tilt is the first production I’m leading in this new role, and I won’t pretend that isn’t personal. I came up through Zip Zap’s own programmes. These programmes were the same free training that 1 493 young people walked into last year alone, and more than 25,000 have walked into since Laurence and Brent van Rensburg hung a trapeze bar in a tree in Langa back in 1992. I know exactly what it feels like to be trusted with something bigger than yourself before you have fully trusted yourself. That’s what this show is built on, and now I get to build it for someone else alongside an amazing team of talented professionals: Iesu Escalante — my husband, and the show’s artistic director and choreographer — along with Jason Barnard, Phelelani Ndakrokra, Jacobus Claassen and other professional artists who came up through Zip Zap’s own programmes.
1 493
Young People
trained free last year.
2500+
Beneficiaries
since 1992.
25
Performers
on stage in Full Tilt.
10
Youth Programmes
kept free by ticket sales.
It’s all talent and grit
Nothing in this show is pre-recorded; it’s all committed youth who train and rehearse as if their lives depend on it. That’s the part I want people to understand before they walk in. In most circus productions, the music is fixed, and there is a track, a click, a count the performers have memorised down to the beat. In Full Tilt, the entire score is played live, on stage, by the young musicians of School of Rock. Nothing is locked in advance. The band responds to the performers, and the performers respond to the band, in real time, every single show.
It’s a bigger risk. It’s also the only way to get what we have: five of our own professional performers, who have just come back from a month performing in Réunion Island, about to leave for Europe again in November. They will be flying to a band that’s finding the same moment they are, live, together, in front of you.
A youth circus that exists because two people believed kids deserved a place to become more than what was expected of them.
Why District Six, why this week?
We open at the Homecoming Centre on Buitenkant Street. This theatre is located in the District Six Museum’s second building, the old Sacks Futeran warehouse where the district’s tailors and seamstresses once bought their fabric, before more than 60,000 people were forcibly removed from their homes from 1966 onward. It reopened as the Homecoming Centre in 2022. Our Thursday shows fall on Heritage Day itself.
I don’t think that’s a coincidence worth glossing over. A youth circus that exists because two people believed kids deserved a place to become more than what was expected of them, performing in a building that exists because a community refused to be erased. All this on the one day of the year South Africa asks itself what its heritage actually is. That’s not marketing language. That’s just where we are this September, and I’m glad we are there.
Buy a ticket, make an impact!
Every ticket you purchase goes straight back into keeping Zip Zap’s ten youth programmes free for every kid who walks through our doors — the same way it was free for me. That’s our whole model. Full Tilt is not a fundraiser wrapped in a show. It’s the show that funds what we do.
Come and watch what happens when a kid is trusted, believed in, and given the room to become everything they can be. This is exactly what I got when I was younger. It is what these 25 performers have. And it’s what the next 1,493 will get too, because you booked a seat this September.
SEE YOU THERE!
Dates: 23–26 Sept 2026
Venue: Homecoming Centre, District Six, Cape Town
Tickets: R180 – R250
Booking: Webtickets
Tamryn Escalante
Director: Social & Professional Circus
Zip Zap Circus
