In its most successful year to date, VAULT Festival has brought together more than 79,000 people in 2019 with over 2,000 artists performing across the eight weeks in seventeen venues throughout Waterloo. There were 3,137 different performances of 428 different shows with an almost 15% reduction in cost bringing the average ticket price down to £11.59.
VAULT Festival continued its support of its charity partners. With Help Refugees and their Choose Love campaign, they raised £15,380 in donations and merchandise sales that will directly improve the lives of displaced people around the world. Their partnership with Child.Org and their Team Mum campaign ran an exclusive stage at The Horse & Stables pub which raised over £10,250 to launch new pregnancy services in Kenya. As a result of the donations through Carbon Free Dining, they’ve also planted 2,308 trees with the Green Earth Appeal. VAULT Festival also continued its partnership with WeAreWaterloo, supporting the local community with a range of initiatives aimed at residents.
Co-founders Mat Burt and Andy George comment, We have been overwhelmed by the positive response surrounding this year’s festival. From the artists who create the work, our hardworking staff, our invaluable partners and sponsors, and our trusting audiences, VAULT Festival remains a true team effort. It’s the same spirit we had seven years ago when we started, and it’s what keeps us striving to do more, to keep improving, to reach new audiences, and to continue to bring brave and exciting work to what has quickly become London’s biggest arts festival and a landmark on the cultural calendar.
Closing the Festival, VAULT held their annual award ceremony to recognise remarkable ingenuity, talent, new writing and productions.
Awarded to exceptional productions from the Theatre and Performance programme the eight winners of Show of the Week Award ranged from explorations of female identity to the sex lives of endangered bats. The week one winner, Juniper and Jules considered bisexuality, polyamory and making new rules. Whereas week two’s Essex Girl followed Kirsty, a sixteen-year-old Essex Girl, whose life isn’t all fake tan and stilettos. Sexy Lamp, the one-woman comedy about Katie, who trained at drama school so she can audition for ground-breaking roles including “dead girlfriend” and “restaurant slut”, took the award for week three. The PappyShow’s cycle of plays in week four, BOYS, GIRLS and CARE, looked at the way we move, we talk, we think to show the things about boys, girls, and the NHS that we never get to see.
A new play about love, loneliness, lies and bats, Vespertilio received the award for week five. For week six, it was WORK BITCH, the waiting tables tale about success, Saturday jobs and what defines us. Set amongst the devastation that hit farming communities in the late nineties, it was Bobby & Amy, the new dark comedy about foot and mouth disease, in week seven. The award winner for the final week of shows was Bon Ami, a sharp, artistic parody about loneliness, the importance of friendship and why you shouldn’t drink from a coffee machine.
The eight Origin Awards were presented to outstanding new work from the Theatre and Performance programme. This year, winners included Inside Voices which blended dark comedy and magical realism to shine a light on Southeast Asian Muslim women; Fatty Fat Fat, a funny and provocative show about taking up space in a world that doesn’t want to make room; Mancoin about masculinity, wokeness and cryptocurrencies; and Collapsible, a furious monologue about keeping it together as you fall apart. Orlando, a story about looking to escape your own identity and definitions; the sexploration of a queer woman in My Father the Tantric Masseur; the neglected history of Sophie Germain the trailblazing mathematician in The Limit; and Anna X,about the nature of narcissism, based on real events, were also among the winners.
Winner of the After Dark Award, Hypnagogue was named the outstanding work from the late night programme of comedy and cabaret. Bringing together the work of three leading practitioners, Hypnagogue used hypnotherapy, storytelling and gong-healing, woven together with a live, improvised soundtrack, to take audience members on an unforgettable, transformative journey.
This year the People’s Choice Award was presented by Festival partner Stagedoor to The Limit which received the most positive reviews and star ratings on the Stagedoor app. The extraordinary true story of forgotten mathematical genius, Sophie Germain, this new musical was set against the backdrop of the French Revolution to an ebullient pop-rock score.
For embracing the VAULT Festival spirit of creativity, cooperation and kindness, How Eva Von Schnippisch Won WWII by Eva Von Schnippisch was bestowed the Festival Spirit Award. Germany’s greatest cabaret star transformed into Britain’s number one spy with a hair-raising mission in occupied France, an explosive death-defying getaway in Russia and infiltrating the very top of Nazi Germany with the love affair to end all love affairs.
Blue Thunder expanded the scope of performances format and style and was awarded the Innovation Award. Padraic Walsh’s powerfully immersive play, staged entirely within a minibus by award-winning director Cathal Cleary, allowed audiences up close and personal with one splintered family in small-town Ireland.
