VAULT Festival 2019
The VAULT Festival 2019 has wrapped, and if you UK residents or visitors didn’t get a chance to stop in, really, next year, you must. This collection of offbeat shows and emerging artists, in one of the most memorable and yet obscure venues in London, is a secret treasure.
This has been the most successful year to date, bringing together more than 79,000 people and over 2,000 artists performing across the eight weeks in seventeen quirky little venues throughout and underWaterloo. Even better, 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.
VAULT 2019 Awards (a few of them)
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 there were eight winners of the Show
Gabriella Schmidt and Stella Taylor of “Juniper and Jules”
of the Week Award, among which were Juniper and Jules, taking on bisexuality, polyamory and new rules; Sexy Lamp, a one-woman comedy about Katie, who trained at drama school so she can audition for ground-breaking roles including “dead girlfriend” and “restaurant slut”, WORK BITCH, the we-can-all-relate tale about waiting tables on the way to success, and Bon Ami, a sharp, artistic parody about loneliness, the importance of friendship and why you shouldn’t drink from a coffee machine.
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.
Nominations in other categories were bestowed to PCB fave, dating politics interactive piece Greyscale by Anonymous Is A Woman, but sadly the fantastic and sensitive A Wake in Progress, from Fine Mess Theatre, didn’t seem to get the recognition it deserved.
If you missed out, VAULT Festival returns in 2019 from 23rd January to 17th March.
A former ABC National, Dallas and Atlanta radio personality, Martina O'Boyle is now making movies and covering culture in London, Dublin, and as far in Europe as the cheapie flights will take her, for Pop Culture Beast.