VAULT Festival returns this month, for eight weeks of innovative and exciting live performances, with more than 600 shows offering something for everyone.
This year’s festival highlights will include a circus spectacle with Tarot; three historical female adventurers joining together for a podcast in Miles Apart Together; Freedom Hi a multi-disciplinary show about the protests in Hong Kong; and Jekyll / Hyde, an urban game for adults.
Other highlights will include female friendship in pre-partition India with Santi and Naz; and an experience of being an immigrant in Ireland with Notch.
During February there will be a chance to shun Valentine’s Day and celebrate Galentine’s Day instead with Pussy Liquor. Throw away societal expectations at their Self-Love Sanctuary, a riotous, grrl-power queer disco, designed to make you feel as good as hell.
Also in February, VAULT Festival will be providing half term entertainment as families are invited to meet a woman whose beauty caused a civil war with Nest. Told by jesters through song, dance and rhyme, this is a tale of Nesta Ferch Rhys, the Welsh Princess who bewitched Kings, Princes and courts. The festival’s family shows will reflect the weird and wonderful offerings found across the rest of the programme; promising duels, elephants and castles built of cheese.
During March, the festival will celebrate International Women’s Day with the true story of Annie Londonderry, hailed as the first woman ever to cycle around the world in 1895, in Ride. Alternatively audiences can explore a different kind of travel with LegalAliens, the female-led ensemble comprised entirely of artists who are migrants in the UK. Their production Closed Lands traces the history of modern walls – real and metaphorical – from Berlin to Mexico to Europe in an unique fusion of poetry, satire, reportage, multimedia and a traveller’s diary.
Also in March, enjoy a perfectly unnerving Friday 13th with Dig, a new immersive production from the award-winning Fever Dream Theatre which sees a shipping container transformed into a tunnel, as the audience experience first-hand the pressure of an enclosed space. Myth, legend and history mix underground as the pressure grows, time runs out, the ceiling creeks and the air gets thin.
When: 28th January – 22nd March 2020
Where: At venues around Waterloo, London SE1
£: Ticket prices vary, depending on the event
More info: vaultfestival.com