Vault Festival Announces Additional Line-Up and Festival For Kids

VAULT Festival today announces a programme of exciting events alongside its return to the Leake Street tunnels. The six-week cultural festival in the labyrinthine tunnel network in Waterloo, opens on 28th January 2015 for six frenetic weeks. As well as over 70 shows, live music and late night parties, for the first time ever VAULT will present Mini VAULT, a magical world for under 11s. Mini VAULT will comprise of three festival weekends of spectacular underground shows, events and free activities for families. VAULT 2015 also presents its biggest ever programme of events and activities for adults. With more announcements to come, events will include curated performance installations, a street art tunnel take-over, wall-running classes, essential political debate and panel discussion, masterclasses, workshops, IdeasTap Spas, a permanent gallery space and a partnership with homeless charity The Passage.

Mini VAULT will take place over the weekends of 7/8, 21/22 February and 7/8 March with a programme of free and ticketed family events from 10am. The programme, designed to encourage audiences to play, dance, make and run wild in the secret tunnels includes circus, theatre, music, comedy, crafts and a family friendly rave. The tunnels will be taken over by interactive installations, dancing lights, craft activities and live music for the duration. Highlights of the programme include: Big Fish Little Fish's family raving crew's takeover 'Magic Under London', a folkloric, multi-sensory extravaganza where world class DJs provide the music for a dancefloor filled with glowsticks, bubbles, balloons and glitter cannons, topped off with the grand finale of the legendary parachute dance; cutting-edge Pirates of the Carabina's free circus showcase of FLOWN excerpts; internationally acclaimed comedians with Comedy Club 4 Kids; Edinburgh success Greenlight Theatre's interactive Albee Vector the Sound Collector in which the audience must make all sorts of noises and collect them into jars to help Albee and his sound-hoover; Classical Mayhem'sDecomposed! My Brother's Turning into a Zombie, taking families on a journey through classical music and Figs in Wigs' Show Off, a glitzy variety show bonanza.

As well as VAULT's family programme, this year the festival presents a series of activities and events to stretch the mind and body. With a full programme still to be announced highlights include: Femme Fierce: Reloaded, a Tunnel Takeover on International Woman's Day - the UK's largest all female street art and graffiti festival, Femme Fierce will see over 150 street artists spray paint and stencil Leake Street tunnel; Generative Constraints' Anti-Body a divisive performance art investigation into the multiplicity of bodies; free IdeasTap Spas every Saturday on everything from playwriting to practical classes for actors; VAULT Panels: Join the debate - a selection of industry experts and policy makers on everything from the social responsibility of the arts to programming an arts festival and gender equality in theatre; and workshops from an exciting selection of visiting companies, including Artful Badger on running up walls and Scaffold State on how to modernise ancient texts in 30 minutes.

Brand new for 2015, there will be a free Gallery at VAULT Festival showcasing a combination of permanent and guest wall art and photography, as well as curated live art performance installations. The live art programme will includeCreation Box London's MASH UP and the Feminist Women's Institute's Everyday Nakedness: Accounting, in which they will do their tax returns... naked, in an exploration of non-sexual nudity. In the last two weeks of the festival photographer Katherine Leedale, who works primarily for arts organisations throughout London, will curate a highlight exhibition, 'Photograph Your Neighbourhood' in partnership with homelessness charity, The Passage. She will introduce clients to street photography before asking them to take her on a tour of their local neighbourhoods. The attendees will shoot pictures along the way which will form the exhibition. The work is a highlight of VAULT's charity partnership with The Passage whose mission is to provide resources which encourage, inspire and challenge homeless people to transform their lives. The Gallery will host a number of exciting workshops and special events over the 6 weeks.

With more than 30,000 tickets available for the festival, more than 500 individual events and over 80 artistic groups, the line-up comprises of some of the most exciting emerging artists and companies in a programme of music, performance, dance, comedy, discussions, debates and one-off late night events, all taking place in a secret maze of underground tunnels behind a single door. Alongside ticketed performances, anyone can join VAULT underground at the Festival Bar, open to the public every night for drinks, dancing, discovery and perhaps a little more.

Full programme listing available at www.vaultfestival.com
Full listings for all events mentioned below
Follow the festival on Twitter @vaultfestival #vault2015
Big Fish Little Fish presents
MINI VAULT: BIG FISH LITTLE FISH'S MAGIC UNDER LONDON
Ages: 11 and under

Big Fish Little Fish family raving crew takes over Mini VAULT on the 8th March for a Magic Under London rave. An enchanting, folkloric, multi-sensory extravaganza where world class DJs provide the music for a dancefloor filled with glowsticks, bubbles, balloons and glitter cannons, all topped off with the grand finale of the legendary parachute dance.

The Happy Monkey craft area run by Captain Cookie will engage and inspire children of all ages, helping them use different skills to create and collaborate on art activities. Cariad Interactives (Hellicar&Lewis) will provide interactive light projections designed to appeal to kids with ASD but which delight and entrance everyone. Siobhan Firefly will lead a merry band of wandering performers that will sparkle, spin and shimmy their way through the crowd.

As well as dancing, everyone can relax in the play and chill out areas with tents and tunnels and a safe area with small ball pool, mats and sofas. With surprise guest artists, a licensed bar and great food it is set to be an anarchic, creative, daft, dance-your-socks off event for all the family.

Pirates of the Carabina presents
MINI VAULT: PIRATES OF THE CARABINA'S FLOWN
Ages: 11 and under

Pirates of the Carabina, a cutting-edge company of innovative British and international circus artists will welcomeMINI VAULT audiences to the world of the unexpected with excerpts from their smash hit show FLOWN on 7 and 8 February for free. Their highly technical, irreverent and silly show brings together extraordinary physical feats combined with live and original music. Originally commissioned by Glastonbury Festival, the show arrives following a full on summer tour which has included performances at the Southbank and Edinburgh Festival.

Life is tough for this touring troupe of incredible acrobats, aerialists, musicians & stuntmen....disagreements, fear & exhaustion all threaten to sabotage the spectacle and catastrophe is always just one wrong move away!

MINI VAULT: COMEDY CLUB 4 KIDS
Ages: 6+

Comedy Club 4 Kids will bring some of best stand-ups and sketch acts from the international circuit to MINI VAULT to do their thing for an audience of children and their families, without the rude bits! Established in 2005, Comedy Club 4 Kid has expanded from one London residency to being countrywide, running shows and workshops all over the UK.

Acts confirmed so far include Luke Toulson, Abigoliah Schamaun, Bec Hill on 7 February, Howard Read and Rich Sandling on 21 February and Tom Allen on 7 March, will the full line up still to be announced.

Greenlight Theatre presents
MINI VAULT: ALBEE VECTOR THE SOUND COLLECTOR
Written by Sam Woolf & Sadie Spencer
Directed by Sadie Spencer
Ages: 3+

On 8 February and 7 March Greenlight Theatre will present Albee Vector the Sound Collector, an interactive children's show in which the audience must make all sorts of noises and collect them into jars to help Albee tell his thrilling tale of love, adventure and a sound-hoover called Mustard.

Albee and his love Andromeda will survive kings, curses and cruelty on their quest to find the most beautiful sound in the world; encountering a witch, a giant and a dangerously awful choir on their way. Playing a host of characters the performers will need the audience to create and capture sounds into magical colour-changing jars to tell their epic tale. They'll need squeaks and pops, fizzes and crackles, zips, squarks and even the occasional fart noise.

Classical Mayhem & The Pleasance Theatre Trust present
MINI VAULT: DECOMPOSED! MY BROTHER'S TURNING INTO A ZOMBIE
Written by Roly Taylor and Tim Armstrong-Taylor
Directed by Chris Larner
Ages: 6+

Classical Mayhem, in collaboration with The Pleasance Theatre Trust bring their brilliantly moving Decomposed! My Brother's Turning into a Zombie to MINI VAULT on 21 and 22 February. Featuring a soundtrack by the world-class London Symphony Orchestra, the show will take families on a journey through classical music, with the odd operatic outburst!

Fate has deemed fit to reunite dysfunctional identical twins: Will, a failing orchestral conductor and total control freak, and Igor his smelly game-obsessed doppelganger. In close proximity after ten years, the dangerous combination of their opposing personalities is an emotionally charged time-bomb. Can Will overcome his own broken personality and turn his life around to save his only brother from turning into a total gaming Zombie? Probably not. But he'll have a good go.

Figs in Wigs present
MINI VAULT: SHOW OFF
Ages: 8+

Figs in Wigs, the industry's lowbrow answer to avant-garde present Show Off, a glitzy variety show bonanza for children and adults alike on 22 February. Show Off delves into our digital existence with a troupe of five women re-introducing themselves throughout the show under various guises, from a dance troupe, to stand-up comedians, musicians and circus performers.

Figs in Wigs are an all-female performance company who make work that is a mix of theatre, dance and comedy. They use puns, fake fruit, and pop culture references to create shows that are surreal, absurdly comic and aware of their own theatricality. Figs in Wigs have been making work since 2010 and have developed a reputation as an exciting and innovative young company. They have performed at established UK venues including The Roundhouse, The BFI, Royal Vauxhall Tavern, The Basement Brighton, and The New Wolsey Ipswich.

MINI VAULT: WORKSHOPS AND MORE

Alongside grown up VAULT and running over three weekends (7/8, 21/22 February and 7/8 March) Mini VAULT will include a programme of exciting interactive workshops and free programmed events, allowing children to be creative whilst learning new and exciting skills. The workshops included range from hula hooping to percussion to synthworkshops. Storytelling Corner will host an event every hour whilst a Mardi Gras parade will take place through the tunnels. For those just keen to relax there will be soft play areas.

Femme Fierce present
VAULT: FEMME FIERCE RELOADED

Between 6-8 March for International Women's Day over 150 female street artists will spray paint and stencil large-scale murals at Leake Street tunnel in a Tunnel Takeover, the second instalment of the UK's largest curated all female street art and graffiti festival. Femme Fierce: Reloaded is the UK's largest all female Street art and graffiti festival, dedicated to unearthing the best of the burgeoning female street artists in the world. The programme of events will also feature a wide range of talk and interactive workshops such as learning how to use spray-paint to create art, marketing for budding street artists, spray painting using stencils and how to create characters.

Generative Constraints present
VAULT: ANTI-BODY

Generative Constraints is an interdisciplinary collective that seeks to interrogate the politics, poetics, and performativity of limitation and productivity. They met and began working together whist practice-based researchers. In their new work Anti-Body they investigate our understanding of site, examining relationships between critical and creative practice and the multiplicity of bodies. In Anti-Body they will provide each other with instructions, source materials and methodologies and a limited time period to complete a task. They will produce textual and digital scores which they will then exchange and perform, involving disembodied writing, voice drawing, Tantric rituals, time-specificity, and mountweazels.

Creation Box London in collaboration with Make Space Studios present
VAULT: BOX COLLECTIVE: MASH UP

Creation Box London in collaboration with Make Space Studios present Mash Up, an immersive mixture of art, dance, fashion, photography and film all in a live performance art installation. In the Gallery space, under the title UMBRA, five creators will respond to different artists in residency at Make Space Studio. During their time at VAULT they will encourage artists and choreographers to create, collaborate and get messy with their ideas, welcoming interactions from new artists and taking them out of their comfort zone and developing new ways of working.

Creation Box London is usually situated at Make Space Studios, they welcome artists into their studio to create outside of their living environments.

IdeasTap present
VAULT: IDEASTAP SPA

IdeasTap will deliver a series of free IdeasTap Spa events every Saturday at VAULT Festival. Sessions will cover everything from beginners' playwriting and drawing workshops to industry expert panels and practical classes for actors.

IdeasTap is an arts charity that helps creative people get to where they want to be through working with leading arts organisations to create industry opportunities for members as well as providing access to funding, competitions, jobs, training and advice.
VAULT PANELS: JOIN THE DEBATE

Join the Debate is a programme of thought-provoking panel discussions, forums and debates, opening up vital conversations about the Arts and society at large, featuring some of the industry's most authoritative voices and figures.

31 JAN: Magic or Mayhem: What makes an Arts Festival Cutting Edge? will be chaired by Iain Gillie, Chair of the Board of Out of Joint and Ex-Executive Producer of Leicester Curve, and includes a panel made up of UK Arts Festival leaders who will discuss the place of theatre, music and arts festivals in the national psyche
8 FEB: The Big Arts Debate! Cultural policy and the future for UK theatre and the arts sees a panel made up of prominent arts and cultural leaders, policy makers and practitioners debate the current climate and ask 'what's next?' for UK theatre, culture and the arts ahead of the 2015 General Election. Chaired by Peter Wilson MBE, Chief Executive of Norwich Theatre Royal and Chair of HighTide Festival Theatre and Propeller Theatre Company.
28 FEB: Elephant in the room: What is the social responsibility of The Arts? Authoritative voices from theatre companies and charitable organisations working with vulnerable, disadvantaged and minority groups in UK society will discuss social responsibility, community outreach and how societal issues can be successfully addressed and real change affected through The Arts.
A panel of 10 female forces in a range of non-performer creative roles across UK theatre will address and discuss gender equality, challenges and rewards in The Female Force Forum: The Future for Women in Theatre (7 MAR). Asking 'what's next?' for women in The Arts, this debate will take place over the weekend of International Women's Day.
VAULT: WORKSHOPS

This year an exciting selection of visiting companies will be running workshops alongside their productions. These include a workshop on Wall-Running from magical multidisciplinary and interactive artists Artful Badger and anImprov and Devising for Performance Workshop by innovative theatre company Needless Alley Collective which willfocus on the creative process in making movement-based performance and dance. King of the Fuckin' Castle Director Joshua McTaggart will run LAB Theatre's workshop Being in the Same World, introducing participants to the Viewpoints technique and how directors, actors, and theatre-makers can use the technique to hone their craft and strengthen their performance and work. Supported by the cast of Sanguine, Scaffold State will run the workshopAncient to Modern in 30, exploring ways to adapt a piece of ancient drama into a modern context in half an hour. Yve Blake returns to headline VAULT with the musical, costumed celebration of confessions that is Lie Collector, a show inspired by over 1000 stories from strangers in 154 different cities sent in to her interactive website, Little Write Liespresent a workshop to create nine new short plays around Yve's production.

VAULT: GALLERY

Brand new for 2015, the Gallery at VAULT Festival, curated by Emma Rock, will showcase a combination of permanent and guest wall art and photography exhibits to be browsed by festival-goers, as well as curated live art performance installations.

There will be two permanent exhibitions in the gallery space, these include Transformation by Joe Wray - a permanent wall exhibition where a few hundredths of a second are smeared together and reproduced on grainy black and white film, and then transformed again in a totally surprising way. The other exhibition will be Anna by Katherine Leedale, a display of photographic portraits of Anna Masing.

There will also be a programme of live art in the gallery. With more artists to be announced, the programme will include Creation Box London: MASH UP and the Feminist Women's Institute's Everyday Nakedness: Accounting in which they will do their tax returns... naked, in an exploration of non-sexual nudity.

In the last two weeks of the festival Katherine Leedale will return to curate a highlight exhibition, 'Photograph Your Neighbourhood' a central activity in the Festival's partnership with homelessness charity, The Passage. The exhibition will aim to raise awareness of their work to combat homelessness in London. Leedale will introduce clients to street photography, composition, colour and camera us in a workshop session before asking them to take her on a tour of their local neighbourhood whilst the attendees shoot pictures along the way. Leedale will then select with them the best of the images and curate them into the exhibitor.

The Gallery will also host a number of exciting workshops and special events over the 6 weeks.

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