Roundup: Vault Festival 2016

The ongoing problem with my annual fringe fix is that after Edinburgh, there’s an eight-month wait before the next one at Brighton. So, partly in an attempt to curb my fringe withdrawal jitters, and partly because Virgin Trains East Coast sell stupidly cheap leisure tickets at this time of year, I thought I’d give the Vault Festival a try. This is an arts festival that takes place in the arches underneath Waterloo station, and in case you ever forget that, you’ll be reminded by the noise of a train passing over your head.

So with ten events attended in four days, that fix should keep me going until Brighton, where I’ll be jittery for completely different reasons. But how does it do as a festival. Here is my first ever round up of the Vault festival. I’ve already written about a Devoted and Disgruntled session that happened to be on whilst I was there, but for the plays themselves, read on …

Are we in danger of a “can’t-do” attitude for disabled artists?

This is a post I am syndicating to both my theatre blog and the web page of Devoted and Disgruntled. For theatre blog regulars who don’t know what this is, Devoted and Disgruntled is a series of theatre networking events which broadly works as a free-for-all discussion forum where anyone can lead a discussion and anyone can go to any discussion they like. They do occasional forums across the country on an open theme, but there’s lots of these in London on specific themes. Last week there was one on artists with autism and learning disabilities at the Vault Festival. I was coincidentally in London for the Vault Festival that week, and I have an interest in this. Those of you who know me will already know why I have an interest. Those who don’t … well, you will know shortly.

It was an interesting afternoon, and the main lesson learned was how complicated this issue is. So many issues were interlinked to other issues about theatre in general. There’s plenty of other topics on the D&D site that’ll interesting reading; for now, I can say that the most surprising observation was that – even though the attendees were all supportive of inclusivity in theatre – there was little support for quotas. Anyway, enough of that. I need to got on with my particular topic, which was to ask if there’s a danger of creating a “can’t do” attitude. Confused? Let me explain.

Lumiere London roundup

Above: Lumiere. Below: crowds

Skip to review of Dinosaur Park

Before I develop too much of a backlog again, let’s do a roundup of Lumiere’s first ever festival in London. This is going to be a relatively quick roundup as it’s already been written about extensively in the London papers, and where I’ve written my thoughts about something in my Durham coverage, I generally won’t be repeating it here. But I do have a few new thoughts this venture to the capital.

Without further ado, let’s go: