VAULT Festival Postpones Until 2022
Announcement 29th July, 2020
To all our supporters, participants, collaborators and friends:
We have made the difficult but necessary decision to postpone the next full, live version of VAULT Festival until 2022. In consideration of the significant financial and safety risks brought about by COVID-19 and that each festival takes ten months to create, we believe this decision is in the best interests of our artists, staff, and collaborators.
VAULT Festival is a celebration of the most exciting and boldest independent and grassroots artists of our time, from all backgrounds, across all live performance styles. We don’t want to ask our artists to begin expending time, money, and energy in creating new shows when the risks remain so unpredictable in an already precarious industry.
We’re a non-funded, independent organisation – 100% of our income comes from ticket sales, food & drink, and fundraising. We don’t have the margins to be able to ride out a less-than-great festival, to implement social distancing, or to protect our artists from exposure to the increased financial and safety risks.
Whilst we have to close the door on a full, live festival for 2021, we are dynamically generating other opportunities to fill the temporary gap the festival will leave. We’re exploring ways we can provide live and digital performance and development opportunities for our artists, staff, and audiences throughout 2021, and will announce our plans in due course. We’ll also be making big plans for our 10th Anniversary VAULT Festival in 2022.
Remaining positive, this is an opportunity to restructure and reorganise to better serve everyone involved; it’s a chance to re-engage with our purpose and interrogate our place in the industry.
The prospect of not doing the festival as we know it in 2021 is daunting. Our commitment is to continue working to provide an accessible platform that best serves our artists, audiences, and staff. We want to make our community, industry, and world more accessible, more inclusive, and more sustainable.
We’re grateful to the wonderful artists, audiences, our team, and the collaborators who’ve made the Festival what it is so far – thank you for your continuing support. Our mission is now more important than ever.
We’ll be back, better, soon.
Mat & Andy
On behalf of the VAULT Festival Team
What You Can Do To Help
Keep Supporting Our Artists
There were over 600 artists & companies involved in VAULT Festival 2020, 97 of whom were scheduled to be in the “lost” week and missed their chance to perform. Please find them on Twitter, Instagram, or wherever else to stay up to date with their announcements so you can go and support them as and when their shows are back on their feet.
Buy A VAULT Festival 2020 Souvenir
Every year, we launch a collection of playtexts curated from the Festival and published by Nick Hern Books called Plays From VAULT. You can still buy one, and we’ll post it out to you as soon as we can. We’ve also got beanies, water bottles, and notebook collections.
Visit The Shop
Donations To VAULT Festival
The Festival’s future is in a difficult financial position. We’ve existed since 2012 to provide new opportunities for artists and theatre industry workers thanks to the support of our audiences. By making a donation to VAULT Festival, you can help keep us going and support our work in emerging artist development, such as the New Writers Programme, the Emerging Critics Programme and the CULTIVATE Bursary, alongside our “usual” work of supporting 600 emerging and grassroots artists every year.
You can make a donation directly to us right now using the buttons below. All donations – however large or small – will help. Read more about the Festival’s mission and ethos here.
