Shows on the Rise at VAULT Festival 2018: Becoming Shades by Chivaree Circus and Upstage Creative

The VAULT Festival is coming to town! From January 24th to March 18th, over three hundred new shows explode across a festival of festivals in their Waterloo home. With new venues, new bars, new food and plenty of surprises, VAULT 2018 is the biggest, fairest platform in London for artists to present innovative, daring work. Here we’re having a peek at their headline circus act, Becoming Shades by Chivaree Circus and Upstage Creative, and where the inspiration for the piece came from.

“One by one they were all becoming shades. Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age.”  James Joyce – The Dead

With Becoming Shades we want to take audience members to a darker world, to throw them right in the middle of the action, to show them something that is poetic and dangerous and to take them through a whirlwind of fragments colliding into one another. The show is about the story of Persephone going into the Underworld and meeting Hades. It’s a love story but also a story about choice and empowerment and we want to make sure
audience members are right in the middle of it. We want them to witness the circus up close, to sense like they too are embarked on a journey upon the river Styx – exploring the Underworld and meeting the creatures who live there. We want them to feel the passion running through the characters and to be swept away, deep underneath reality, for the length of the show. It’s about creating cinematic experiences you can almost touch, and universes you can dream in.

We are very excited to be presenting this show at the VAULT Festival this year. It’s a great platform: so many companies working alongside each other, seeing audiences arriving and wondering which show they’re going to. 2018 is the 250th anniversary of the invention of modern circus and the 100th anniversary of women conditionally getting the right to vote so we are celebrating by having a fully female circus cast for the show and telling a story
of female empowerment.

Becoming Shades is running from the 24th Jan – 18th of March at the VAULT Theatre in Waterloo. Tickets and more information can be found here.