Shows on the Rise at VAULT Festival: Sparks by Jessica Butcher

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 have a closer look at Sparks by Jessica Butcher, about how to cope with love and life after losing your mother to Multiple Sclerosis.

“I feel his closeness,
of him and me,
me and him,
together we can do life,
just everyday life,
banish it’s boringness and reinvent it as the pure unadulterated joy of living and just being
together.”

That’s one of my favourite bits of the book. It’s a chick lit, fantasy, thriller, well psychological thriller, I suppose. It’s about falling in love with a man, I wish it wasn’t, because I am feminist. But, you know, we have been told to write what’s in us, haven’t we? Everyone’s got a story in them, that’s what they say! So yeah, fuck, here I am!

Sparks was inspired by the Elena Ferrante Neapolitan novels. Specifically the character, Lila, whom our girl or woman is named after. She’s a lonely writer, trying to love and come to terms with a complex past. She’s a romantic, in the worst possible sense, and is trying to fill a big, old, empty void. She tries all the possibilities, including a man, a jar of mango chutney and a trip to Laser Quest. Lila lives through her book, romantic stories from the past, through the music in her head, with her Mum’s voice, anything to avoid the loss that runs through her.

Jessica Butcher’s Sparks fuses live music and storytelling, and is written in collaboration with singer songwriter Anouska Lucas and developed with director Jessica Edwards. Edwards specialises in new and formally inventive work, female-let narratives and subversive stories. Lila will tell her story at the VAULT Festival 21st Feb – 25th Feb, she’s got a lot of questions and, maybe, one answer. Come and meet her.

Sparks is running at the VAULT Festival from the 21st-25th of Feb at 19:45. Tickets and more information can be found here.