VAULT

In loving Memory of Karim Rome.

Vault is funded by Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts Founded in 1956, the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts fosters the development and exchange of diverse and challenging ideas about architecture and its role in the arts, culture, and society.

Vault is a 4 hour durational dance piece made in collaboration between Hartford, New Haven and Philadelphia-based artists Marisa Williamson, Nicholas Serrambana, Arien Wilkerson, and Kevin Hernández Rosa. Together, under the auspices of Herb Virgo founder and director of the Keney Park Sustainability Project, Vault is an interdisciplinary and collaborative space-making project that transforms John C. Clark Elementary, a shuttered public school in the North End of Hartford, into an outdoor exhibition space through dance, performance, and monumental public art. Vault erects a new performance space out of the ruins of another. The performance space is a hybrid space that is neither a place of transit, nor one of gatherings. It takes audiences through the literal landscape of abandoned and poisonous elementary schools in New England cities and across the U.S. that will feel familiar to some, and foreign to others. Vault is interpellation through dance. In Vault, performance is metaphorically an alchemical tool for the transmutation of a space from one of loss into one of recreation and re-creative. Vault convenes voices and stories from parents, community members, and students affected by the contaminated school, creating a soundtrack to move by. Vault is a generative and an open structure that valorizes a collective incompleteness. Vault proposes a space for dance as a reparative act.

The primary audience for Vault is the North End community. For the young people who will one day become Hartford’s leading movement artists, the altered exterior of John C. Clark Elementary will be a new rehearsal space, a playground for future performances, a free, public, and open air testing ground, workshop, and classroom. Vault is a monument for them. Secondly, Vault will engage audiences of all ages and backgrounds. It will draw art world patrons who want to see a site-specific, one-of-a-kind work by a team of important and emerging artists with roots in the region. It aims to deepen the understanding of some, and meet others where they are. The project intends to reach regional influencers and decision-makers; politicians, curators, organizers, and educators who might be convinced to take action around this particular school site and others, based on their experience of Vault. Vault is a radical new program development that, for its own sake, stimulates the release of toxic stress for the artists and community members. Vault proposes a new standard for wellness--one in which the arts awaken and shed light on movements and memories on a shadowy urban site.

Vault is slated for a September 2022 presentation in Hartford Connecticut.