Guest Blog: Artistic Director Kris Nelson On LIFT 2020

'Continuity and rupture': this phrase has been rolling around my head ever since I became LIFT's Artistic Director and CEO just under two years ago. In our business, when you're a leader new in post, people are always keen to know what you're going to do next and where the change is coming from. Rupture and transformation feels sexy - at first glance.

LIFT has been offering Londoners singular and pioneering international theatre experiences for nearly 40 years - introducing some of the world's greatest artists to London audiences, merging international presentation with community-based practise, forging new partnerships, and presenting extraordinary and ground-breaking events across the city. Directing LIFT means being in charge of a cultural entity that has been transformational for countless artists, audiences and cultural workers.

As one LIFT audience member put it to me during our last edition, "I love LIFT because you do the things no one else in London would dare do". It's the other thing that's been on my mind. Through and through, LIFT has been audacious, daring, engaged in the politics of the day, and kept one eye on the pioneering artists and trends around the world and the other on what's surging to the foreground at home in London. Rather than tear down the work which has gone before and start again, I want to build upon it.

So that makes continuity the name of the game, right? Yes, but not absolutely.

As the 2020s begin, the world is in tremendous flux, and that means the entire terrain for how an international arts festival should operate shifts with it. Broadly, we are continuing the essentials of LIFT's DNA, and in focussed, strategic ways, rupturing the usual way of doing things and making the international deeply connected to our city.

That mix of a powerful legacy and the urgency of the present moment of now and the future makes it really clear how to set the artistic agenda for LIFT 2020.

We're continuing our focus on topical work. From Sonia Hughes' civic interruption I Am From Reykjavik testing London's hospitality and inviting conversations about race and belonging to Tina Satter's riveting docudrama Is This A Room staging the uneasy interrogation of whistleblower and American patriot Reality Winner, conversations will spark. Is this who we are? Is this what it costs when we stand up?

The programme redoubles our commitment to International Artists, presenting not just the best of the West or the Anglosphere. With The Feminine and The Foreign, the Nest Collective investigate what it means when we fight the status quo. Creating evocative documentaries about Black activists in Cape Town and London, they turn their cameras outside of Nairobi for the first time.

The Argonauts features disabled artists from Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia and Ukraine (artists from at least two countries represented at LIFT for the first time). What binds them are interpersonal histories, myths and legends that cross across the Caucasus region and bring audiences perspectives we rarely experience on stage.

Formally, LIFT maintains our ardent love for artists who break conventions with form. You'll find it in the Nest (it's promising to be a film screening, conversation and happening all at once) and you'll see it in leading artist Phia Ménard's Immoral Tales: The Mother House - a piece that is at once a performance and living work of visual art. Nat Randall and Anna Breckon's The Second Woman is formally pioneering - cinematic theatre with an invitation to audiences unlike any other; over 24 hours, audiences will watch as Ruth Wilson performs the same scene with 100 local men.

Those focussed ruptures come in the form of exchange, particularly in our commissions, setting up collaborations between leading International Artists and Londoners. Sonia Hughes will do this in the City of London and Royal Docks, while in Tottenham SESSION, Inua Ellams and Imwen Eke and the UpLIFTers reveal multiple ways of encountering a borough through the experiences of young people.

Exchange can happen through collaboration, but also through revelry. Which is why we're throwing a house party in a mansion in Deptford with a line-up of live art and music curated by Malik Nashad Sharpe and hosted by Travis Alabanza. Too often, London doesn't offer places to really meet our fellow arts lovers. At The Night Shift, we'll see you on the dance floor.

Breaking from tradition, we're embarking under a theme this year. 'Fact and Fantasy' opens the door for audiences to be playful with their relationship with the truth and how they want to use fiction and beautiful lies to imagine the possibilities for now and for the future.

We'll be thrilled to welcome you at LIFT this June and July. We want to greet you with a festival rich in ideas, in unusual experiences, all led by artists whose visions bring us together, reckon with the present and imagine the future.

LIFT 2020 runs from 3 June-11 July, and tickets are on sale now

Photo credit: Giorgi Demetrashvili

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