Interviews

Mark Ball on … Taking LIFT to the next level

The
London International Festival of Theatre (LIFT) is marking its 30th
year in 2012 with an ambitious four-week programme that includes work
from the Middle East, Australia, the US and Europe.

LIFT launched this week with the UK premiere of the cult Off
Broadway hit Gatz, Elevator Repair
Service’s eight-houring staging of The Great Gatsby
at the Noel Coward Theatre. The festival
runs at venues all over the capital until 15 July.

Here
Mark Ball, artistic director of the biennial festival since 2009,
tells us what to expect from LIFT 2012….


We
were very conscious when programming LIFT 2012 that we wanted to
respond to the ambition of this once-in-a-lifetime year when the eyes
of the world are on London. We wanted to present the idea that the
world is in London and the world comes to London, and we also wanted
to reveal things about London to the world. But that relationship
between global and the local has always been a very important part of
our programming.

As
an organisation LIFT has always been absolutely passionate about the
place of theatre in revealing issues, in unpicking politics, in
shining a light onto some of the darkest corners of the world, in
telling us things that we didn’t know.

There’s
a huge strand of work here from the Middle East that represents a
response to the unleashing of creativity that’s happened since the
Arab Spring. It’s work which tells us
about what is happening in one of the most important geo-political
areas of the world. Theatre is such an extraordinary artform for
allowing us to really focus in on the similarities between human
relationships, whether in the Middle East or the UK.

There’s
also a strong body of work which is focused on revealing London, on
engaging international artists to help us see the familiar in a
completely different way. It’s work that takes us into the city, that
uncovers the city, that shows us the city in a different light,
whether that’s Motor Show, which will take place in a
desolate wasteland overlooking the Greenwich Peninsula, or You
Once Said Yes
, which takes you down the backstreets of
Camden and Chalk Farm.

There’s
also a strong focus on participation, which has always been a very
important part of LIFT’s work, particularly in providing more
marginalised communities with the opportunity to have a voice.
Unfinished Dream, the project that’s happening in
Croydon predominantly with the refugee community and produced and
directed by the brilliant Iranian director, Hamid
Pourazari
, is a fantastic example.

That
sense of real ambition extends to Gatz too. This
is the year when can take a piece of event theatre into the West End,
the first time we’ve ever done so. When I joined LIFT in 2009 I was
conscious of coming into an organisation with a history of incredibly
pioneering and important work, but that over the past 10 years our
influence had slightly waned.

We needed to be really bold and
ambitious to bring focus back onto the organisation. I think a lot of
the work we do deserves and demands big audiences. So I think the
festival that we’re seeing this year, which is big, bold and
ambitious, is a sign of more things to come.