Lift team had a taste of ‘our-lives-during-a-festival’ in Brighton. Russells pics and text are quite representative of our uplifting experience.

Brief highlights: the van-trip (like a school excursion), - jackets + sunglasses, white wine at the bar on the beach, take-away fish & chips (it tastes better by the seaside), Lift people with joysticks creating their avatars in the Rimini Protokoll exciting video-game performance Best Before, (London audience can wait until the 30th of June where they will present their show until the 3rd of July at the ICA).

But the happy-van returned missing one person. Someone was left behind. It was me. The lucky me. When everybody went out of the show I was hidden in the toilets. They called to me but I said: “I think I ate too much fish & chips mates. Maybe a super-natural power wants me to stay here”.

It was a weekend in heaven repeating the exciting, although exhausting, triptych of ‘performance-ice cream-beach’. Brighton Festival and Fringe were sprawling around  the town while a food festival was held all along the beach. The city heart was beating. More than 10,000 people attended last Saturday’s parade while more than 700 performances were held in 240 venues. Parks, squares, platforms and streets were the extended theatre stages.

The only reason I stayed indoors was the new work by Hofesh Shechter, Political Mother, and Curious’ piece, The moment I saw you I knew I could love you; A worthwhile decision. The Israeli choreographer once more created a strong piece drawing from his own country’s polemical past. The show opened with a samurai soldier plunging his sword through his belly and sinking to the ground, a hardcore rock band in military costumes appeared above the stage. A frenetic, ritualistic dance followed mixing a vocabulary of freedom and servitude. Their hands were lifted to the skies while their heads were always down. The Israeli-born choreographer managed within 45 minutes to give us a dance work challenging our warfare filled history. “Where is pressure there is folk dance” was the last message written in lights on the stage. The whole room stood up and applauded with enthusiasm.

Two streets below, in the underground venue of The Basement, Curious company offered us a quite different experience full of tenderness and bitter-sweet moments. We left our bags and shoes at the foyer and we entered a specially designed room. The audience was sitting in 3 boats with video walls all around. We were told that we were within the belly of a whale. A common nostalgic essence linked all the projections and small pieces of narrations between the performers. Stories and fragments of lost loves that washed in the seashore. The small audience shared a dream by the sea and Brighton was the ideal place to be. We went out, we put on our shoes and carried our bags but a dreamy sense of buoyancy followed us in the streets.

No matter how hard it is for culture to sustain itself in a recession there will always be the driving forces that are born out of brave synergies and creative collaborations. LIFT 2010 will be the first big scale festival in London challenging our gloomy times and proving that only culture can make a city flourish.