The last few weeks have been spent out on the road travelling in preparation for the 2012 festival.  2012, we know, is going to be an extraordinary time to be presenting work in London, when the eyes of the world are going to be on London in that pre-Olympics moment.  And it’s a fantastic opportunity for LIFT to bring over some of the finest work from around the world.

 

So I’ve been travelling a lot over the past few weeks and months, and the week before last I was in Montreal at an event called CINARS, which is a national showcase of Canadian work, and particularly work from Quebec.  It was a 5 day event, which brought together international presenters and producers from around the world to sample some of the best of Canada’s performing arts.  I went there with the intention of seeing work that may be of interest to LIFT and finding out about interesting artists who were presenting work; and also it’s always useful at these kinds of events to find the time and space to network and meet and chat and talk about ideas with other presenters and producers.

 

The nature of the event is that you tend to get short excerpts of shows, and obviously, Quebec is a French speaking region of Canada so an awful lot of the work is in French, so clearly I should have taken Emilie with me, our French speaker.  And also because Quebec has such a strong reputation for new circus, given that it’s the home of Cirque de Soleil, there was an lot of work that represented new circus and physical theatre.

 

Montreal as a city was extremely interesting and seems to have a theatre on every street corner.  Actually the real highlight for me wasn’t a Canadian piece of work but a Korean one: Sadari Movement Laboratory’s Woyzeck.  It was incredibly well crafted piece of theatre performed in Korean, English and French: performers synchronised to military precision, highly ordered contrasting perfectly to the lost and disordered life of Woyzeck.  There were a lot of performers on stage, performing text and choreography that was absolutely seamless and perfect in its timing, and the whole thing became a bit like watching a military exercise.  And in the midst of this, you could see that Woyzeck character, broken on the wheel of that order, and driven to despair.

 

So that was a really interesting piece.  It’s actually been around for a while now, and was at the Edinburgh Festival a couple of years ago, so I’m not sure it’s necessarily something we would bring to LIFT but it was very interesting to see those artists at work, and they’ll be ones to look out for in the future.