So we’re deep into preparations for this summer’s festival, and are looking forward to extending a warm London welcome to an impressive array of companies from all over the world.  It’s always exciting to present international artists in our city, though the flip side is that lists of dietary requirements, passenger manifests, shipping schedules, visa applications and backstage riders seem to be proliferating in the LIFT office at an alarming rate.  Mark commissioned Tim Etchells to write a performance lecture about our archive last year, and Tim dug his way through all manner of festival ephemera and photostat memorabilia to find precious nuggets of quirk and anecdote.  To quote his lecture:


…an archive at the same time makes clear

that The Three Sisters needed

2 hand bells

1 statue

9 rugs

2 mirrors

1 globe

2 whirlygigs

1 medical bag

1 clock

1 artificial cake

3 suitcases

1 basket of artificial flowers

and a dinner set for 13 persons
… in another typewritten document
at the bottomsomewhere at the bottom of the long long list of tech and lighting needs
it’s a shame to miss the detail of the request – itemised as ‘A Miscellaneous NEED’ - for 100 Cubic Feet of Helium per week.


This year’s programme has not yet thrown up any requirements quite so strange or poetically appealing, but one company has stipulated that as well as the expected list of very precisely specified sound and video equipment that they will need “four very beautiful grape bunches”.  With fifteen weeks to go there’s still time for gas-powered whirlygigs to be written in.


Anyway, it’s a good time to be reminded that all the paperwork and props-sourcing is worthwhile, with the visit of a company who were a real highlight of the 2008 festival.  Capetown’s Magnet Theatre are at Oval House this month with their show Every Year Every Day I Am Walking.  It’s beautiful, funny, moving and made by lovely people.  Faniswa, Jennie, Neo, Mark, Riana and Daniel, it’s great to have you back in London and we all wish you good luck with the run.  The rest of you should go and see it: you’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll find yourself humming the tunes for weeks!