LIFT, the leading London biennial festival of international theatre, has today announced the programme for LIFT 2022 – the first full festival to be presented by Artistic Director and CEO Kris Nelson and Executive Director Stella Kanu following the cancellation of LIFT 2020 due to the pandemic. The 2022 festival will form the culmination of a year of celebrations marking LIFT’s 40th anniversary.

LIFT 2022: Unexpected Perspectives will feature seven premieres that challenge the way we see and understand the world around us, allowing audiences to experience joyful, daring and risk-taking performance in unusual ways as artists from around the world use London as their stage. It will explore how the current global tensions including international conflict, ecological disaster and political turmoil impacts us all on a personal level.

Through a line-up of topical, compelling and ground-breaking new work, the festival will explore personal circumstances, tensions on a global and intimate scale, and voices and issues hidden by the on-going pandemic. Bringing together a myriad of defiant voices from London to Nairobi and Milan to Helsinki, LIFT 2022 will see global experiences as intimate, exhilarating and powerful encounters in unexpected places. A festival rich in ideas, and a line up designed to challenge and surprise, LIFT 2022 invites audiences to see the world in a different way.

The first LIFT edition post-Brexit and post-pandemic offers audiences access to international theatre throughout the city from Islington to Ilford and Deptford to Wood Green. All LIFT 2022 shows have an allocation of £5 tickets available or are pay-what-you-can.

Programme highlights include:

• An interactive audio ghost hunt through London shopping centres will see audiences uncover stories hidden in plain sight, in the world premiere of ZU-UK’s Radio Ghost.

• A languid afternoon at the beach transforms into an urgent warning of the threat from climate change in the UK premiere of Rugilė Barzdžiukaitė, Lina Lapelytė and Vaiva Grainytė’s award-winnning opera Sun & Sea, staged on an indoor beach in Deptford.

• Kenyan multidisciplinary artists the Nest Collective combine cinema, visual art and electronic music to form a collection of intimate documentary portraits celebrating Black activists in the world premiere of The Feminine and the Foreign.

• Moving from theatre to fireside audiences are immersed in eight artists’ reflections on the powerful connections between geopolitics, the body and conflict, in the UK premiere of Giorgia Ohanesian Nardin’s Գիշեր – gisher.

• Art meets life in a forest of real and fake wood as artists and lovers Rosana Cade and Ivor MacAskill create and recreate Pinocchio in the UK stage premiere of The Making of Pinocchio, where their autobiographical experience of gender transition meets the magical story of a little puppet who wants to be a ‘real boy’.

LIFT 2022 will take place in various locations across London from 23 June to 10 July.

Full details and ticket information can be found here.