[6] Sue Arnold, a regular columnist at The Observer, impressed by the hard work of Fenton and Neal, wrote: "if the Festival is not a phenomenal success I shall eat an entire millinery collection without demur".
[6] LIFT premiered Ariel Dorfman's Death and the Maiden, experimented with the form of theatre with pieces such as the labyrinth show Oraculos and commissions such as Deborah Warner's St Pancras Project, Bobby Baker's Grown-Up School and Theatre-Rites' House.
This saw LIFT break away from the structure of a biennial festival and program international and national artists as part of smaller seasons of work alongside workshops, talks, residencies and projects.
One of these is SESSION, a Tottenham original production involving young dancers, live afrobeats music, designers and musicians which will take place in Bernie Grant Arts Centre.
American playwright and actress Anna Deavere Smith returned to the Royal Court Theatre for her first London appearance in 25 years with Notes From The Field, her Obie-award-winning play which tells the story of the students, parents, teachers and staff caught up in America's school-to-prison pipeline.
Also, with seven UK premieres and five shows new to London, LIFT 2010 included new work from Dutch theatre-maker Dries Verhoeven, who linked audiences at the National Theatre live to performers in Sri Lanka, Israel's Nalaga'at Theatre, the world's only professional company of deaf blind performers, a weekend of social game playing on an international theme from Hide&Seek, and a new symphony for ice cream vans by the composer and theatre-maker Dan Jones.
Luke Jerram's Sky Orchestra sent seven hot air balloons that took off at dawn and flew over London with a melody specially created by composer Dan Jones.
The festival went to the West End for the first time in its history with Elevator Repair Service's Gatz, that "beautifully captures the elegiac tone of the book with its sense of the dissolving, essentially agrarian American Dream".
The main activity during those months was to focus on giving support to small or medium size companies which LIFT had worked with before like the Belarus Free Theatre that presented its new project Trash Cuisine.
Whether it's thinking about the history of censorship in the Soviet Union, the impact of global warming or the distribution of water, the work is eye-opening, witty and entertaining, with dollops of music, visual culture and animated debate thrown into the mix.
The programme included The Roof a three-dimensional free-running performance and A Journey on Foot at Dusk which invited audiences to participate in a Haitian-inspired funeral procession.
One of these was Depart, a Circa production involving circus artists, choral singers, designers and musicians and took place in Tower Hamlets cemetery park.