There is something quite startling about the 2008 Lift Festival programme: it comes in two separate brochures. One details the body of work and events taking place from June 12-21 in Stratford in east London; the other details the performances taking place at the Southbank centre between June 26 and July 6. Why is that so startling? Well, it looks like two entirely separate festivals with quite distinct programmes of work and seems to be suggesting that art can't talk to everyone, that some art is for some people and some is for others, and that what matters for one community may not interest another in the slightest.
It is the opposite of the argument put forward in Lee Hall's The Pitman Painters which argues that culture is something we all share and bemoans the passing of an era when everyone - including the working class - were aspirational about high art and felt, as Hall says, "entitled to take part in the best that life has to offer in terms of life and culture".
Of course attitudes to cultural value have altered quite considerably over the last 40 years, largely because of long-overdue reassessments of class, race and gender, but I find the Lift brochures interesting because they seem to accept that the battle to "democratise the riches of culture" as Hall would put it has been lost. You could say that the evidence for that is all around us. For all the audience access schemes that have been put in place, only a tiny proportion of the population goes to the theatre, and of those people even fewer go to the National or the RSC or other bastions of high culture. A great deal of theatre shuts people out more than it welcomes them in, not just in terms of the language it uses, but also in how much it costs, where it takes place, how you should behave, what you should wear and even how you book a ticket. I'm a white middle class woman and I still find the Royal Opera House an intimidating place. Every time I walk through the door I'm always half steeled for the possibility that one of the ushers will know that I don't really belong there and kick me out.
But is the Lift approach - which is to say that if the people of Newham won't go to the art then it will take the art to them and create art that is specifically geared to that community's particular interests and concerns - creating a seismic shift and raising questions around the modes of cultural production that most of us working in the arts take for granted, or is it creating a cultural ghettoisation? I simply don't know the answer, and maybe it's not the right question anyway.
I'm persuaded by the arguments of Lift's director Angharad Wynne-Jones that the Stratford programme is entirely about context, featuring ongoing work and participation projects that have been taking place within the community over the last six months, and that the festival's mobile structure, called the Lift, provides a meeting place where a community with no vested interest in the arts can meet with artists and have a conversation about things that really matter to them. But equally I'm persuaded by the argument that one of the most important functions of art is not just to give you what you feel comfortable with and think that you need, but also what you didn't know and never dreamed existed.
