LIFT 97: RAISING STANDARDS

What better way to stop your sun-soaked brain from corpsing than a little Lift, the capital's international Festival of Theatre? This year's intercontinental imports include South American sense terrorists De La Guarda's Periodo Villa Villa, which invites you to crowd into a dark cavern. Feeling as though you're underwater, you look up to where shadowy shapes float overhead. As the music increases in tempo, flying figures chase round the walls and into the crowd. A small disclaimer warns that "some members of the audience may get wet during the performance" - whether this is through the carnivalesque effects or sheer excitement, it's a small price to pay for such muscular choreography and Latin American verve.

It is probably also worth booking a ticket now for I Was Real, the new work by Japanese shock-trooper Saburo Teshigawara. Famous for the virtuosity and velocity of his performance, Teshigawara has, in the past, proved his ninja dance credentials by walking on broken glass and burying himself in mud. His more salubrious set for this production is designed by the fragrant Issey Miyake.

Other productions dispose of sets altogether and make use of found spaces to present a kind of fluidly interactive promenade theatre. At Trinity Buoy Wharf, 50 years of Indian independence are commemorated with a celebratory procession wending through canopied walkways, where historic events blend with personal memories. At Meard Street, meanwhile, solipsistic Soho life reaches its apotheosis with live cinema, simultaneously recording and playing back the ebb and flow of fashionable humanity on to surrounding buildings. Alternatively, enjoy the Colombian theatre of Oraculos, which sucks shoeless visitors into the labyrinthine cellars of the Roundhouse in Camden. The sensual odyssey was described by Liberation newspaper as a heightening of perception "better than any drug", praise indeed from cartel country and sure to give your spirits a legal lift.

Venues around London 3-29 June. Booking: 0171-312 1995;

information: 0171-336 0508

LS