"THE whole city is just transformed and that is something only festivals can do," says Laurie Anderson, guest director of Brighton Festival.

She goes on; "you can suddenly shift attention away from work life and turn the whole place into a haven of music and arts" and she enthuses "it really has a kind of celebratory, crazy, art party feel to it".

Every May for the past half a century the Brighton Festival has taken over the city with a spectrum of the arts ranging from string quartets and orchestras to the most cutting edge performance art and innovative site specific installation.

This year the festival is celebrating its 50th anniversary, an unbroken arts thread back to the very first Brighton International Festival of the Arts which was presided over by impresario Ian Hunter who created the event as a prestigious hub for the highbrow.

But while that very first festival was rooted in classical music, theatre and was accused of elitism, the Brighton Festival as it stands today is one of the city calendar's most beloved events encompassing every aspect of arts culture.

As the festival celebrates gold anniversary this year is also dedicated to honouring the city itself with the central theme of home and place, something Anderson herself finds intensely compelling.

"When I was Brighton there was this feeling of a busy place which was windy and bright," she says. "It gives a certain briskness to your ideas and the concept of place colours them so I was really glad to hear that was the central theme.

"It is really easy, especially when you are in the no-place of technology or in some kind of hyper zone, to forget you are in the real world of a place and the sensuality of that is really important."

With events like arts installation Dr Blighty and fusion of music and film Symphony of a City dedicated to celebrate the city and its history, the festival will be exploring the concept of Brighton and Hove as a place.

For Anderson, her two stand out memories of her time in Brighton are sitting on the beach writing about music, listening to the musicality of the pebbles and the sea, and debating opera with someone in her hotel, recalling the bright light and the salt air.

The New York-based performance artist will be involved with five shows at the festival, the UK premiere of her Music for Dogs, a screening of her intimate feature film Heart of a Dog, a new monologue named Slideshow, her second production of Song Conversation, and a tribute to her late husband Lou Reed in the Drones installation.

But as well as celebrating Brighton and Hove as a place, the festival will also be celebrating its people, aiming to have its biggest year ever for engaging communities across the city in the arts.

"It is of the things we really wanted to concentrate on and galvanise people around," says Andrew Comben, chief executive of the festival. "I hope we can really encourage people on the fringes of the city and people who do not regularly engage with the festival.

"We want to show it is not all about 'high brow stuff that is not for them', there is a huge amount of stuff which great fun, free an accessible, and which might introduce them to a huge amount of other stuff they might not otherwise experience.

"The fact we are performing on two days with free work in Portslade and Whitehawk means we are giving everyone the opportunity to sample what we have to offer and celebrate this thing has been going for 50 years and putting Brighton on the international stage."