Culture to your couch: arts you can experience at home

March 18, 2020

Given the significant challenges facing the arts community during the Coronavirus outbreak, we’re helping to bring cultural content into audiences’ homes and supporting the creative teams who have made this work.

Below, are details of some productions you can watch at home. We’ll be adding more shortly, so please check back frequently and support us by tweeting @thespacearts.

Looking for something new to watch? Check out ‘Filmed in lockdown’ – brand new works from artists and organisations responding to socially distanced life in lockdown.

Available to watch now:

Little Cog’s Funny Peculiar

Vici Wreford-Sinnott’s lockdown short ‘Funny Peculiar’ (★★★★ The Stage) gives voice to four disabled women who are locked down, locked in, shut up and shouted down. While the rest of the nation is in meltdown, it takes a lot to phase this quartet… ’Funny Peculiar’ is produced by disabled-led theatre company Little Cog. The film is co-commissioned by ARC Stockton and Northern Stage, and funded by Arts Council England. Watch ‘Funny Peculiar’ for free on YouTube.

Open Clasp’s Sugar

A probation officer, a prison cell and a homeless shelter. Meet Annie, Julie and Tracy, three survivors all ‘doing time’ in very different ways. Three survivors. Three voices seldom heard. Sugar is an intimate piece of theatre made for the screen.

tiata fahozi’s good dog

Set during the early noughties, ‘good dog’ chronicles growing up in a multicultural community and the everyday injustices that drive people to take back control…

Stopgap’s Artificial Things

This award-winning film, directed by Sophie Fiennes, showcases some of the original pioneers of inclusive dance: Artists who are now change-makers, choreographers and masters of their craft.

Opera North’s Trouble in Tahiti

Accessible versions of Opera North’s production of Leonard Bernstein’s one act opera, Trouble in Tahiti are now available to watch online in full, for free. The film is available with audio description, British Sign Language interpretation, or British Sign Language interpretation with captions.

Sampad South Asian Arts – About the Elephant

Broadcast from Dance City in Newcastle, About the Elephant examines our sense of place and purpose in the world. Kathak dancer Vidya Patel and Contemporary dancer Connor Scott come together for their first collaboration which beautifully intertwines their respective dance styles.

Streetwise Opera and The Sixteen’s The Passion

An abridged version of Bach’s iconic oratorio St Matthew Passion, with Streetwise Opera and The Sixteen, directed by Penny Woolcock and a final chorus with music by Sir James MacMillan and lyrics by participants in Streetwise Opera’s workshops in Manchester. Filmed live at Campfield Market, Manchester in March 2016.

Cheek by Jowl’s The Winters Tale

One of Shakespeare’s greatest plays, The Winter’s Tale tells of a delusional and paranoid king who tears his family apart.

Studio Wayne McGregor’s Atomos

Ten incredible dancers perform the unique style of Wayne McGregor – sculptural, rigorous, jarring and hauntingly beautiful.

Rosie Kay Dance Company’s 5 Soldiers

5 Soldiers: The Body is the Frontline is available in full. A moving, dramatic and unique work that looks at how the human body remains essential to war, even in the 21st century. 5 SOLDIERS provides an intimate view of the training that prepares soldiers for the sheer physicality of combat, for the possibility of injury, and the impact conflict has on the bodies and minds of everyone it reaches. The piece has a powerful physicality, moments of humour and is full of honesty, all inspired by input from serving and former soldiers.

Le Patin Libre’s Vertical Influences

Five strong troupe Le Patin Libre use the ice in daring and dazzling ways to present a completely new perspective in the full length 20-minute film VERTICAL. Produced by Dance Umbrella and commissioned by The Space – and available below.

Granby Winter Gardens 360

Shot and edited over three years, this immersive 360° film captures the process of realising the restoration of the Winter Gardens, former derelict terraced houses at number 37 and 39 Cairns Street in Liverpool. Turner Prize winners Assemble and Granby Four Streets CLT converted the former derelict terraced houses into a new shared space, housing a communal indoor garden meeting and events space, and an artist residency accommodation.

Shobana Jeyasingh’s Staging Schiele

Staging Schiele is inspired by the Austrian artist  Egon Schiele. Schiele was famous for his unflinching nudes and searing self portraits. Four dancers inhabit Schiele’s highly-charged world of colour, masterful lines and unusual perspectives, a world that puts the human body on visceral display. The production is available below, and on Facebook and Twitter, until the end of March.

Relative Motion

Relative Motion fused the 125-year-old opera, Tosca, with virtual reality to put you in the centre of Puccini’s greatest love story.. Set on location in a Cambridgeshire church, their immersive production of 15 minutes of Act One of the opera fuses incredible live performances in a 360° space with fully spatialised sound and orchestrations, to transport you to the heart of this iconic love story.

Available to watch on Marquee TV

Donmar Theatre’s Shakespeare Trilogy

Phyllida Lloyd takes her arresting production of Shakespeare’s famous discourse on power, loyalty and tragic idealism into a gripping version for the screen. Features The Tempest, Julius Caesar and Henry IV.

Donmar Warehouse Shakespeare Trilogy

Northern Ballet’s 1984

Applauded by critics, Northern Ballet’s 1984 is an awe-inspiring retelling of George Orwell’s masterpiece choreographed by Jonathan Watkins.

Watch 1984

Martha Leebolt on stage as Julia in 1984

Phoenix Dance Theatre’s Windrush:Movement of the People

A lively celebration of the rise of multicultural Britain exploring the arrival of SS Empire Windrush that brought the first Caribbean migrants to the UK.

Watch it here.

Phoenix Dance – Windrush: Movement of the People – Vanessa Vince-Pang and Prentice Whitlow Photo – Richard Moran