Kitchen discos and archive performances kept us going – but being stuck at home made me pine for a full house
In the early months of the pandemic, as the survival instinct of the live arts community performed a macabre two-step with the increasingly grim statistics, it seemed self-indulgent to complain. Who cared if you were no longer at liberty to sit cheek by jowl with other culture lovers, trading viruses for vibes?
There was even a sense of excitement, as decades of archive performances, which I’d been too lazy or preoccupied to attend in person, spilled out on the screen from the lockers of great institutions – the Royal Ballet and Opera, the National Theatre, the Royal Shakespeare Company – whose pricing and popularity had put them increasingly out of reach for many of us. The illusion of a new intimacy emerged as musicians busked in their mansions, ballerinas pirouetted in their flats. Some little cutting-edge companies I’d never heard of were even stretching the definition of live, by doing whizzy new things with the body in cyberspace.