Channel 4 boosts arts output

Channel 4 is boosting its arts offering with a number of new programmes including a classical music season, a ballet documentary series and a time-lapse look at the rebuilding of New York’s World Trade Center.

The broadcaster is to air a season of programmes offering a unique perspective on the power of classical music in people’s lives.

The season, Mad 4 Music includes three documentaries, a series of shorts, and complementary programming on More4 and Film 4. Each documentary explores how music can have a remarkable impact on everyday lives – from pop maverick Bjork’s drive to help us see music in a new way, to pianist James Rhodes’ desire to break out of the concert hall and take music to surprising places, to a promising young Glasgow pianist who, despite being faced with a devastating neurological condition dedicated his energy to relearning a piece of Chopin with his one functioning hand.

The channel also announced the commission of Big Ballet, which follows a troupe of plus-size amateurs as they attempt to realise their ambition of performing scenes from Swan Lake, mentored by choreographer and dancer Wayne Sleep and ballet dancer Monica Loughman. Wayne Sleep was the shortest ballet dancer ever to make his debut on the Royal Ballet stage. He confounded his critics who told him he was too short to make it and went on to become one of the UK’s greatest ever dancers. Now, he wants to unlock the world of ballet for a wider audience and break one of the biggest taboos in the ballet world: weight.

Grayson Perry, who signed a two-year deal with the channel in 2012, has a new art series which will air in 2014. The three-part series will chronicle the creation of a series of works featuring a range of Britons from across the UK, all of whom embody a particularly potent aspect of contemporary British identity. It will be accompanied by a major display at the National Portrait Gallery. Grayson Perry – Who Are You? explored British tastes and used Perry’s discoveries as inspiration for a work of art – The Vanity of Small Differences, a narrative series of six tapestries which was recently acquired for the nation. The tapestries are beginning a tour of the UK and will feature in the Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy. Production Company: Seneca Productions

In September Channel 4 will air a unique artist’s film that has been seven years in the making, using 2000 days of filming on 13 time-lapse cameras to stunningly document the rebuilding of Manhattan’s World Trade Center after the devastation of 9/11 in Rebuilding the World Trade Center.

Commenting on the new commissions Tabitha Jackson said: “I have two ambitions for Channel 4 Arts – to celebrate, enable, showcase, and inspire contemporary creativity, and to use the arts as a prism through which we can understand what it is to be alive today. These films do that and provoke us to see both the arts and ourselves in a different way.”