Deloitte Ignite

The Royal opera House will resonate with chilled-out music on Saturday 4 September evening as No Nation stage an unmissable multi-tier event, Underwood, using both the Paul Hamlyn Hall and the Crush Room forest spaces.

Mercury Prize-winning tabla genius Talvin Singh, creator of an innovative fusion of classical Indian music and drum and bass, collaborates with cutting-edge electronica artist Leafcutter John. The experimental Barcelona-based Radio Zumbido curate their wonderfully unique music, existing between textural electronica and instrumental melodic folk; while the mighty Jah Wobble brings his 10-piece Nippon Dub band: a fantastic melding of traditional Japanese drums and acoustic instruments with bass, keyboards and programming. Plus The Ikebana – Japanese flower arranging – by Takashi Sawano.


This unique evening of music forms part of Deloitte Ignite, a contemporary arts festival at the Royal Opera House curated by internationally renowned pianist, composer and auteur, Joanna MacGregor. By day, there will be free entry to contemporary, forest-inspired installations to explore: an epic Floating Forest in the Paul Hamlyn Hall of organic materials and projections from a quartet of award-winning artists and filmmakers; opera designer Dick Bird’s mysteriously playful Reclaimed Forest in the Linbury Studio; and theatre powerhouse Richard Williams’s surreal, fantastical Faded Forest of discarded opera costumes and mannequins in the Crush Bar. Kathy Hinde’s poetic, inter-disciplinary installations Piano Migrations, One Thousand Birds and Dancing Cranes colonize a darkened Pit Lobby and other spaces, while the spooky Ghosts and Mirrors in the subterranean Supper Rooms enact echoes of operas. And, as a more permanent artwork, the brilliantly gifted Anglo-French artist Alice Anderson creates a special, fairytale installation of hair in the Link.

In the Clore Studio Upstairs, the distinguished writer and cultural historian Marina Warner will host Into the Woods, a series of films, animations and performances exploring the light and darkness of fairytales, with live music from WARP artist Mira Calix and the remarkable Eastern European duo Alexander Balanescu and Evelina Petrova. There are live and digital forest soundscapes from sound artists Matthew Fairclough and Scanner, and spectacular performances, in and amongst the forests, from Balinese Gamelan orchestra Lila Cita with Lila Bhawa dancers, percussion outfit ensemblebash, and operatic ambushes from Royal Opera House Jette Parker Young Artists.

There will be specially-staged contemporary dance from Phoenix Dance and new dance works from ROH Associate Artists. Across the three evenings in the Paul Hamlyn Hall there is rich mix of performances set in a magical night-time Floating Forest ranging from Thomas Tallis’s Spem in Alium and the London premiere of Alex Roth’s massive, life-affirming Earthrise sung by the fifty-strong Ex Cathedra choir, to Japanese music, both traditional and contemporary; from Finnish aerialist Illona Jäntti, grooves from pop genius Talvin Singh, Barcelona’s funky Radio Zumbido, and the mighty Jah Wobble with his 10 piece Nippon Dub band and to a dramatic closing ceremony by the Tashi Lhunpo Monks of Tibet.