Around Town

All events are ticketed, but free, unless otherwise stated. Visit www.roh.org.uk/deloitteignite for more information.

Audience
Wayne McGregor’s Random Dance has long excited critics with its radical approach to the use of the human body in dance. Here, the choreographer collaborates with rAndom International, the London-based experimental design collective that was founded by Hannes Koch, Stuart Wood, and Flo Ortkrass in 2005, after they met at the Royal College of Art. The company has won two IF Concept Awards, a Wallpaper* Design Award, and the Creative Futures Award in the first three years of running the studio for projects such as PixelRoller, which copies digital images onto large surfaces. In their latest installation, ‘Audience’, they have teamed up with interaction designer, Chris O’Shea, to design the basic characteristics of human behaviour into the individual elements of the installation, aiming to redefine the relationship between viewer and technology. Showing a group of amicable objects, ‘Audience’ at the ROH is displayed as a series of autonomously behaving, ‘head-like’ mirrors, that react organically and collectively to members of the public as they move through them. As a complement to the installation, McGregor has choreographed a short piece in which an individual dancer will find their own distinctive reflection in the mirrors.
Paul Hamlyn Hall; from 10am daily.
Feature continues

Breath
‘I set out to capture my breath,’ declares Shirazeh Houshiary, to ‘find the essence of my own existence, transcending name, nationality, culture.’ (Shirazeh Houshiary, 2000). The Iranian born artist, who came to Britain in the late '70s, was nominated for the Turner Prize in 1994. Her work has been exhibited worldwide and can be found in major public collections including the Solomon R Guggenheim Museum, New York, The British Council Collection, London, and The Museum of Contemporary Art in Prato, Italy.

Breath as a theme is central to Houshiary’s practice. In paintings such as Presence 2006-2007, breath leaves its mark as an elusive presence, a form that vanishes as soon as it enters visibility. In Houshiary’s sound installation ‘Breath’ 2003 the powerful chants of Buddhist, Christian, Jewish and Sufi songs fill the room. The hypnotic sound emanates from four small video screens that mimic through abstract moving shapes the expanding and contracting breath of the vocalists, whose cultural chants envelop the viewer.
Clore Studio; from 10am daily.

Green & Black’s Chocolate Tasting
Think you know what chocolate tastes like? Then these sessions, presented by Green & Black’s, should make you think again. Micah-Carr Hill, head of taste at the company will be inviting participants to sniff vials containing different elements of what make up chocolate’s rich, complex, and – let’s face it – addictive flavour. Prepare to be shocked at the revelation that an aroma smelling much like old socks contributes to the appeal of your favourite foodstuff. And delve deeper into why chocolate tastes so much more interesting than carrots.
Amphitheatre Bar daily: Fri 12pm, 1pm, 2pm; Sat 3pm, check website for other times

Fields of Feathers
Welcome to a very alternative take on ‘Swan Lake’ with the help of fragrance and beauty company Jo Malone, and artist Cecilie Egeberg. Here, the senses of smell and touch are used to explore ideas surrounding the ballet. Subtle prompts, such as filling the room with suspended feathers and the fragrance of sweet lime and cedar, aim to trigger responses which – by emphasising the senses not normally used in appreciating theatre – will allow people to return to the work itself with a renewed understanding.
Lambert Studio; from 10am daily.

Inside-Out
Football was Ravi Deepres’ inspiration for ‘Patriots’, the series of video and photographic works that examines the different dynamics of fans, both as individuals and as a crowd with its own consciousness. The artist – of English/Indian heritage – was born in Liverpool and grew up in Newcastle. His father died while working as a captain in the Bangladesh navy, and having no contact with this side of his family influenced Deepres’ fascination with themes of patriotism and identity.

For ‘Patriots’, he observed fans all over the world from a cultural, symbolic and choreographic viewpoint, from the time of the 1996 European Championships focusing on the movement. As a result of his project, the ROH has asked him to conduct a similar visual survey of their audiences, challenging assumptions about opera as an elitist activity, by looking at the wide variety of individuals who attend performances, and also by the way they conduct themselves when surrounded by the Royal Opera House’s imposing architecture. The work intends to focus on the cultural dynamics and differences of the crowds and, at the same time, create moments of inner contact with individuals as they become part of the mass.
Trust Supper Rooms; from 10am daily.

Julian Opie
Julian Opie distils his images from the wide but everyday world we encounter, rendering them in his universally recognisable style. Simple signs and pictograms are expanded to evoke real people and places, objects are reduced to their most essential lines and contours, so that they become pictograms. Opie is interested in reality itself, not a photographic record of a past moment but how, through memory and sensory experience, reality is represented (also a key theme in Wayne McGregor’s work).

Like McGregor, Opie has constructed his own language to uncover the ways we ‘read’ the world. Opie has been collaborating with McGregor and the dancers of the Royal Ballet exploring the choreographic language of McGregor’s new work for the 2008/09 Season. Opie’s interest in the human figure and portraiture has been further extended into moving animations using LCD (liquid crystal display) and LED (light-emitting diodes). The animated figures walk, smile or dance with the fluid movement of real humans, an approach that has a natural affinity with McGregor's explorations in choreography. This new public art work for the Link at the Royal Opera House will be a rare sneak preview of what is to come later in the season.
ROH Link from 10am daily.

Of Air and Ear
Robin Rimbaud, known in experimental music circles as Scanner, first attracted attention when he started using ‘found’ mobile phone conversations in his compositions. Using a hand-held scanner, he trawled the airwaves for sonic artefacts to use in his work, developing a form of music that is rich with warmth and frailty, yet heartbrakingly poignant and immersive, twisting technology in unconventional ways to find new worlds of sound. He has collaborated with a wide range of artists, including Bryan Ferry, Merce Cunningham, the writer and critic Sukhdev Sandhu, Steve McQueen and Wayne McGregor.

In ‘Of Air and Ear’, he will be combining his distinctive techniques with a spectacular playable light sculpture created by the visual artist Sophie Clements, who has specialised throughout her career in working with sound and music. The result will be a dialogue of colour, music, texture
and light, given renewed force by live percussion from Pete Lockett. This event will continue through the night, allowing the audience to be drawn further and further into the hypnotic interplay of light and sound.
Paul Hamlyn Hall; Sept 13, 8pm–2am; £8 before 10pm, £10 after 10pm.

Perception Lab
How do eyes, ears, and hands transmit the sensations they receive to the brain? How does the brain organise the signals it receives in order to create the picture we have of the world around us? There is so much we have yet to understand about the way the senses work.

Professor Patrick Haggard presents his guide to the myriad processes that shape our daily experience of the world . A neuroscientist from University College London (UCL), and author of ‘Sensorimotor Foundations of Higher Cognition’ – which looks at the complicated relationship between cognition, sensation, and action – he is presenting his more user-friendly side at the ROH, in a series of simple live demonstrations. You are invited to come and discover what insights you can gain about the way your brain operates.
Amphitheatre Bar; daily, at regular intervals during the day.

Proprius
A key part of Wayne McGregor’s work with Random Dance is his pioneering work in site-specific locations, such as the atrium of Portcullis House at the Palace of Westminster, Durham Cathedral, and the Natural History Museum. In his continued quest to ‘disrupt the spaces in which the body performs’, ‘Proprius’ is a fresh dance collaboration between more than 50 young people from London and the east of England.
Inspired by, and performed in what’s usually the commercial bustle of the Covent Garden Piazza, this unusual event takes the sense of proprioception (the sense of self) as a starting point. Expect McGregor’s trademark physically demanding, explosive choreography as he explores this theme with the dancers.
Covent Garden Piazza; Sept 13, 2pm, 4pm; Sept 14, 1pm, 3pm.

Siren
Ray Lee is, in his own words, a ‘maker of kinetic sound sculptures’. This extraordinary 40-minute spectacle was originally inspired by a visual installation that Lee was working on at a spinning mill in Derbyshire. Part sculpture series, part performance piece, it introduces audiences to a static army of 29 metal tripods – ranging from around 1.5m to 3m in height. At the apex of each tripod is a horizontally spinning metal bar, which has at either end an electric tone generator and tiny red lights. As the arms spin, the notes emitted by the electronic tone generators combine to create the sense of an invisible choir – hence the title, ‘Siren’.

The performance element emerges in the form of two individuals, in identical felt suits, who walk through the tripods, setting them in motion, until the point when the theatre lights are turned off, and all the audience can see are the tiny red lights whirling in the dark. At first, Lee intended to create spinning machines without sound, but later realised in a flash of inspiration that ‘when you put sound in motion… it changes the way you perceive space’.
Linbury Studio Theatre; Sept 12, 12noon, 2pm; Sept 13, 12noon, 1pm, 3pm; Sept 14, 11am, 2pm, 4pm.

The Silence is Twice As Fast Backwards
Identical twins Jane and Louise Wilson are renowned for their work with film, photography and sculpture. Shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 1999, ‘The Wilson Sisters’ combine these different mediums to create installations that dig into the unconscious mind, looking at our anxieties and phobias. The malign exercise of power, surveillance and paranoia are repeated themes in their work. They are also fascinated by the unsettling atmosphere projected by certain buildings, especially large institutions with political connotations.

The sisters first collaborated with the ROH in 2005, when they designed the set for Michael Tippett’s ‘The Knot Garden’ in the Linbury Studio, as part of an ongoing ROH2 project to bring visual artists together with the live arts. For the festival they have adapted a sound installation that will take place on the ROH’s main escalator, inspired by the moment in Jean Cocteau’s film ‘Orphée’ when a bell signals his descent into the Underworld. Each individual will trigger their experience simply by stepping on to the first step, to be pulled into a soundscape that will last for the whole of the two-minute ride.
Main escalator; from 10 am daily.

You Get Me
Blast Theory have a track record of creating technologically sophisticated experiences, drawing audiences into worlds that question how we live. In ‘Uncle Roy All Around You’ (2003), members of the public were sent out on to the streets with small hand-held computers. Players in a virtual city online tracked the public on the street, collaborating with them to uncover the location of the enigmatic Uncle Roy. ‘Day of the Figurines’ (2006), centred on a model town containing 1,000 figurines. Members of the public were invited to select a figurine to represent themselves and, over the next 24 days, used text messages to control their figurine, exploring the model town and the story that unfolded among its inhabitants.

In ‘You Get Me’, specially commissioned by the ROH, Blast Theory again get participants involved in a game that combines real and virtual worlds. By walking into the foyer, you’ll become part of an online chase taking place live on the streets of London’s East End. ‘You Get Me’ is a work about understanding, distance, mediation, and a place where street culture finds its feet and voice.
Linbury Foyer; at regular intervals during the day.

Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait
The beautiful game proves it’s ready for its close-up in this landmark film by artists Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno. Shot in 2005, during the Real Madrid v Villarreal match, it zooms in on legendary French footballer, Zinedine Zidane, giving not so much a fly-on-the-ball perspective – for once, the ball is not central to the action – but an in-depth portrait of the motions and emotions he undergoes during the game.
No fewer than 17 synchronised cameras were positioned around the Santiago Bernabeu stadium to execute this project, and the focus on Zidane is unflinching. Beckham and Ronaldo are revealed on the pitch towards the end, but until then, unless you’ve watched the game itself, you won’t be aware of their normally camera-grabbing presence.

Famous for his ‘24 Hour Psycho’, which slowed down the famous Hitchcock thriller so that it lasted an entire day, Gordon and his collaborator have restrained themselves on this occasion to a mere 92 minutes – the exact length of the actual game. Football-lovers and football-loathers alike will be fascinated.
Crush Room; daily, from 10am.

Royal Opera House, Bow Street, WC2E 9DD (020 7304 4000/www.roh.org.uk). Covent Garden tube.