LONDON.- This autumn, the Southbank Centre unveils the UK premiere of Playing With Fire: An Immersive Odyssey with Yuja Wang, a major new mixed-reality experience and bold expansion of the piano recital, written and directed by Pierre-Alain Giraud. Combining live recital, visual art, mixed reality and virtual reality technologies with spatialised sound, the production places classical music in striking dialogue with virtual worlds, allowing an unprecedented perspective on the performance of one of the world’s greatest living pianists.
Running at the Royal Festival Hall from 9 September 2026 to 3 January 2027 as part of the Southbank Centre's 75th anniversary year, Playing with Fire invites audiences to step inside a series of visual environments and precisely crafted sound worlds, shaped around the artistry of internationally acclaimed and Grammy Award-winning pianist Yuja Wang.
Produced by experiential arts collaborators VIVE Arts and Atlas V, the experience uses state-of-the-art volumetric capture to place visitors inside Wang’s recorded performance at a Steinway Spirio player piano. With VIVE Focus Vision headsets, audiences can move freely around her, encountering the thrill of a close encounter with Yuja Wang’s performance impossible in a concert hall, observing her virtuosity, precision and the exuberance of her playing.
Seamlessly shifting between mixed reality and virtual reality depending on the audience member’s proximity to the piano, the installation creates an unprecedented kind of emotional and sensory closeness to Yuja’s performance. Yuja Wang’s personally curated repertoire spans composers including Debussy, Ravel, Bach, Stravinsky and Prokofiev, forming a musical and visual journey through the many facets of fire as a symbol of human creativity. Visual environments transform in response to the music – serene night skies, molten primordial forms and dreamlike waterscapes – while fragments of Paul Verlaine’s poetry deepen the introspective atmosphere and chart pivotal moments of emotional development.
Yuja Wang, lead artist, said: “Music is energy, and it is curiosity that drove me to discover what can be created when all senses are stimulated with technology. To be able to fuse art and technology with this new immersive installation is really a dream come true. The result is a synergy that is the simulacrum of being fully alive as a human. With the enclosure of the headset, we enter our own intimate space — yet still connected to others — understanding the evolution of humanity, its rituals, its cosmic divinities. As Baudelaire wrote: "Through the unknown, we renew” (Au fond de l'Inconnu pour trouver du nouveau).”
Pierre-Alain Giraud, writer, director & visual director, said: “Working with Yuja Wang has been both an honor and a joy. She shatters all preconceptions about classical music and embodies everything that the greatest music can be – vibrant, bold, universal. Through Playing With Fire, we create an experience that matches her spirit: using cutting-edge technology not as a gimmick, but as a way to reveal how each piece connects to our universal human stories. This project extends my 15-year collaboration with Icelandic artist Gabríela Friðriksdóttir, whose surrealist paintings of fire, water and organic forms provide the perfect visual language for our journey, combining mixed reality with the physical presence of a Steinway piano and Yuja’s extraordinary performance.”
Mark Ball, Artistic Director of the Southbank Centre, said: “As we continue the Southbank Centre’s 75th anniversary year, Playing With Fire reflects our ongoing ambition to bring audiences closer to the transformative power of classical music, honouring the depth of the classical canon while exploring new ways of experiencing it. Since opening in 1951, we’ve welcomed generations of musical innovators into our concert halls, and this mixed-reality work continues that legacy by connecting the virtuosity of Yuja Wang’s performance with the creative possibilities of today, bringing audiences expansive and multi-disciplinary approaches to the classical music experience.”
Written and directed by film and immersive director Pierre-Alain Giraud (winner of the Best Immersive Work Award at Cannes 2024), with visual design by Gabríela Friðriksdóttir and spatial audio by Nicolas Becker, the installation offers a rare opportunity to encounter one of the world’s leading pianists up close, within a richly textured mixed-reality world.
Celina Yeh, Executive Director of VIVE Arts, said, “VIVE Arts’ mission is to support groundbreaking projects where immersive technologies open new dimensions of artistic engagement. Playing With Fire not only showcases technical innovation, but channels it into a powerful, intimate encounter with the creative process of one of the world’s most prodigious performers. Yuja’s expressive range, unparalleled technical virtuosity and electrifying stage presence make her the ideal artist for this kind of exploration, where performance, spatial computing, immersive sound and lush visual storytelling converge to allow audiences to experience music viscerally as it’s felt from the inside out, expanding the possibilities of how we engage with performance.”
Playing With Fire is produced by VIVE Arts and Atlas V, in collaboration with production partner Lightroom, and is supported by Steinway & Sons, the CNC (Centre National du Cinéma et de l’image animée) and Pictanovo.
