Review – Playing With Fire: Virtual Reality at the Southbank Centre

The Southbank Centre’s new immersive Yuja Wang experience is this weekend’s big draw. It also makes an unintentional case for live music.

Playing With Fire: An Immersive Odyssey with Yuja Wang opened at the Southbank Centre’s Royal Festival Hall on 9 September for previews. Forty-five minutes, a VR headset, a Steinway Spirio playing back a recording of Wang’s performance while an avatar of her sits at the keyboard, accompanied by nine visual worlds built around nine pieces of music.

On arrival, visitors are given a set of instructions about how to fit their headset, after which a QR code is scanned and instructions how to experience what follows appear in your field of vision. The view is a little blurry with vari-focals but you get accustomed; you’ll need to adjust things a little to accommodate glasses. Don’t move around too fast. Don’t go too near the piano.If you need to sit down, find the blue boxes in your display which will denote a spare seat. By the time the pre-flight checks are done there’s a sense we’re about to sit an exam of some kind.

The digital player-piano is triggered by a MIDI recording of Yuja Wang’s performance of these works. A backdrop of animation surrounds the piano at the centre of the room, where a Wang avatar sits at the keyboard and appears to play. Seeing her is mildly discombobulating at first — there’s a sense of both knowing and not knowing what world we’re in. We know it isn’t her, and yet it’s definitely her, and she appears to be present in the room. This is the brain recalibrating once its usual points of reference have been shut off. The neuroscience of it is fascinating.

The animation is bold, trippy, sometimes jumpy. Wang’s hand movements – the result of filmed sequences featuring Wang herself – are smooth for the most part. Up close, Wang has the look of a video game character, though the skin detail is impressive — the tan lines, especially. It gets a little unsettling when I’m close enough to feel her staring right at me. This isn’t the kind of concert experience I’d normally have, and that makes it a far more intimate one than a concert hall could offer. I find myself having to look away and, eventually moving away from The Wang.

The visual design builds a cavernous space that opens the imagination, though it sometimes tips too far the other way and pulls attention away from the music. Wandering is inviting — I find myself drawn to the outer reaches, away from other people, who appear as stylised blobs, making the available space a slightly tricky thing to judge. I bump into someone at one point, which feels deeply uncomfortable. At 45 minutes, it isn’t long before the headset’s refresh rate brings on mild nausea, and I have to sit down on one of the clearly signposted benches. Here, things feel calmer.

At the end, we’re asked to remove our headsets and watch the player piano perform a brief encore — without Wang at the keyboard. The effect is grounding, a return to the real world before we leave. It’s a ghostly performance, slightly eerie, but there’s a reassuring human quality to it even though we know we’re listening to live sound triggered by a recording. This is where the show risks giving itself away away: the capture, the nine worlds, the philosophy of fire and water — built to close the distance between audience and performer. When the technology was laid to one side and the piano played on its own, so the absence of the avatar made the case for what we have already more firmly.

Set against the development work Southbank’s resident orchestra Philharmonia has been doing in this space over the past decade, and Insula Orchestra’s in Paris, its easier to see how far the technology has come in building a complete world to explore. The Philharmonia’s version was steadier viewing — a fixed shot of an orchestra, movement directed by the headset wearer — and I recall it produced considerably less nausea and a more emotional response, simply from being able to sit inside the orchestra and watch everyone play around you. Playing with Fire felt colder by comparison, an overdetermined application. I’d like to see what applying it to an operatic scene would be like. Wandering around the drama may result in a deeper connection.

This is the show’s fourth outing, after premieres elsewhere in Europe. On Level 1 at the Southbank Centre, it also serves as the entry point to this weekend’s Creative Intelligence Festival. The wall of credits in the waiting room lists a Cannes-winning writer-director in Pierre-Alain Giraud, visual artist Gabríela Friðriksdóttir, sound designer Nicolas Becker, and a philosophical consultant, Dominique Pagani, brought in to shape the fire-and-water framing, ends up making the case for the very thing it’s imitating. Innovation leveraged to increase reach: the line between being alert to what audiences want and what programmers see as novelty is blurred. The first preview ran on a day when the rest of the venue had been hired out for a graduation ceremony — a hall full of international students completing their studies, stepping into new and uncertain futures, while innovation distracted elsewhere in the building.