I could enjoy an immersive odyssey with Yuja Wang, not least because I’d get to find out what it feels like to play the piano without swearing. I could make a triumphal landing of Rach 3 at the Concertgebouw and blow all my per diems on fancy shoes. There would be a lot of hotel rooms, plane journeys and hours and hours of practice.
That’s not what’s on offer in ‘Playing With Fire, An Immersive Odyssey with Yuja Wang’, written and directed by Pierre-Alain Giraud that has already travelled from the Paris Philharmonie and has now taken refuge in a small bunker in the basement of the Royal Festival Hall. For a show whose VR technology suggests a dialogue with the future, there’s a lot of very 20th-century fuss about shepherding us all through a black-out curtain, and much old-school explaining from a clipboard has passed before we are finally introduced to our VR headsets. It’s the kind of heavy-handed pedagogy that invites insurrection. As this show is advertised for age 12+, I do fear that the RFH team are about to have a rude awakening with their first consignment of British teenagers.
Headsets on and here we go into a lava-lamp world of colours and semi-abstract shapes and a glittering avatar of Yuja playing various pieces on the piano. It’s all very accomplished technologically. I am not going to explain volumetric capture – Google it – and I’m sure I’m supposed to think of something more sophisticated than the bit in Mary Poppins when Julie Andrews and Dick van Dyke find themselves floating in a cartoon. As Yuja’s avatar begins her recital, actual reality melts away, along with my own body which I can no longer see, though blurry skittles are discernible in the gloom as other audiences members with whom I must take care not to collide. As invited, I attempt to waft myself towards Yuja, absorbed in her own flawless performance of Jeux d’eau and insensible of my presence. YOU ARE TOO CLOSE TO THE PIANO flashes up across my vista. This is more like it, though Giraud has missed a trick here; Yuja could just shout it instead, that would feel authentic.
For all that her name and image are central to this project, Yuja Wang herself is rendered curiously incidental. Granted, there is a certain fascination with seeing up-close the movements of one of the world’s most accomplished pianists at the top of her game but although I’m hearing her, I’m not really listening. There’s too much else to worry about when you’ve lost touch with your own extremities in company.
Additionally, a gigantic pretzel has appeared during Bach’s Ich ruf zu dir, Herr Jesu Christ before morphing into a wicker man. A phoenix flies overhead during the Infernal Dance from Stravinsky’s Firebird and the ground comes and goes. With the Precipitato from Prokoviev’s Piano Sonata no. 7, the burning buildings on the horizon merge into a scene of aerial bombardment and the dropping from the sky of what looks horribly like a corpse dangling from a noose. A content warning would be appropriate here. Some of the things one goes to the concert hall to avoid include scud missiles, summary executions and suicide ideation. But on we go. A neon grid looms in my periphery to indicate an oncoming wall. YOU ARE TOO CLOSE TO THE PIANO.
You can, of course, break the rules and sit down throughout, take off your headset and watch the piano play itself in a room painted like the inside of a bag of liquorice allsorts. Or just close your eyes and listen. The pictures are better that way.
