our london adventure: Overture

The Royal Festival Hall celebrated its reopening this weekend, barely out of its £115 million two-year-long renovation, and in advance of Monday's official (read: posh) opening concert. With an amazing schedule of events on offer today, Saturday, and Sunday (all of them free) under the moniker Overture, I did my best to see as much as I could, but I had to pick and choose, especially since this weekend seemed to be an extremely busy one in London, with great events happening all over town. I arrived around 5:30 P.M., thinking that I would just pop by for a quick wander, but I didn't end up catching my bus home (the last tube had long gone) until after 1:00 A.M., with songs in my head and way too many photos on my memory card. But let's go back eight hours! This isn't some sort of freak rainstorm pouring out of blue skies;

it's a photo from inside Jeppe Hein's fountain installation Appearing Rooms, which features walls of water that fall

and rise at various intervals.

While most participants took care to enter and exit when the streams fell to their lowest, some enjoyed leaping in and out at random.

Jarvis Cocker played some records for the growing crowd,

who enjoyed the perfect early-evening weather and the celebratory atmosphere.

Overture took place in a variety of spaces in and around the Royal Festival Hall, and I caught a bit of jazz courtesy of Led Bib, in the neighbouring Queen Elizabeth Hall's front room:

Seating in the ballroom area and many of the outdoor areas was made more comfortable by an array of coated-paper blow-up pillows

that people very strangely seemed to claim as their own, dragging them around from event to event. I even saw people deflating them and taking them home at the end of the night--then I saw the same pillows being used on Saturday and Sunday at different events around the city! Perhaps they were given to people who had arrived early, but it still struck me as odd. Down by the Thames, I watched Skylon Spirits rehearsing for their upcoming performances,

but I didn't end up catching their aerial duets again. I wandered along the Thames for a bit, toward the London Eye, which I always forget looks quite impressive close-up:

Bob and I haven't been on it yet; it's expensive (£29 for two!) and somehow we doubt it'll be worth it, but maybe if a two-for-one promotion runs again (as it was just when we arrived in December), we'll give it a try. Maybe. Next up was a bit of gamelan music. The gamelan itself was beautiful and the music was lovely as well.

I had to go back outside midway through the performance (£115 million refurbishment and I don't think there was any air conditioning on in the hot, crowded building!) and from the considerably cooler terrace, I watched some dancers from the European Same-Sex Dance Association perform for an enthusiastic crowd:

I noticed some people moving through the crowd, sketching and interviewing people

and found out where all their efforts were going--

artists were asking people for their impressions of Overture and then adding them to a collaborative mural:

Later on in the evening, people began lining the south bank of the Thames and the east side of Hungerford Bridge

in anticipation of Singing River,

a musical welcome to the new Royal Festival Hall performed by six London choirs on the river as well as 150 more singers on the upper terrace of the building itself.

After the performance, these red arrows instructed us to move to the back of the building,

which took a bit of time, considering the staggering number of spectators on the boardwalk.

The back of the hall was used as a screen for a montage of thoughts and images about the venue

and the end of the montage featured a fireworks display that was a lot less smoky than the real thing!

Numerous choirs performed at Overture and all night long different groups sang in various parts of the building.

The main reason that I stuck around so late was that I had a ticket to the second Lucky Dip concert of the evening:

Four Lucky Dip concerts took place over the weekend, with the exact performers not being revealed until the day of the concerts in question, so when I arrived at the Royal Festival Hall early in the evening and saw this sign, I was very excited to learn that Billy Bragg was performing tonight--but I wondered if tickets would still be available, as prebooking had been available for all the auditorium events. I headed inside and joined a ticket queue, but was told that tickets wouldn't be available for the Lucky Dip shows until one hour before each show. Now if this were Vancouver, I would have come back at 10:15 P.M. and joined the ticket queue, but since this is London (and Bob and I still can't believe the number of times we've been told something will work one way, only to find out that it really works another way), I lingered around the box office wondering what to do. Sure enough, about five minutes after I was told to come back in five hours, two signs were set up on opposite sides of the box office, indicating where people should queue if they had prebooked and where people should queue if they hadn't prebooked. I quickly joined the latter line, where I had an "interesting" exchange with the woman behind me:
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Woman 1 (about 60 years old, behind me, to no one in particular, slightly irritated): "I don't think there's anyone working at the front of this queue!"
Woman 2 (behind her, but not with her): "I think they'll be right back."
Woman 1: "Is this the right queue if you don't already have a voucher?"
Woman 2: "I think so."
Woman 1 (even more irritated): "No, look, no one's behind the desk at the front of our queue!"
Me (leaning out to look): "Oh, really?"
Woman 1 (after a pause, in a VERY loud forceful voice, ostensibly to no one in particular): "I THINK only ENGLISH people should get tickets to these shows because we live here and this is our hall."
Me (turning around): "Well, I live here too."
Woman 1: "Not as long as I have."
Me: "Well, I'm Canadian and so before I lived here, I lived in Canada--you know, Canada? The Commonwealth? We have the Queen on our money. THE QUEEN! Come on--that's got to count for something. THE QUEEN!"
Woman 1: "Oh, you're Canadian. You sound American. (pause) We don't like Americans."
Me (only slightly sarcastic): "So now do I have your permission to queue for tickets?"
Woman 1 (smiling and in a very friendly tone now): "Oh sure, I thought you were American."
(I turned back around, but after a minute she tapped me on the shoulder.)
Woman 1 (smiling): "But if you get a ticket and I don't, well, heads will roll."
Me: "Okay, then, do I need to wait after I get a ticket to see if you get one too so that I know if I have to submit to your pronouncement?"
Woman 1 (smiling even more): "Oh, no, you're okay."
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We both got tickets, although I think she was after tickets to the early Lucky Dip. I still can't believe (okay, sadly, I can) she had the gall to say what she did. The interesting thing is that it wasn't my presumed ethnicity that offended her, it was my presumed citizenship. Anyway, back to Overture. The auditorium was wonderful and although my seat was about halfway up the rows, I moved down to the front row after I realised that the hall was only half-full after the show started.

Billy Bragg was in fine form, playing old favourites, folk songs, songs off his nearly finished new album, and (as always) filling the spaces between songs with lively banter.

After the hour-long concert, I wanted to have a peek at

What's a silent disco, you ask? Well, just what it says! Participants were given wireless headsets that provided the music

and the silent disco then took place on the terrace. They wouldn't let people onto the terrace unless they had a Silent Disco wristband, so I had to settle for taking a few pics from inside the festival hall.

However, since the hall was fully lit, the terrace was very dark, and I had to put my camera right up against the glass to get any decent photos, the dancers could see me better than I could see them!