Playing With Fire: An Immersive Odyssey with Yuja Wang

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.

Debuted in winter 2025 at the Paris Musée de la musique, visitors have been blown away by this uniquely immersive experience led by one of the world’s finest pianists. The FT described the VR concert as “a retrofuturist spectacle”, while Wang has explained that “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”.

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. The state-of-the-art performance experience centres around a repertoire personally curated by Yuja Wang that includes work by Debussy, Ravel, Bach, Stravinsky and Prokofiev.

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, while the experience seamlessly shifts between mixed reality and virtual reality depending on the proximity to the piano. 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.