(Picture by atomicShed.)
Maybe it would be a good thing if halls and parks were shut down for refurbishment more often — it looks like it’s worth it, if only for the brilliant festivals when the refurbishments are over and the site reopens. This coming weekend it’s the Southbank Centre’s turn, with the reopening of its Royal Festival Hall. The celebratory Overture Weekend runs constantly from the 8th to the 10th of June. No, really, constantly, as in “through the night as well”, though in the small hours of the morning it all gets scaled back to a few scattered outdoors installation, and some demure projecting light shows.
The programme reads like the organiser woke up one morning and wrote down a lot of visions from a dream, and then somehow those notes got mixed up with the real schedule for the festival. There’s Billy Bragg leading anyone with a guitar in a “mass busk”. There’s a martial arts workshop on the riverside. There’s light shows on the Royal Festival Hall throughout Friday and Saturday nights. They’re reopening every single room in the hall, one by one, including the toilets, and then they’re having ballroom dancing displays on the outdoor terraces, and a thousand-person silent disco, and floating six singing choirs on barges down the Thames from Tower Bridge.
The full schedule’s available here as a pdf; among other highlights, there’s also free entry to Anthony Gormley’s Blind Light exhibition at the Hayward, between 8am and 10am, on Saturday and Sunday; and the reappearance of Jeppe Hein’s fantastic “Appearing Rooms” fountain that sat on the South Bank last summer, projecting sudden walls of water into the air and causing quite a lot of excited squealing.
Better still, none of it will cost you anything. Even the concerts in the Royal Festival Hall itself don’t cost anything. Free tickets are available on the day from the Southbank centre ticket offices — which means they won’t already have been booked out by people who heard about this before you did.
Overture Weekend: The Southbank Centre, between Golden Jubilee and Waterloo Bridges, on the South Bank. June 8-10. Free.
