Royal Opera House launches Dark Nights
The Royal Opera launches Dark Nights, a new research and development series in the Linbury Theatre showcasing one-off performances by leading vocal innovators and experimental composers. Celebrating boundary-crossing new music, the programme explores the theatrical possibilities of the human voice.
Dark Nights offers artists the opportunity to present intimate, explorative performances to our audiences. There are five Dark Nights scheduled throughout the season, each with a different artist at the helm.
Join the entire series and experience a full programme dedicated to bold, imaginative music beyond the mainstream.
Elaine Mitchener – LATE JOYS
Monday 9 November 2026 at 8pm
Late Joys, was conceived by Elaine Mitchener and devised with Dam Van Huynh (choreographer), Reece Ewing (moving image artist), and her electro-acoustic group The Rolling Calf: Xhosa Cole, Jason Yarde, Mark Sanders and Neil Charles. Together they present an hour-long experience which unfolds as a reverberation of time and space, where presences are conjured through sound, movement and visual intensity. Drawing on the poetics of writers who have inspired Mitchener’s practice, the work weaves between a shifting landscape where memory, inheritance and imagination converge, — propelling voices and bodies beyond the present and invites audiences into opening up new ways of sensing the past while reaching towards possible futures.
Elaine Mitchener concept, direction, vocalist, dancer
Dam Van Huynh choreography, lighting, dancer, đàn bầu
Reece Ewing moving image
Michael Picknett, production manager
The Rolling Calf:
Jason Yarde saxophone, electronics
Neil Charles bass, electronics
Xhosa Cole flute, saxophone
Mark Sanders drums, percussion
Her debut solo album, SOLO THROAT, released in May 2024 on Café OTO’s OTOROKU label, has been described as ’an uncompromisingly imaginative approach to text that does credit to the power of the human voice, as well as the mind that pushes it on to previously unheard paths’ (Jazzwise).