Royal Opera Debuts Dark Nights Series Featuring Vocal Innovators This Autumn

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Featuring Keeley Forsyth and Elaine Mitchener.

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This autumn, The Royal Opera launches Dark Nights, a new Linbury Theatre series showcasing one‑off performances by leading vocal innovators and experimental composers. Celebrating new music, the programme explores the theatrical possibilities of the human voice.

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Occupying evenings when the Linbury stage would otherwise be dark, Dark Nights creates a platform for artistic exploration - offering artists the chance to present intimate, boundary‑pushing work. Five performances will take place across the Season, each led by a different artist.

Opening the series are composer, singer and actor Keeley Forsyth, and vocalist, movement artist and composer Elaine Mitchener - two singular artists whose work resists categorisation and moves fluidly across disciplines. Their performances set the tone for a programme dedicated to bold, imaginative music beyond the mainstream.

Wednesday 23 September 2026 at 8pm

HAND TO MOUTH TO is conceived as a compelling and emotionally charged performance that both challenges and comforts, building a concise yet powerful sonic and theatrical environment. The work expands on Hand to Mouth, the 2025 EP by Keeley Forsyth and long-time collaborator Matthew Bourne . This new performance transforms the record into a multi-layered live experience, with projections created in response to the architecture of the Linbury Theatre.

At its core, the performance stages a dialogue between song and story. French writer Jean-Baptiste Del Amo contributes text that intertwines with Forsyth’s song cycle, creating a hybrid work that shifts seamlessly between music and monologue.

Unconcerned with current trends, Forsyth seeks a sound and subject matter that feel timeless. In spring 2024, she released her third studio album, The Hollow, on FatCat Records’ 130701 imprint, described by critics as her most compelling and accomplished collection to date.

Hand to Mouth is a six-song EP for voice and piano by Keeley Forsyth and Matthew Bourne , released in April 2025.

Monday 9 November 2026 at 8pm

Elaine Mitchener is a contemporary vocalist, movement artist and composer whose expansive practice spans improvisation, contemporary and experimental music, and dance.

Curated by Mitchener, LATE JOYS brings together a creative troupe of performers, spanning voice, instrumentation and movement, to present a not-quite after-the-show for the curious and curiouser. This “alt-variety evening” unfolds as a sequence of provocations, encounters, interventions and happenings, inviting audiences into a playful and unpredictable shared experience.

Her debut solo album SOLO THROAT, released in May 2024 on Café Oto’s OTOROKU label, has been praised 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). The Guardian has similarly described Mitchener as “a singer who redefines what singing means.”

Tickets will go on sale on Wednesday 24 June at the Royal Opera's website.

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_Originally reported by [BroadwayWorld](https://www.broadwayworld.com/uk-regional/article/Royal-Opera-Announces-Line-Up-For-DARK-NIGHTS-20260622)._