Du Yun and Royce Vavrek's Angel's Bone comes to the London Coliseum from 16 to 31 October 2026, part of English National Opera's 2026/27 season.
Du Yun was born in Shanghai in 1977, works in New York, and writes across classical, punk, electronic and cabaret without treating the boundaries as real. Angel’s Bone, with a libretto by Royce Vavrek, won her the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2017. It is an opera about human trafficking: two angels fall to earth, are taken in by a suburban couple, have their wings clipped and are sold. The score moves between plainchant, punk and pop as the abuse escalates, which is not a stylistic flourish — it is how the piece refuses the audience the comfort of a single register.
It is one of the operas that changed what an American new opera could be about, and it has been staged sparingly since, because it asks a good deal of a house and of a room. Vavrek is the most produced opera librettist of his generation and has written for Mazzoli as well, so two of the four contemporary works in this season come from the same writing partnership.
English National Opera gives it at the London Coliseum from Friday 16 to Saturday 31 October 2026, its first staging in the building. It sits inside a season of nine works the house has built around resistance, resilience and what it means to be free, four of them by living women, and Du Yun is one of the four.