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The Royal Opera House's big screen stars: Bryn Terfel and Angela Gheorghiu in last year's Tosca

Creative vision: former ballerina Deborah Bull looks over the piazza in Covent Garden, where Don Giovanni will be screened next month

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Next week in Trafalgar Square, 4,000 resident pigeons will vie with another more gorgeous avian species in the form of a corps de ballet of swans. Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake is the first of this year's three BP Summer Big Screen events from Covent Garden. This classic of the ballet repertoire will be beamed live from the Royal Opera House, also reaching audiences in Canary Wharf and nine more venues around the country, presented by the former dancer Deborah Bull who, as creative director of ROH2, now masterminds the company's burgeoning access programme.

"This is one of the company's all-time evergreen shows and a fantastic chance to see it with worldclass dancers," says the former principal of the Royal Ballet. "It's a stunning live show and a collective experience in one of London's great spaces. It's a brilliant way to give a new art form a try. I can guarantee that anyone who turns up with an open mind will enjoy the passionate music as well as the physicality and poetry and sheer excitement of the dance. And if you don't, there's nothing to stop you leaving."

This is the 20th season of ROH live relays. An experiment that began tentatively, and some thought tokenistically, in 1987, the screenings have now become a mainstay of Covent Garden's summer season. A handful of mildly chaotic one-off events, dogged by poor sound quality, has been streamlined into a must-see activity - last year record attendances of 50,000 people across the country enjoyed the chance to sample world-class opera and ballet for free.

"One reason, of course, for this sudden rush is the change brought about by digital technology," says Bull. "Everything is so much easier, quicker, of higher quality. When we began, we could only relay as far as a cable would reach, which basically meant the Covent Garden Piazza. Now we go to more than two dozen places nationwide in the course of a season. This year we've added Potters Fields, just near Tower Bridge. And we're developing audience interaction with text messaging and so on, which makes it far more of an involving event."

The Royal Opera House was a big-screen pioneer, but suddenly everyone is catching on, and bringing their own ideas to the form, especially in the US. Peter Gelb, the new general director at the New York Met, has introduced streaming to cinemas worldwide - including the UK - to great acclaim. And only last week Washington National Opera announced that it would introduce simulcasts to the state's high schools and colleges, as well as to a shopping mall, with the specific aim of reaching a student audience.

The Royal Opera House has no limits to its hoped-for audience, pleased only to reach beyond the red plush of the auditorium. "This is nothing to do with ticking boxes," Bull insists. "The whole ethos of the company is that our audience is everyone we touch, in whatever way. We know many of these people will never enter our building, but if they respond to something we offer - through schools events or workshops or big-screen relays - we're succeeding in our aims."

Repertoire for Big Screen events is carefully chosen. "It would be nice to do the less mainstream shows but actually what people want is to see the famous things everyone's heard of." So the two operas featured this season are Francesca Zambello's classic production of Mozart's Don Giovanni, starring Anna Netrebko and Erwin Schrott - two artists at the absolute peak of their careers - and Puccini's Tosca with a topnotch cast in Jonathan Kent's staging from last year.

"We're doing some school work with Tosca but we're also always looking at ways of exploring the digital area with teenagers and younger. We can't know how the coming generation might use YouTube or MySpace. Anyone of my generation or older has been used to sitting obediently in an auditorium watching what's happening on stage. But now, in theory, people can download scenes from Tosca, recut it, give it a new ending. It might be rubbish, but this kind of experience is in its infancy, and it'll be a new way of relating to the live experience."

Given her own career as a dancer, as well as her more recent incarnation as a TV presenter, Bull knows the excitement of touching an audience: the bigger it is, the more exciting. "The odd thing for the performers, hidden away inside the theatre, is that they can't feel the crowd as they're just dancing or singing to a 2,500-strong auditorium as usual. And yet they know that outside there's a huge crowd responding in a completely different, more informal and relaxed way."

And if it rains? "Of course the weather is a factor, just as what's on TV and whether there's a big football match going on. The audience may be out there in the pouring rain, swathed in plastic macs [cautiously provided free by BP for all the screenings], but that's all part of it. No one complains about Glastonbury in the rain, do they?"

And at least in Trafalgar Square, whatever the pigeons add to proceedings, there's no mud.

SEE IT FOR FREE

SWAN LAKE
31 MAY, 7.30PM
The epitome of classical ballet at its most lavish, with the greatest ballet score ever written. Tchaikovsky's tragic story follows Prince Siegfried as he falls in love with Odette, who is turned into a swan by day because of a sorcerer's evil curse. Only at night is she a woman. How will the spell be broken? Anthony Dowell's Imperial Russian production has luscious designs by Yolanda Sonnabend, inspired by a Faberge egg. The thrilling Madrid-born ballerina Tamara Rojo and fellow Royal Ballet principal, the Italian-born virtuoso Frederico Bonelli, star.
Big screens in Trafalgar Square, Canada Square Canary Wharf; BP Chertsey Road, Sunbury (plus venues in Aberdeen, Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham, Rotherham and Bradford).

DON GIOVANNI
13 JUNE, 7PM
Sex, violence and damnation in Mozart's opera about the irresistible philanderer who plays the field then meets his doom after dining with a statue. Starring the sensational Latin baritone Erwin Schrott and the world's current top-star rated soprano, the Russian Anna Netrebko.
Big screens at Covent Garden Piazza (no portable furniture allowed); plus Belfast, Liverpool, Manchester, Hull, Birmingham, Leeds, Rotherham, Bradford and Derby.

TOSCA
3 JULY, 7.30PM
Puccini's murder-thriller has a grand diva taking on a corrupt police chief in the hope of saving her lover from execution, with tragic consequences. This event promises a Tosca singalong led by ROH artists before the screening. In the leading roles are gorgeous soprano Violeta Urmana, once invited to stand as president of her native Lithuania, and Salvatore Licitra, a one-time graphic artist on Italian Vogue who gave it up to be a world-class tenor.
Big screens at Potters Fields Park, near Tower Bridge; Victoria Park in Tower Hamlets and Canary Wharf's Canada Square (plus Ipswich, Aberdeen, Liverpool, Manchester, Hull, Birmingham, Leeds, Rotherham, Bradford and Derby).

www.royalopera.org

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