Thousands of performers give Festival Hall welcome home party

Outside, there was a spectacular laser light show across the Thames river while a floating choir of 300 performed a rousing number on a pontoon along the South Bank.

Inside, the musicians Jarvis Cocker manned the turntables and Billy Bragg sang his heart out at a free concert. Atop the building, a group of flash mobbers captured the celebratory spirit in a silent disco.

These flamboyant events marked the grand public reopening of the Royal Festival Hall, which had been closed for two years for a £115m makeover.

The ambitious redevelopment has been widely praised, not only for almost remaining within budget, but also for the refurbishment of the main auditorium which has been almost entirely remade in accordance with its original 1951 design.

Yesterday, the floating choir travelled from Tower Bridge to the South Bank, culminating in a grand choral piece by Orlando Gough with 500 Southbank Centre singers joining them at Festival Pier. The light projection group, Light Surgeons, ignited the outside walls of the hall in a montage of archival footage in the first of the three-day celebrations which will continue today and tomorrow.

With a total of four orchestras, 18,000 performers, 3,000 dancers and 2,500 singers at the event, the 48-hour free festival, The Overture, brought an end to one of the most celebrated re-developments in the history of British arts venues.

Last night's highlights included concert performances by Bragg and a session in which Cocker became a disc jockey in the Hall's main auditorium.

Bragg will conduct a singalong tonight where people can strum along on guitars to accompany his singing on stage.

He has also written a new translation of Schiller's text for Beethoven's 9th Symphony, to be performed by the Philharmonia Orchestra and conducted by Paul Daniel with a choir of 2,000 singers, which will be performed tomorrow to bring a close to the extravaganza.

The London Philharmonic Orchestra is to recreate a big-band sound in The Ballroom, while the choreographer, Lea Anderson, will recreate her 1998 work, Flag, on a grand scale with 230 performers from 13 national dance agencies around the country.

Students from Central Saint Martins College of Art designed an open-air Gamelan pavilion for the riverside terrace in which ensembles from across the country were to perform, and Shlomo, a world-renowned human beatboxer, was to lead a beatbox choir in The Ballroom.

A dizzying number of concerts over the weekend will cater for for 10,000 ticket holders, with baroque, gospel and jazz mixed in. Antony Gormley's exhibition, Blind Light, will be open in The Hayward Gallery for a free dawn view.

Jude Kelly, the artistic director of the Southbank Centre, said it was a historic moment for the hall. "The Overture reflects the huge commitment of our resident artists to the vision of a renewed Southbank Centre, still alive to the original creative spirit of the 1951 Festival of Britain, the genesis of the Royal Festival Hall itself.

"So before the gala opening night on Monday and all the spectacular concerts which follow, The Overture will provide a historic moment that belongs to every single person in the country," she said.

Among the more innovative offerings will be "Sheds, Beds and Bread", an installation of unusual garden sheds, a dance cabaret performed by same-sex couples performed in Ballroom and Latin style and a Poetry Slam champion.

A classical 1950s Bollywood dance dedicated to the Royal Festival Hall will be performed by the actress and choreographer, Shobna Gulati.

The events come a week ahead of the Meltdown music festival at the South Bank, this year directed by Cocker, as well as Nitin Sawhney's "Aftershock" concert, performed by emerging musicians, for which he is artistic director.