Review of Free Your Mind at Aviva Studios, Manchester.
When Neo chooses the red pill in The Matrix, and Cypher cryptically advises, “buckle your seat belt Dorothy, because Kansas is going bye-bye”, I’m not sure Neo expected to eventually end up in Manchester.
Yet that is exactly where he pops up – as part of Free Your Mind, Aviva Studios’ breathtakingly big official opening show.
Co-created by a largely London-based team of creatives, Free Your Mind offers audiences an opportunity to explore Factory International’s new £240 million cultural space.
Inspired by the Wachowskis’ classic sci-fi film and its various spin-offs – the show incorporates elements of The Matrix’s narrative alongside reflections on man and machine, artificial intelligence, and the increasing infiltration of technology into everyday life.
While the original movie, as director Danny Boyle points out, has ”kind of swum into view (and) got clearer and clearer in the 20-odd years since it came out”, this stage production re-muddies the waters with a relatively free-form reframing of its source material.
Although there are attempts to create an immersive experience – white rabbits galore in the foyer/bar area, a tableau of spoon-bending children in the stairwell and even Jefferson Airplane exhorting you to “feed your head” over speakers in the toilets – they are more sideshows than interlocking pieces of the main production.
For the most part, the show’s audience are static spectators – either seated initially in a conventionally configured theatre space (The Hall) or standing, after the interval, in the more gig-like set-up of the Warehouse.
While Alan Turing might be an unexpected presence to open the show, he neatly serves as a useful bridging point – with a continuum being carved out from Manchester’s role in the industrial revolution, through to the birth of computing, evolution of AI, and the fictional world of The Matrix.
As you would expect with Boy Blue on board as Associate Producers, and Michael ‘Mikey J’ Asante and Kenrick ‘H2O’ Sandy being part of the core creative team, this is very much a piece of dance theatre.
After Turing has set the scene, the first half evolves into a selection of scenes from The Matrix franchise. Fifty young performers deliver Sandy’s choreography with fiercely focused commitment.
Movements are determined and angular, as the dancers create expanding and contracting clusters or flow forcefully across the stage – and elements of the film’s slow motion, gravity-defying fight sequences are imaginatively recreated.
A jarring stop/start quality to shifts in scene, overly emphasises the episodic nature of the storytelling. Although Es Devlin’s eye-catching designs help to distract from that.
Despite being pared back, almost minimal in style, Devlin’s set designs during the first half have real impact. A formulae-packed blackboard running the length of the stage, cocoon-like structures stretching upwards, sulphurous flares, and pieces of paper gently showering down, like volcanic ash. Subtlety, and spectacle.
There’s something almost gladiatorial about the wraparound environment that Devlin creates in the Warehouse for the second half – ready to host an almighty showdown between opposing forces. An immense swathe of white material envelops a giant runway, with the audience funnelled in on opposite sides via tunnel-like entrances.
Gareth Pugh’s costumes catch the eye too, and tell stories – whether depicting uniformity and individuality, or wittily referencing the online attention economy via a capsule collection of themed catwalk-style outfits (including an Amazon parcel gown and Blue Tick head gear).
Alongside the cool dark restraint of so many of the clothes, Pugh also provides shiny reflective surfaces, pops of colour, and even a splash of the avant-garde with a handful of costumes seeming to channel Leigh Bowery.
An imposing double-sided screen hovers above Devlin’s runway, slicing the Warehouse space in two. It also delivers a crowd-pleasing (some might say cynical) nod to local sensibilities, as the second half begins. New Order’s Blue Monday kicks in, and a video-montage provides a random rapid-fire data dump of Manchester cultural references – mills, cotton, Albert Finney, the Mancunian Way, LS Lowry, and even Peter Kay and Orville marching through the corridors of the old Granada Studios.
And before it all fizzles out, Tony Wilson glitches into fleeting view, like a ghost in the machine.
Everything about the show looks great, its surfaces dazzle. Yet it doesn’t always grip. At one point, as the video screens rose upwards, I was distracted by a massive lighting rig gliding gracefully across the ceiling. There is little narrative to cling to.
Even as a collection of experiences, rather than a cohesive show, it will have achieved many of its aims. An opening ceremony, an entertaining night out, a showcase for the building’s potential – tick, tick, tick.
Yet it is hard to shake the feeling that this is culture with its price tag on full display, no expense spared and flattering to its audience – you’re worth it! An event of which people can proudly say, ‘we were there’ – as opposed to ‘it got me right here’.
Those in search of heart might want to fasten on to the collective pulse of Free Your Mind’s hardworking young cast. They seem to revel in the opportunity to show off their not inconsiderable talents within these vast new spaces – which, for now, is more than enough reason to celebrate Aviva Studios’ opening.
Performance seen on 18 October 2023.
Free Your Mind runs at Aviva Studios from 13 October to 5 November 2023.
Images by Tristram Kenton.
Circles & Stalls 