Danny Boyle and Boy Blue unpack their Matrix-inspired show, Free Your Mind

We interrupt Danny Boyle in the middle of rehearsals with Boy Blue, the radical theatre company that he first teamed up with on the operatic opening ceremony of London’s 2012 Olympics. This time, though, they’re in Manchester. Later this month, their new immersive show, Free Your Mind – a hip hop reappraisal of The Matrix, staged almost 25 years on – is set to open the city’s much-anticipated arts venue, Aviva Studios, home of Factory International.

Alongside Kenrick ‘H2O’ Sandy and Michael ‘Mikey J’ Asante (the choreographer and composer behind Boy Blue, respectively), the project sees the Trainspotting director team up with a world-class cast of creatives. Large-scale stage sculptures come courtesy of designer Es Devlin, with additional contributions from costume designer Gareth Pugh, acclaimed writer Sabrina Mahfouz, and BAFTA-winning producer Tracey Seaward.

“Everyone has come with their excellence,” Kenrick tells Dazed, though he adds that the collaboration began with a sense of kinship, with emphasis placed on putting egos aside and listening to each other’s perspectives. “As much as this is a professional job,” he explains, “we’re growing friendships in this space, which makes it even more powerful.”

Another focal point of the collaboration, of course, is a shared love for the source material, and a sense of its renewed importance in 2023. First released in 1999, The Matrix made a number of prophecies about humanity’s techno-dystopian future, from mind uploading, to the ubiquity of artificial intelligence, to the blurry lines between real life and a simulated “reality”. A couple of decades later, we’re seeing some of these prophecies come true around us in real-time – people are losing themselves in the metaverse, forming relationships with AI chatbots, and wearing tiny little sunglasses. Even our politics revolves around a key image from the Wachowskis’ sci-fi universe – the red pill.

Below, Danny Boyle, Kenrick Sandy, and Mikey Asante dive deeper into their unconventional, contemporary take on The Matrix, and answer the all-important question: if we are living in a simulation, would they choose to wake up or keep dreaming?

Could you talk a bit about your first meeting?

Danny Boyle: I went to this place in Stratford, and it was an evening [Boy Blue] session. This was 2011. And people were paying a fiver a head for an hour and a half with Ken. I’d never seen him before, and it [was] one of those transformational moments in my life, just seeing somebody work like that. We talk a lot, as artists, about involving the community, and that you want to reach people with your work, but to see it in operation was extraordinary. 

So we started working together on the Olympics, and these guys did the Tim Berners Lee [sequence]. And here we are again on the same theme!

How did you initially react to each other’s work? Were you fans of Danny to begin with?

Mikey Asante: Yo, one hundred per cent. You saw how sympathetic Danny was to dance in Slumdog Millionaire. Some notable ones, for me, are Trainspotting, obviously, 127 Hours, 28 Days Later, which was really weird, going into this show during COVID. I would like to highlight one major thing: we come to this particular show as friends. It’s been a long road since 2010, and Danny’s just a cool dude, man, just one of my favourite people.

What is it like working within a team of such huge, acclaimed artists? Does everyone’s creative vision gel?

Kenrick Sandy: We are all successful artists, and we are all coming with our own expertise. Everyone’s bringing [our] best interests to the table. Each department inspires another department. From a choreographic point of view, Mikey’s music, or Danny’s directing, or Es’s set design, or Gareth’s costume helps to bring inspiration to the movement, and vice versa.

“As much as this is a professional job, we’re growing friendships in this space, which makes it even more powerful” – Kenrick Sandy

Danny, as the director, how do you go about bringing these different visions together?

Danny Boyle: It’s funny, because I can’t direct dancers. I just can’t. The difference between dancers and actors is riveting, fascinating. But I try to do what Mikey does. Mikey comes and looks at stuff that Ken does, and then speaks to him about it. I try to do a bit of that, and then we try to talk about the concept overall.

Kenrick Sandy: What Danny does is that he comes with particular spices and goes, ‘Okay, try this in the food. Try that.’ Whether it’s musically, or movement-wise, or an artistic point of view. That brings debate, it brings suggestions, it brings applications and problem solving. Nothing is straightforward. It’s always like, ‘How can we bend the rules? How can we play with conventions?’

Mikey Asante: Danny’s a great orator first and foremost, explaining and showing, gesturing. He creates solid provocations for us to respond to. Without a shadow of a doubt, the idea of a director is that their eyes are on everything. At some point, Ken and I have to look at our specific zones and make sure it’s locked in. You need someone who champions the concept. Danny will take that and make sure it filters into each space. 

The starting point for the collaboration, of course, is this cultural artefact, The Matrix.

Mikey Asante: I like that. ‘Cultural artefact.’

I think it is, at this point!

Mikey Asante: It is, yeah. It’s how many years now?

Danny Boyle: It’s 25 years old. It is amazing, the way it connects people. A lot of these dancers weren’t born when it was out, or they were tiny little babies, but everybody’s got access to it, and the idea of it. 

If you think about what the [Wachowskis] were addressing at the time, and the way that it’s swung into focus for all of us, it’s extraordinary. It’s not just the idea of artificial intelligence, and ‘are we free’, but also climate change, and the binaries of gender in society. It was such a risky film, in 1999. It’s breaking so many boundaries all the time, about the world we’re moving into. I think they got away with it because when the studio saw it, it must have been so thrilling that they thought, ‘Keep backing this’.

Mikey Asante: The concepts and philosophies about freeing one’s mind, taking a leap of faith, challenging what is real and what is appropriate... all of these things cannot be dismissed. They all affect each and every one of us and our practice in some way, shape, or form.

As you say, it’s been almost 25 years. What kind of changes have you made in Free Your Mind, to reflect how the world has changed since The Matrix?

Kenrick Sandy: Firstly, it’s a dance show, so it’s the language and the movement that does the talking. I don’t want people coming in thinking that they’re going to see Matrix the Musical. That’s not the case. We’re twisting it up, we’re playing with convention. If you’re a Matrix fan, then you should be looking out for little easter eggs here and there. And if you’re not someone who knows The Matrix, you should be entertained and enlightened by the piece. We play with convention to explore what The Matrix was, but also what The Matrix is now.

Mikey Asante: The issue of The Matrix as a cultural artefact is that those things have played out. It was a prophecy. You always look at the problem of life imitating art, art imitating life. Could it have had some sway? Who knows. Either way, we’ve moved into a hypersensitivity surrounding the digital idea of self, and how that impacts people’s regular, real, everyday lives. So there is new ground to be uncovered, discovered, and discussed.

“We’ve moved into a hypersensitivity surrounding the digital idea of self... There is new ground to be uncovered, discovered, and discussed’ – Mikey Asante

Have you dared to make any of your own predictions or prophecies?

Mikey Asante: I wouldn’t want to expose it at this stage. I think we’ve tried to at least turn a mirror to the audience. We want them to think about themselves and their relationship with digital technology.

How concerned are you, personally, about the development of technologies like the metaverse and AI, and the sci-fi futures they could bring into reality? Is that something you worry about?

Kenrick Sandy: 100 per cent. 

Mikey Asante: You worry about them?

Kenrick: Of course. When you watch things like Terminator, you know, the robots think that humans are a waste of time, and [they] just need to get rid of them, and take over... The way that things are moving, I’m quite anxious. But at the same time, I’m trying to understand the benefits of this digital space. There is a beauty in it, but it’s also a beast, and that beast could easily take over, and not give a damn about what we require. That’s what I’m fearful of.

Danny Boyle: When you say to people we’re doing The Matrix as dance, it makes sense to them, and it did to me, but I didn’t understand why. I sort of do now, I think, which is that there’s a discipline in it, a kind of regimented certainty in it, which is numbers, which is a code, which is a kind of algorithm. There’s a pattern, and yet there’s also, running like a river through it, freedom of expression, emerging out of these patterns. 

The [dancers] are hand in glove, they’re just like two hands washing each other all the time. It’s a beautiful way to explore a topic that is oft talked about. We’re reading all the time about it, everybody’s got an opinion about it, but to feel it is different.

Mikey Asante: I’m less pessimistic in my viewpoint than Ken. Tech has allowed me to expand and evolve and push. I’ve had orchestras in my mind for many, many years, but would an east London boy have had the access to get that orchestra together? Now I can, with a computer. I’m able to extend myself. The AI, it’s just gonna allow us to do something else. It will do something that will allow our minds to make the next leap.

Free Your Mind is based in Manchester, the birthplace of the first Industrial Revolution. What makes it the perfect place to stage an exploration of this new technological revolution?

Danny Boyle: That was one of our starting points. The Matrix is [set] in an anonymous city, but you can sort of locate it as Chicago, and Chicago is very like Manchester, really: a blue collar city that these ideas came out of, based on mechanisation. Now, there's so many similar questions being asked about job security, job replacement. ‘Are people going to be discarded, because they’re no longer necessary to make the system work?’ It feels like a second Industrial Revolution, so that connection is very strong.

And Manchester’s a great city. The idea was that we would not just stage a show here, but that we would try to enable the people in the show, and who’ve come to see the show, to feel that a key is being manufactured for them, and that key is for the building [Factory]. It’s their building. These buildings are pointless unless they belong to the city, to the people, and they feel that they can express themselves.

“As an artist, I’d take the red pill, because I wanna see how far the rabbit hole goes, how we can continuously push convention and take it into a new space” – Kenrick Sandy

Finally, I have to ask: given the choice between the blue pill and the red pill, which would you take?

Kenrick Sandy: I’m in a bit of a pickle, because as a dad, I’d take the blue pill. I just need to keep it cosy, stay in my house, and just let life be life. No stress, no worries. However, as an artist, I’d take the red pill, because I wanna see how far the rabbit hole goes, how we can continuously push convention and take it into a new space. Then, I want to be able to create more pills. I wanna create a violet one, a caramel-coloured one, different types of pills so people can decide how they manoeuvre within reality.

Mikey Asante: I came redpilled. I always had my own thoughts. My late dad told me that. He said a friend spoke to him and said, ‘Look, you see this boy? Be mindful of how you talk with him, because he’s gonna do one of two things. He’s either going to follow this journey that he’s on, or he will rebel.’ My dad took those words very, very seriously. Both my parents allowed me to be very abstract in my ways. They’re Ghanaians, coming from Ghana to the UK. The notion of me doing music was nonsense in their eyes, but unfortunately, they just had to let nature take its course.

As a new dad myself... he is unfortunately stuck with the fact that I came redpilled.

Danny Boyle: One of the things we’re doing is working with the new School of the Digital Arts. We’ve been working with their students to create some digital content for the evening, but they also prepared their own little films. One of them, he brought in some really old footage of his grandparents, home footage of them playing in the garden. He cut it together, and it was really moving, because we are moving away from that time so fast that it feels like the past is a foreign country. And in the title of it, he said, ‘What’s wrong with the blue pill?’ You just go, ‘Oh my god, look at these people’. They were happy, and we’re not. We’re restless, and it’s ceaseless. It was really interesting. You’ve always got to trust the younger generation.

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