Danny Boyle, Kenrick Sandy and Mikey Asante’s retelling of The Matrix is showing at Manchester’s Aviva Studios now
Opening with a frenetic monologue from Professor Alan Turing (Ian Harris), who told the audience that “if machines could think, they’d think much greater thoughts than humans”, Free Your Mind is The Matrix updated for a new, technology-driven world. Showing at Aviva Studios, Manchester’s new “cultural powerhouse” and director Danny Boyle’s latest venture, the show uses hip-hop choreography and a mesmerising score to get audiences thinking about the new digital revolution, and the effects it’s having on the world.
The Matrix brought questions about what is and isn’t reality into the mainstream. But Boyle and his co-creators – designer Es Devlin, writer Sabrina Mahfouz and dance company Boy Blue, led by Kenrick Sandy and Mikey Asante – took the concept a step further, pulling on themes surrounding the new digital revolution, including, of course, social media and rapid consumerism. And what better place to tell this story than Manchester, the birthplace of the first industrial revolution and the “home of the machine”?
The immersive performance pulls you in from start to finish. Upon arrival, guests are greeted by white rabbits and characters wearing long, brown lab coats to the sound of gritty techno. Viewers are chaperoned through the new venue where trippy visuals adorn the walls (and which essentially comprises part of the set), before being seated in the main auditorium.
In Act One, we’re introduced to antagonist Agent Smith (Mikey Ureta) and protagonists Neo (Corey Owens) and Trinity (Nicey Belgrave), whose chemistry was palpable. A nod to multiple aspects of the Matrix universe, we learn of the trial of B1-66ER, the first robot to kill a human, and the eventual war between humans and AI. Prior knowledge of what happens in the original film is pretty vital, as the context can be lost through the medium of dance.
At the end of Act One, viewers are once again chaperoned to the auditorium for the interval before being split into two groups and taken to The Hall, where the second act takes place. A nod to the director’s Olympic Opening Ceremony production in 2012, Act Two starts with a timelapse through Manchester’s history to the tune of New Order’s “Blue Monday” (what else?). As the screen lifted, viewers who were recording the montage with their phones were confronted with a reflection of themselves: dancers glued to their phones, flashes on, wandering the stage like zombies.
The following performance was anything but subtle in its prevailing message: we’re all becoming increasingly more distracted and in the thrall of pursuing likes and comments on social media. But Free Your Mind went further than criticising algorithms and notifications for our collective alienation. Between a clever scene where a hypnotic Coca-Cola bottle tranquilised dancers who were beginning to break free, voguing Amazon parcels and a drone delivering a pint of milk (shot down, to applause, by Neo), Free Your Mind also dares to criticise late-stage capitalism and rampant consumerism for our disconnection from real life.
While the story of The Matrix is nothing new, the emotion and intensity of Free Your Mind left an X-shaped bruise right on my forehead, one that chimed with my already-growing impulse to get off social media and wake the fuck up.