The first performance in Manchester's £240m new venue is as much an extravagant opening ceremony as a show
The first performance in Manchester’s £240m new venue is as much an extravagant opening ceremony as a show
A scene from Factory International’s ‘Free Your Mind’ at Aviva Studios, directed by Danny Boyle to launch the monumental Aviva Studios, is an eye-popping, innovatively staged reimagining of a cinematic classic and an exciting glimpse of what the cavernous spaces ofThis is not a retelling of the 1999 film, in which hacker Neo discovers that humanity has been enslaved by machines, and it doesn’t pretend to be.
This theme has new resonance in the age of AI, and the production is updated from the movie through the appearance, among other things, of a humanoid Twitter tick, a performer dispensing Amazon parcels and a group of dancers hypnotised by the light of their smartphones.branding was artistically necessary to make these points, or whether the scale of the launch – the Studios represent the UK’s largest cultural project since Tate Modern opened in 2000 – required such a big-name reference.
That said, this first scene – like the rest of the production – looks magnificent. Behind Turing, holes appear in Es Devlin’s clever set, reminiscent of the punch holes that featured in early computing. Later, as the post-interval action moves from the 1600-seater Hall to the vast Warehouse, the audience are dispersed to either side of a giant catwalk-like structure.
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