A group of dancers in cocoons convulse on stage, thrashing their limbs in tortured spasms as if trying to break free from their elasticated sacks. This is a scene from Free Your Mind, Danny Boyle’s live-action, Matrix-themed extravaganza which launches Aviva Studios – a new £240m arts venue that Manchester city council’s leader has described as “the most important cultural development in Europe”. The frenzy of writhing, shrink-wrapped bodies is a nod to the movie’s depiction of humans being grown in amniotic pods. But it also looks eerily like the dancers are showing the audience what this building was supposed to look like before the reality of escalating costs, functional requirements and straightforward gravity intervened.
When plans were unveiled in 2015, they depicted an astonishing structure unlike any theatre ever seen. It was as if a spandex-spinning spider had smothered the building in a stretchy white web, with odd protrusions poking through – as if artistic energy itself was bursting to get out. The sculptural chrysalis was an otherworldly appendage to a vast, glass-walled hangar, where full-height sliding doors would allow theatrical wonders to spill outside, down a great cascade of steps.
