There are some shows that are such an “event” that it’s hard to separate the performance from everything else going on around it. The opening of Free Your Mind, a new creation from director Danny Boyle, dance company Boy Blue, designer Es Devlin and writer Sabrina Mahfouz, is also the launch of Aviva Studios, the £242m home of Factory International, the producers behind Manchester International festival. It’s the coolest party of the year.
The show is a 2023 take on the 1999 film The Matrix, which fits with the current 90s nostalgia (those skintight PVC trousers will take you right back) but is also alarmingly prescient in its story of humans being usurped by intelligent machines as we enable the march of AI, ever more in thrall to the algorithm.
