Brighton Theatre Review: Nullspace Motel

Summary

Rating: ★★★★★
Running Dates: Wednesday 22nd October
Where to see it: Attenborough Centre for the Creative Arts
Duration: 1 hr
Keywords: dance, technology, mindfulness, identity

Review

What does it mean to live in a body? That’s the question that Symoné asks in her latest show: Nullspace Motel.  Blending dance, storytelling, and technology, Nullspace Motel is a thoughtful exploration on the relationship between memory and identity. It’s an important celebration of the humanity that lies deep within us all. 

The show consists of interactive mini-video games accompanied by spoken word and dance performances. It blends the boundaries between performers and audience, and lets us embark on a journey of discovery, reflection, and change.

Memory is the central theme in Symoné’s show. We are asked to reflect on what it means to hold onto memories, and how those memories shape our identity. It gives us space to think about the memories we have now forgotten, all those days and hours we have lost to the unstoppable passing of time. What would we be if we had kept those lost memories? Who would we be if we had different ones instead?

The interactive nature of the show makes it truly one of a kind. What I witnessed last night was the product not only of the work of writers, directors, and performers, but also of the input of every single person in the audience. We shaped and directed the story through a sequence of choices. This resulted in a personalised experience, which cannot be replicated to be the same ever again. It reminds us that each and every one of us have something special and different to offer, because our identity is the unique combination of thousands of experiences and memories that belong only to us. 

The human body takes centre stage throughout the show, in the physicality of dance and the storytelling. Nullspace Motel highlights the beauty and rarity of our bodily experience. It honours the body as the vessel through which we experience the world, through which we feel alive. 

We are now living through the new-age of AI. We see people using chatbots as therapists, tech corporations trying to infiltrate and invade human interaction on every level. “Ask more of your phone” a recent ad says. Ask your phone what outfit to wear, what food to buy, ask your phone when your friend’s birthday is. We are told over and over that we cannot rely on ourselves anymore without the help of technology. We are told that our bodies, our minds, just aren’t enough. That a machine will always be better. 

But a machine can never replace the lived experience, Symoné reminds us. A machine cannot know the warmth of the sun on an early morning. A machine does not know what it feels like to slowly fall asleep in a moving car. A machine does not know how to love, how to live. Nullspace Motel puts the physical body at the core of the human experience. We live through our bodies, we feel through them, we experience life and then store those experiences in our brain, in the form of memories. 

Nullspace Motel can be interpreted as a miniature reproduction of daily life. In the show, as in our day-to-day, we make certain choices without knowing where they’ll take us. We’ll also never know where the other choices would’ve resulted in. We can keep hoping we’d chosen differently, we can imagine the other paths better, the grass greener. But what good would that do? This is it, now, in this moment, this is life and we’ve got to experience it as it is. 

I spoke to performers Li Xu and Yuma Sylla about this after the show, which they’ve described as ‘a fever dream’. The improvisational nature of their performance means they too need to make choices without fully knowing the outcome. Their performance relies on instinct and improvisation. This blew my mind. I am a planner at heart, a rule follower, a type-A person through and through. And, sometimes, this comes at the disadvantage of not being ready when life takes a turn I wasn’t expecting. Nullspace Motel offers an important lesson: to welcome life with open arms, no matter what. Be open to change, be open to the unknown, to new experiences. They might just lead you where you need to be.

Nullspace Motel celebrates the aliveness, the humanity that we store inside. It asks us to take a moment to reflect on who we are, and why. These are questions to which there may be no answer, or no clear one at least. But they’re important questions nevertheless, as their value lies in the journey we take as we try to understand ourselves. 

See If:  you love video games and deep reflection
Stand Out Moments: the ending scene, which left me feeling quite emotional and perfectly summed up the whole show
Last Impressions: interesting, innovative, and extremely relevant

Written by Roberta Guarini

We were kindly gifted these tickets in exchange for a review.