Two Cents: Motion Sickness (Sydney Fringe)
Come dance at the edge of the apocalypse. In protest of it. In fiercely human spite of it. As fevered data centres suck our world’s water supplies dry to spin us in thick webs of manic, soul-necrotic code, let us remember our wetware autonomy together and sweat.
Coming to Sydney Fringe after scooping up no less than six festival awards across the Tasman (including Dunedin’s ‘Best in Fringe’), Ben Ashby’s Motion Sickness is a piece of experimental physical and immersive theatre designed to first unsettle, then uplift. There’s three performers behind three elements: Toby Leman on keyboard, pulsing out an electronic heartbeat; Asha Barr doing some mad live AV projection in text and colour panes; and Ethan Morse in the centre, who channels waves of data streams and fractured story lines.
Emerging from a kind of cocoon – imagine a ceiling high 360 dressing room with diaphanous curtains – Morse first asks the audience to imagine ourselves as submarine cables buried deep beneath marine snow. Through these invisible, inconceivable pipelines, the torrent of 21st century (mis)information arrives. New Theatre houses this production, and on opening night, this first set piece was literally (purposefully?) incomprehensible, with the music drowning out almost completely the spoken (well, yelled) word. In my strained dragnet of understanding, I gathered snatches of some primary Big Tech anxieties and depression points, like billionaire Bryan Johnson pumping his son’s blood into his veins in a bid to cheat death, and the man-made end of the habitable world as we know it, and so on. Lines of black text cluster, bunch and overwhelm.
From the Big Freeze theory, we shift to the Big Bounce theory – the idea that the universe’s origin and future is like a human breath: in and out. Collapse and expand.
While it has pockets of humour – clownish then dry then twerking – Motion Sickness is for the most part a very earnest rallying cry against late-stage capitalism and, you know (gestures vaguely at the state of everything). It landed in Sydney the same week as what The New Yorker has described as ‘the great global A.I. freakout’, after a viral tweet from a former Anthropic worker, reading The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade, got a ‘well yeah, haven’t we been saying this?’ response from his peers.
I never feel as close to life and death as I do on the dancefloor – during those totalising moments when time and self find vanishing freedom in that ever-returning beat. Movement feels like a primal howl of despairing joy into the abyss – an embodied realisation of the miracle that any of us get to be here at all. Somehow it feels radical: thrashing about, feeling so much, serving no empire at 2am in some dirty dingy room. It’s why I’ve raved just about every weekend after lockdown (unless I’m sick or broke – and even then). Motion Sickness brings a humanist political battle cry to a similar vibe.
Motion Sickness
Sydney Fringe Festival
New Theatre, Newtown
Until 19 September 2026
