Motion Sickness Review by Will Winter

There’s an organised mania throughout Motion Sickness, the experimental physical theatre experience which played at the New Theatre from the 16th to the 19th of September. The main actor, Ethan, started the performance by circular breathing through a crisis, digging through a slam poetic running list of offbeat thoughts, looming political troubles, and overwhelming dread about the rise in dodgy tech and generative AI.

Throughout this feat of stamina, Toby played electrotrance on a keyboard, thumping loops engulfing the bare stage, and Asha projected the rolling script onto the back walls, vertical and horizontal lines of text overlapping indecipherably. Cue early 2000’s Government PSA voice: This is the brain on technology.

From here, Motion Sickness continued to burst and bloom in unexpectedly profound and technofuturistic ways. As Ethan’s rant continued to bleed through the music, the non-sequitors evolved, ranging from frustration at the lack of political intervention in the genocides affecting Palestine and Sudan, to the bright idea that sending Robert Irwin to the moon might bring peace to Australian shores. Finally, he sat, and started the next chapter of the show.

Most of the performance revolved around these episodic interludes, the actors running in and out of the floating circular shower curtain on the stage as they performed choreographed dances and dialogued. The brightest section included a back-and-forth between Ethan and Asha in which Asha insisted they lived in a void, Ethan insisted that the void had objects and characteristics that made it feel homely, and Asha continually affirmed that the key feature of a void was extensive nothingness. It was the most absurd part of the show, that simultaneous crushing feeling that everything digital is non-existent but also forever.

The trio of performers (joined in a surprise musical break by their writer and director Ben Ashby) continued this ritual of regurgitating their thoughts and then dancing it out. The best techno is like a heartbeat, and its use here as a perpetual soundtrack was fitting for a show so insistent on highlighting the human in all the chaos.

The final sequence of events, in which Ethan’s words were unrolled on various hidden scripts around the stage by Toby and Asha, brought the show back to its original purpose: ‘it’s always been about the crowd.’ It was, in the end, about us in the room, watching this theatrical rave.

The creative team from a2 Company who developed Motion Sickness were expat Kiwis now taking residence in Naarm, which explained their ability to both excise the Australian socio-political climate and understand what it means to live inside it. It also explained the strange sense of peace that washed over me while all of this anguish and existentialism was flung like mud at the audience.

This is what existence is now, swimming in the flood of a 24/7 international news cycle, of every political insurgency being the most prescient, of a constantly splintering pop culture lexicon. Through it all, we keep on moving. What else is there to do? Process, party, persist.

If this feeling was Motion Sickness, then I frew up in catharsis. Once my stomach settles again, I’ll keep dancing like we always do.

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Will Winter attended Motion Sickness at New Theatre on Wednesday 16 September.