No Save Points
“As a child, games were my avenue of escape. Years later, when my family learned about my mother’s diagnosis, once again I wanted to escape. This show is about the confrontation between my imagination and reality, the chasm of coping that exists between fantasy and truth, and the whimsical imperative to live.”
—Sébastien Heins
No Save Points explores a universal question: What do we do with the time we have? Theater, video games, and memoir collide as Sébastien Heins places the controller in the hands of the audience, giving them the ability to pilot his performance through motion capture and haptic technology. Intimate and innovative, the piece is driven by a single devastating event: Heins’s mother being diagnosed with the rare genetic illness known as Huntington’s Disease.Heins gives a virtuoso performance as a playable video game character inside a 15-foot-tall Gameboy-like structure. A small group of audience members sit onstage in the “Player’s Pen,” using a wireless controller to direct his actions by sending signals to receivers on his body. By the end of the evening, the entire audience takes control of the performance. They help him negotiate medieval court intrigue, save citizens as a caped crusader, side-scroll across a mysterious island, and ultimately find himself anew on the dark side of the moon.
Throughout its run, No Save Points raised funds for the Huntington’s Society of Canada, an organization dedicated to improving the quality of life for those affected by the brain disorder by facilitating support services, providing access to educational resources, increasing awareness, and investing in research.
ABOUT HUNTINGTON’S DISEASE
Huntington’s is a brain disease that is passed down from generation to generation. It’s caused by a mistake in a person’s DNA — a small error in one gene. It leads to deterioration in the person’s physical, mental, and emotional abilities, usually starting between the ages of 30 to 50, though it can occur in children and young adults. The symptoms are sometimes described as having ALS, Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s at the same time. Most people with Huntington’s disease have trouble with thinking, behavior, and movements. Symptoms generally worsen over a period of 10 to 25 years and affect the ability to reason, walk, and talk. Early on, a person may have trouble remembering things and may experience depression, anxiety, irritability, and anger. They may develop uncontrolled movements of the face and limbs, causing them to lose weight and have problems walking. Eventually they lose the ability to work, drive, and manage tasks at home; they may have trouble speaking and swallowing. People with advanced Huntington’s disease need full-time care and ultimately succumb to pneumonia, heart failure, or other complications. Every child of a parent with Huntington’s disease has a 50/50 chance of inheriting the faulty gene. There is currently no cure.
Sébastien Heins is an actor, writer, producer, and director. Sébastien caught the acting bug at age 10 when he starred as Young Simba in the original Toronto cast of Julie Taymore’s The Lion King. A first-generation Canadian of mixed German-Jamaican heritage, he is a graduate of the National Theatre School of Canada in Montréal and the School at Steppenwolf in Chicago. He starred alongside Martha Henry in Ontario’s Stratford Festival production of The Tempest and appeared for three seasons in Sheridan’s The School for Scandal and Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors. His first one-man show, Brotherhood: The Hip Hopera, won him a Best Emerging Artist award in New York and toured extensively across Canada and to Mumbai and Bangalore in India. In 2009 he became a founding member of Outside the March, which with some two dozen productions to its credit is now one of the leading immersive theater companies in Canada. No Save Points was in a nascent stage of development when he won a residency at the University of Toronto’s BMO Lab for Creative Research in the Arts, Performance, Emerging Technologies and AI, giving him access to the motion-capture technology that enabled him to create a fusion of video games and immersive theater.
IN THE MEDIA
“Combining cutting edge technology, theatre, and memoir, No Save Points uses video games to explore Sebastien Heins’ personal journey of coming to terms with his mother’s Huntington’s Disease diagnosis. It’s a masterclass in technology and art coming together, and a great example of how immersive theatre can help an audience internalize and understand an experience more deeply than traditional theatre allows. I laughed and cried, and then bought another pair of tickets to see it all over again.”
—No Proscenium
“If nothing else, the charismatic central performance of creator-star Heins is reason to attend No Save Points. It is incredibly difficult to carry a two-plus hour show on your own – let alone one trading in such difficult, uncomfortable topics – and the fact that he pulls it off with style and humour to spare is nothing short of miraculous. . . . While you may come to No Save Points for the chance to make a human video game character move around at your command, it’s likely that, at the end of the show, it is you who will have been moved.”
—Toronto Guardian
