Team Rolfes hands the cockpit to the audience

Mustang Speedrun is Team Rolfes' broadcast-spectacle in progress: a fictional sim studio reenacting a nation's founding myth as a televised stunt contest, performed live from a motion-captured, broadcast-rigged cockpit while avatar jockeys race to keep a failing exoskeleton running. Per Sam Rolfes' announcement, the New York studio takes it to two stages next month, and neither is a club.

London first: on Saturday, October 17, Team Rolfes closes a night of 3 Evenings at Wapping Hydraulic Power Station—Somerset House Studios' tenth-anniversary reimagining of 1966's 9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering. The one-off, subtitled Pit Call and billed as "part game show, part emergency," opens the performance apparatus to the room and puts pop provocateur GFOTY in the driver's seat, with the whole night relying on collective input to get through in one piece.

Then New York: on Wednesday, October 21, a new version closes Unsound New York's evening at Alice Tully Hall, sharing a Lincoln Center bill with FUJI|||||||||||TA with Ka Baird and Actress. Rolfes' announcement names performers Fitness and baddad_x, with live cinema by Kevin Peter He. Sam Rolfes is a Lincoln Center Collider Fellow, and Somerset House notes the project is headed for a playable download, so the stunt contest will eventually be yours to run.

We have been watching the brothers drag game engines onstage for a decade — from the early VR-puppetry livestreams to the sold-out chaos of Diskokina. The through-line has always been control as material: who is holding the puppet, and how badly. Handing the cockpit to a concert hall is the logical, unhinged next step.