Part Italian modernist cinema, part MTV’s The Real World

THIS PLACE IS A DESERT
Conceived and Directed by Jay Scheib
In collaboration with media artist Leah Gelpe
Produced by Shoshana Polanco

Part Italian modernist cinema, part MTV’s The Real World, Jay Scheib’s mixed media portraiture This Place is a Desert pushes past the by now somewhat familiar The-21st-Century-is-oversaturated-with-media-and-surveilance critique to remind us that, while our private lives may be incessantly invaded by and broadcasted to the outside world, it is still possible (inevitable?) to be profoundly, painfully alone. On a set of obscured rooms behind rooms viewed through windows, around doors, and down a dead-ending hallway, eight desperately alone characters strive to fill their lives with meaning and surround themselves with connective tissue. They cheat on their spouses, they lie to their lovers, they yearn for physical contact and they try to disappear. All the while their peopled solitude is penetrated by 6 migrating cameras and one wryly voyeuristic cameraman that isolate and redouble their figures on the four-frame-wide projection screen that crowns the mutable domicile. Alternating between calculated, underperformative naturalism and hyper-aware presentationalism, and with balletic interludes of sometimes violent sometimes mechanical gestural expressionism, the aspiring movers and changers strive to focus their minds, and the camera’s chronicling gaze, on the good things, all the while reinforcing their own isolation. Sometimes delightfully spastic, often raw and affecting, it’s a physically lyrical sketch of the bodies that the 21st century seems to leave behind.

Actions speak louder than words here. There’s an intricate web of relationships, a story of sex and the culturally elite, and some clever, often hilariously self-aware and self-effacing turns of phrase. But for me the story and language mostly amounted to a meaningless wash—the incessant babble of party-speak hashes through bloated, familiar philosophy and a gleeful rave-turned-orgy descends into an untranslated deluge of mispronounced Italian, but the details of what’s said are never really at issue. And while select words and phrases may provoke fits of raucous laughter or clue us in to the thematic heart of Scheib’s meditation, the juxtaposition of flattening, deemphasized everyday speech patters with evocative, more illuminating gesture and penetrating cinematic framing assures that this is not a language play. It’s a hodgepodge of acting styles, but what at times feels like an uneven standard of performance serves to foreground the wrought figures in moments of more calculated composition. Early in the piece one characters wonders if an image can speak—if an image can remember. This Place is a Desert lets the images (both filmed and staged) do most of the work. While Scheib identifies the films of Antonioni as inspiration, This Place is s Desert is not purely an exercise in cinematic mise en scene; the raw immediacy of the expressive bodies on stage effectively counters the potential preoccupation with projected film. On screen the camera isolates characters in sometimes crowded rooms while on stage the attuned physicalities of unexpectedly graceful bodies cry out with a visceral, physicalized ennui, begging to be touched. I’m left ultimately awash in the various cultural references and critiques, but with a more primary collection of visceral responses—a catalogue of viscerally trenchant remembered images of human solitude: a reticent woman shrinking from the ringing phone at the end of a hallway, lovers pressing through a mattress to find one another’s touch, a businessman’s physically audacious showmanship on a flimsy folding table, a woman in her nightgown dancing with practiced grace and cyclic violence in the privacy of her own bedroom…

Elliot B. Quick