(The following contains light spoilers for the experience, describing the general plot, one-on-ones, and setting; this review is based upon a press preview performance on August 7.)
When I was studying abroad in Japan, I went to an enormous concert at Nissan Stadium by the band Sekai No Owari. Known for their poppy jams and Pink Floyd style spectacle, I was expecting overwhelming fluff that would just leave me in a good mood. And while it was certainly overwhelming — with blimps, LEDs on parachutes, a dozen buildings housed in a fake tree the size of the stadium, a full sized immersive carnival, and a train — something about the earnest aim to please paired with the technical achievement elevated the performance into art. Maybe not particularly deep art, but an effective, deliberate evocation of certain genres and emotions.
I was reminded recently of my experience seeing Sekai No Owari when attending the new, ultimately frustrating immersive art and theatre experience ZeroSpace which describes itself as “a one-hour immersive experience unlike anything ever created.” In reality, although pleasant, ZeroSpace was a 45-minute experience that reminded me mostly of a selfie factory that forbids selfies. What’s maddening about it is that the experience has similar elements as the concert I’ve just described, but never really succeeds at elevating itself.
ZeroSpace is, in essence, a series of beautiful pieces of installation art and some light theatrical elements. There is a deliberate onboarding process introducing audiences to the story, followed by a few vague scenes consisting of abstract dance and a little bit of dialogue. Audience members can stumble upon these scenes by moving through the space. The plot is fairly simple: extra-dimensional beings have opened a portal to Earth, and you the audience are volunteers intent on making early contact with them. Despite how sinister the aliens seem, any worries are put to rest quickly; their mission is one of peace, an attempt to save an increasingly disconnected humanity.
These attempts to grapple with the idea of a disconnected humanity lead to the biggest challenge in ZeroSpace gelling. The piece’s tone is truly all over the place, and the rewrites and reshoots are plain to see. There’s an opening that tries for both humor and a twee sense of comfort, alternating between vague anti-Millennial platitudes about how we as a culture are “selfie-ing ourselves to death,” and comedic corporate liability doublespeak about the risks we’re assuming on this voyage. Once in the “portal,” we go through a superb onboarding process that takes the best parts of a planetarium laser light show and gives them a narrative function, but its success is undermined by an incongruous audio track reassuring us that the aliens love us and want what’s best for us. The tone shifts from smug self-awareness to almost painful sincerity in a matter of minutes.
The tone of the experience proper is completely different from the opening scenes. Attendees enter an enormous, lushly lit sandbox space with freedom to roam and encounter both installations and performers. The immersive installations are pretty, but feel uncurated, lacking a real narrative function or cohesive theme in the space. My favorite by far was a mirror room, with the ceiling covered in pulsating luminous fronds of LED lights. The ground was entirely astroturf, and patrons laid back and watched the digital stars flicker. It was a tremendously satisfying sensory experience, almost a visual/tactile equivalent to ASMR, but like all the art, didn’t seem connected to the story. As for the performers, the “aliens” would occasionally do an otherworldly “courtship” dance with the patrons in one of these installations, which blended in well with the tone of the intro, but then, in the spaces in between exhibits, the actors playing government agents would slam themselves against the walls in synchronicity, writhing about, eyes darting, appearing to be possessed.
I briefly thought — perhaps even hoped — that the assurances of the aliens’ friendliness was vastly overstated and the story would soon take a dystopian dark turn. But no; it was just a tonal inconsistency, an obvious bit of choreography that was a remnant from an earlier draft of the show. When I asked an agent about his twitching, he gave a beatific smile and said that he was fine, and that all of us were special and brought into this universe for a greater purpose. And just when I was starting to perhaps settle the ambivalence between comedy and horror in the piece, an alien whisked me away to a private booth.
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Even in the best of circumstances, one-on-ones are tricky to navigate. My time in a tiny cramped booth with a performer did not, to put it charitably, navigate it gracefully. For starters, one-on-ones require an audience member to be able to improvise and connect with actor in some capacity. When that actor is in a voluminous robe, wearing an elaborate head mask, and their voice comes out only through a harsh metallic filter, well, there’s nothing to do but ignore their costume and hope for some meaningful content to latch on to and play against. A metaphor used often at NoPro is to approach these encounters as a dance where you have a partner, and you don’t know the steps, but they do. You need a constant teaching process to allow a feedback loop to exist between the audience member and performer. What I received, however, was a series of probing questions on the nature of legacy paired with the alien singing (in his painfully distorted voice) an ancient Greek funeral lament, one of the earliest songs known to man. It took all my energy to suppress laughter during this encounter. Having just come from a light show in a room full of bean bags, walking past the “horror film”-esque agents jerking about, and now being cudgeled into introspection by a character, I felt clumsily manipulated to seemingly no coherent end. The overall theme eluded me once more.
I have a feeling that by trying to do everything, ZeroSpace ends up not accomplishing much of anything. The art is nice but without stronger curation or shared context, never moves beyond just pretty. Use of smartphones and cameras are forbidden during the experience, so participants can’t even take pictures to impress their friends online. The theatrical elements vacillate between being too scary to be uplifting, too earnest for satire, and too capitalistic to be spiritual; unlike similar installations, the snacks aren’t even included, so you can expect to pay double digits for what’s essentially an adult Capri Sun pouch.
What’s left? Honestly, probably something quite profitable: one of Manhattan’s best venues. For a promotional launch after Comic Con? A wealthy child’s Bar Mitzvah? A nerdy, artsy couple’s wedding? I can’t imagine anywhere else more fun to attend a party that someone else is paying for. The synchronized lights and music, the trippy psychedelic colors, the futuristic projection mapping, and the way the ancient building only enhances the sense of “otherness” — these add up to a tremendous space. But the current tenant lacks cohesion and a clear vision for that space. I could even imagine a successful immersive theatre show, or several, being staged within the space. But whether it comes down to too many cooks (a group of disparate artists created the installations), executive meddling (the previews were delayed and marked by a level of revamps and rewrites unseen since Spiderman: Turn Off the Dark), or just a gap between vision and execution, this show is not the winning show for this venue. I’d like to see other artists given the chance to use the space to create something, a sci-fi fantasia to match the hominess of a place like Wildrence, subsidized by the amazing parties it could play host to.
When trying to think of a way to simply encapsulate my thoughts on ZeroSpace, I keep drifting back to the one motif that served as a throughline through the piece. After each one-on-one, an actor would take out a paint pen and draw on the back of your hand to mark you with a short line. They’re meant to add up to the ZeroSpace logo diamond after you’ve had four interactions. I only got half a symbol, as I was unable to find more interactions, ending up with a sad little “<” caret on the back of my hand.
How appropriate, I couldn’t help but think. Less than.
ZeroSpace is currently running through the end of the year. Tickets are $49.
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