Get Physical

Megan Mazarick's Avatard

by K. Ross Hoffman

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Published: Apr 29, 2009

Melvyn Brown (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

Video-gaming and modern dance seem like impossibly disparate propositions, given the former's association with indolent, unenlightened couch potatoes and the latter's with vigorous, able-bodied aesthetes. But video games are, naturally, all about movement, and usually the most thrilling kinds of movement imaginable: high-intensity car races, warp-speed interplanetary travel, martial arts battles. And as gaming technology grows more sophisticated, the relationship between onscreen movement and real-world physicality has become increasingly complex.

Megan Mazarick's Avatard, debuted last weekend as part of the CEC's New Edge Residency series, picks up on that connection, envisioning a game, "Star Battler," whose players control their characters with their entire bodies, like a seriously next-level Wii. The narrative framework is fittingly flimsy, the stuff of C-grade cult sci-fi: A goofy trio of dude-bros (Brad Ellis, John Peery and Jumatatu Poe) get literally sucked into the game, eventually doing battle with their own alien-warrior avatars in order to escape back to reality. The minimal dialogue is entirely perfunctory and expository, with no attempt made to explain the pseudo-scientific mechanisms at work, or to create any sense of onstage illusion (to enter the game-world, performers simply walk behind the projection screen). Excepting Danielle Marie Tobin's playful but stylishly executed costumes, particularly the futuristic/fetishistic black rubber outfits she created for the characters Tetris and Soul Burner (Mazarick and Alex Holmes), nearly everything about the piece is low-concept, no-budget and unabashedly frivolous, from the cobbled-together sci-fi score to a shoehorned-in T-Pain reference.

What stops Avatard from being merely a hokey, if energetic, novelty piece, what makes it not just reflexively entertaining but engagingly artful and actually provocative, is of course the dancing. From a poetically abstracted opening skirmish over the controller, to the fluidly mechanized, highly specific movements of the game characters, (including Poe's cartoonishly creepily "crab king"), the grace, precision and strangeness of the performers' tremendously athletic physicality form a pointed contrast to the (deliberately) hackneyed clunkiness of the conceptual premise. Ultimately, the work's retro-techno-futurist trappings turn out to be a bit of a double-edged light saber: They led Mazarick to develop an excitingly stylized, refreshingly original movement language, but they also end up distracting somewhat from choreography that might be just as striking without them.

(ross.hoffman@citypaper.net)

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