Onstage, the young woman in the red action suit takes a runner’s standing-start stance. Behind her on the white stage backdrop are projected images done in simple blocky animations and screaming hot colors. The music starts up and she begins bouncing in place. She sort of runs in place a bit, before moving forward, a sort of exaggerated motion that looks like running but doesn’t move as fast. A few steps on, she comes across a trio of young women, who sit on the stage, knees up, moving legs back and forth like the mouth of a trap. The red-clad women takes a step between the legs of the first woman, her legs close, and the red-clad woman dies a figurative death: Her arms go up, her face expresses some nonspecific woe, and her body wiggles as she withers in place. At the same time, above the music, you hear a buzzing electronic tone fall from high to low register. And then the red-clad woman returns to her starting place, assumes the sprinting stance and resumes bouncing in place, and the scene begins again. This time, she successfully navigates the leg traps.

If the above scene sounds suspiciously like a video game, it’s supposed to. Baltimore-based Goucher College graduate Claire Côté—dancer, Effervescent Collective member and choreographer, and visual artist—came up with the idea for a video-game inspired dance piece, to follow gaming’s looks, movements, sounds, and narrative structures. She recruited friends/artists Bri Bowman, John Marra, Isa Leal, Josh Hewitt, and Alex Vizzio to form a “game development team” to create its worlds and levels. Clarissa Gregory, Marra, Kaitlin Murphey, and Marcela Villa were tapped to create the piece’s costumes and puppetry. Choreography for these levels and characters was created in collaboration with the dancers. The piece’s leads—Player 1 (Erin Reid), the young woman in red, and Player 2 (Rachel Boss), who wears blue—used their video game knowledge to come up with their player’s movements. Chris Balint came up with video art to be used during the production. And soundtrack music was provided by Dan Breen, Dan Deacon, Josh Van Horne, Martin Kasey, and Chase O’Hara, with live sound effects provided by a small ensemble. The result is the fascinatingly ambitious Power Moves Forever Quest, a roughly one-hour multimedia performance/narrative dance production that is a bit all over the place. And if you’re, like this writer, at all video-game illiterate, it’s a tad overwhelming.

Premiered at last weekend’s Transmodern Festival, PMFQ is a strange mashup of low-tech means, high-concept vision, and a total commitment to this singular idea. Despite the number of collaborators, everything about the production is remarkably of a piece. The stage is a multilevel white construction that allows for upper and lower levels, with space beneath the stage for dancers to exit/enter and space under the apron for video images to be projected or dancers to occupy. Hanging from the ceiling are ordinary but shiny golden CDs, which Player 1 occasionally punches with her fist (cue wiggly electronic sound effect). A box with a question mark hangs from the ceiling house stage right, which Player 1 sometimes punches and obtains a special tool or skill needed to defeat one of the many travails/foes that come her way.

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