Shock to the system

We all come into this world naked and, for the most part, hairless. It’s another matter to stay that way. But for Hannah Sim and Mark Steger, known in tandem as Osseus Labyrint, maintaining that condition is but one aspect of a, shall we say, novel stage persona. They also characterize their act as representing an alien species that manifests itself by crawling like caterpillars, hanging like bats or walking on all fours like gimp canines -- making for additional exotic theatricality.

Beginning tonight, local audiences will have their latest opportunity to judge exactly what Osseus is, does or seems to be as the two performers, in collaboration with designer Barry Schwartz, unveil their latest creation, “Modern Prometheus LLC.” Commissioned and presented by UCLA Live, the 90-minute work runs through Sunday at the New Deal Studios in Marina del Rey.

Inspired in part by Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein,” the piece, according to UCLA Live, depicts the “corporate launch of a new life form built from the atom up.” It also involves a million volts of electricity that Schwartz will arc off Osseus’ naked bodies.

“People will have never seen anything like this,” says the 42-year-old Sim, whose delicate bone structure and rail-thin body are supermodel-worthy. “It’ll be like a spaceship landed with technology from somewhere else.”

Adds Steger, a year older and with equally chiseled features: “What planet we’re not sure, but it sounds good.”

The name Osseus Labyrint is in fact a riff on the medical term for part of the inner ear, which regulates balance, but the duo has been pushing boundaries, mostly with site-specific works, since Sim and Steger first got together 15 years ago in the Bay Area. They’ve performed in a swimming pool in England, in the treetops of an Austrian forest and at a Czechoslovakian mental hospital. They’ve also staged mind-boggling acts of derring-do in Los Angeles, their home since 1994.

To celebrate their 10th anniversary, the pair created “Them,” a 1999 performance in which they dangled upside down from the First Street Bridge, 40 feet above the Los Angeles River. As an audience of 300 watched on a cool October night, the coup de grace came when Steger and Sim -- after contorting their bodies into an array of freakish postures, then lowering themselves to the concrete riverbank -- swam away in the ooze below.

And all this without benefit of tetanus shots!

“Once we had the idea of finishing the show like that,” Steger recalls, “there was no other way. We had a good single malt Scotch and called a doctor afterward.”

“Fear” is clearly not a word that figures largely in Osseus’ vocabulary. Neither is “dance,” at least in the conventional sense, although Times critic Lewis Segal called a 2001 appearance in which the audience was issued lab suits and sprayed with disinfectant “an example of contemporary dance at its most hauntingly extreme.”

Los Angeles-born Steger was a visual artist and member of an experimental theater company when he met Sim in San Francisco in 1988. The willowy Sim, who grew up in Pennsylvania and dabbled in dance but preferred athletics, was a leatherworker for an accessories designer. But both were interested in computers, art and movement, and they soon forged a personal and professional union.

Rejecting easy labels, the two instead refer to Osseus as “a laboratory of random mutations,” one in which their influences are motion-picture animation and the life sciences. Sim remembers watching plants and animals as a kid: “I thought about the different genetic switches that cause arms to grow this way on a human or that way on a dog.”

Steger continues the thought: “There have been billions of years of matter evolving, and we try to manifest that through our bodies.” They shaved those bodies not so they would look similar, he says, but “to get to a more primordial place in such a way as to manipulate them and lose references.”

Sim likens their performances to a Rorschach test, where spectators see different shapes and “can lose track of who is who.”

An idea that began percolating in 1991, when the two met Schwartz (a.k.a. Dr. Pank) at that asylum in Czechoslovakia, “Modern Prometheus” is set to a high-tech score written (and performed live) by Daniel Day and Ann Perich. In the work, Osseus’ alien species butts against the corporate world (“LLC” means “limited liability corporation”), where Sim, through artificial insemination, eventually gives birth to a machine.

The narrative includes seven other (non-naked) performers and plays out on an elaborate set designed and built by Schwartz, 46, an Oakland resident who has been touring Europe for 15 years exhibiting his electromechanical artworks. He transported the multi-ton scenery from Northern California to Los Angeles on two 53-foot flatbed trucks.

“Have electricity, will travel” might be the motto of the artist, who calls himself a “boundary tactician.”

Explains Schwartz: “I find the boundaries of a particular field of force, study and figure out the parameters, and create within that. For this production, I’ve created a central piece -- the animation station -- that harnesses electricity through a Tesla coil, which will then be harnessed to Mark and Hannah. They’re submerged in liquids, where I’m reworking electricity and outputting the energy in a visual way.”

In other words: Sparks will definitely be flying in something unimagined by Benjamin Franklin, with Schwartz making use of nonconductive oils such as those used to clean transformers and high-end electronic components.

“I’m normally working with 1 million volts, but with lower amperage,” Schwartz adds, “which is the lethal side.”

Sim, seemingly nonplused by the concept of her body as some kind of superconductor, says, “Barry told us that when you work with electricity like this, you can get a shock but not get hurt.”

Steger elaborates: “Within the context of doing dangerous things, we overbuild -- our harnesses, for example. Everything is rock-climber safe, although electricity is more unknown.”

This unknown factor is the reason UCLA Live’s executive director, David Sefton, has urged people with pacemakers not to attend the performance.

“This is not a gimmick. It’s absolutely true,” he says. “Dr. Pank works with old Tesla electromagnetic things that do interfere with pacemaker technology, but these machines are perfectly safe for people with normal hearts.”

Sefton, known for scouting out off-the-beaten-path types, seems to have hit the mother lode with Osseus, but he confesses that even he doesn’t know what to expect from “Prometheus.”

“It’s unusual for me to be in the same position as the audience on opening night,” he says, “not having a clue what I’m going to see.”

As for those who might shy away from this kind of risk-taking theater, not only because it might be hazardous -- or precious in that performance-art kind of way -- but because it might be devoid of humor, Sim is quick to note: “We think there’s a lot of comedy in what we do. But people tend to get serious around naked people.”

*

Osseus Labyrint

Where: New Deal Studios, 4121 Redwood Ave., Marina del Rey

When: 8 p.m. today through Saturday; 7 p.m. Sunday

Price: $15 to $35

Contact: (310) 825-2101