The cursor clicks, an icon of a muscular warrior lights up, and the game begins.
The stocky fighter comes to life as an animated 3-D character with boulders for his head, torso, arms and legs. He kicks and spins in martial-arts moves as he prepares for battle, his massive stone body moving with surprising agility.
Next the cursor clicks on his adversary -- a beautiful woman warrior with a sword. She turns into wood, her branchlike limbs resembling a deadly skeleton. With dizzying speed, she twirls and lunges with her sword in a defiant challenge.
The screen flashes "earth vs. wood" and the opponents circle each other, eyes locked. The onlookers whoop, and the soundtrack kicks into a furious percussive beat as they begin to battle.
No, it's not a scene from a video game arcade. It's a new dance piece, Avatars, by the tech-focused dance group Capacitor.
The piece combines animation, dance and electronic music to simulate a video game world. The 3-D animation of the characters was created using motion capture -- the same technology used to make video games.
"We're emulating ... the creation of a video game, but we're creating live performance," said Jodi Lomask, the director of Capacitor. "We're using (motion capture animation) to expand our dancing, but also as a theme for the show."
Avatars tells the story of five archetypal video game characters making a journey of self-discovery. The characters represent the five Chinese elements: earth, wood, metal, fire and water.
As each performer dances before a fight, a 3-D animation of the element mirrors the movements of the dancer on stage - creating a virtual counterpart, or avatar.
In preparation for the show, the dancers went to Los Angeles to have their motions "captured" by cameras at House of Moves, one of the world's largest motion capture studios. That data served as a basis for the movements of the animations, which were done by two artists from the studio, Josh Ochoa and Garret Gray.
Motion capture is commonly used in video games such as Namco's Soul Caliber and films such as Spider-Man and Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones.
"In the sense that Capacitor is obsessed with technology and with using many different disciplines, it's fitting that we would get really into the technology of motion capture and want to exaggerate it to make it part of the performance," Lomask said.
By having the dancer and animation dance simultaneously, she chose to "accentuate the tech."
"You wouldn't recognize that the animation is me at all, if you didn't see me dancing along with it, and say, 'Oh my God, that animation is moving just like she moves live -- but it's a blob of water," said Lomask, who plays "water" in the piece.
Other dance choreographers have used motion capture for artistic effect. For example, dancer Lisa Naugle and digital artist Kathleen Ruiz recently used motion capture animation in a piece called the Ava Project, in which dancers interact with an avatar. Merce Cunningham also used the technology to create virtual dancers in his piece BIPED.
However, Lomask has gone a step further in Avatars by mimicking the creation of a video game, a real-world application of the technology.
While this may be the most unusual aspect of the piece, it is hardly the only one. Lomask thrives on breaking boundaries between disciplines.
In Avatars, she mixes so many media elements that dance critic Sima Belmar described it as "a refined version of the kitchen sink approach."
In addition to the 3-D animation, the piece includes 2-D video-game-screen animations by Travis Boyle and Ray Shomon of Digital Justice, and three films by documentary filmmaker Josh Callaghan. Lomask also drew upon the talents of electronic musicians, DJs, dancers, a martial arts choreographer, a projection artist and many others in producing the piece.
She even references classical ballet tradition in Avatars, though with irreverence. One sequence looks something like Swan Lake meets Nine Inch Nails.
In what Lomask described as a "villainous ballet," evil ballerinas in sexy red tutu outfits arabesque and pose while manipulating ropes that hold another dancer captive in the air. Industrial music throbs in the background.
Needless to say, the show won't be playing at the San Francisco Opera House anytime soon. The debut performance of Avatars in May was in a black-walled warehouse club, San Francisco's King Street Garage. Ravers and multimedia types sipped beers during the performance and got their groove on to techno music during the intermission and after the late show.
Capacitor has its roots in the rave scene, and it was founded with the idea of bringing dance performance to non-traditional spaces.
For the dancers' first performance in 1997, they painted themselves silver and did a "juggling, dancing, bungee cord piece" among the club goers at San Francisco's trendy 1015 Folsom, Lomask said.
Five years later, the company has retained its playful spirit of invention. "Everyone's always like, 'What are we doing tonight, Jodi?'" she said with a laugh.
For example, what dancer would expect to find himself assigned by his director to play video games galore?
As research for Avatars, "we were studying those games hard -- getting moves from our video games," Lomask said.
"Like Soul Caliber, we projected that on the wall and had the guy who was doing the knives up there, and Zack (Bernstein) and I were breaking down the moves."
Bernstein, who plays the element metal, juggles machetes in the performance -- and so does his animated counterpart.
One fight sequence is based on games like Space Invaders and Pac-Man, said David Hirschfield, who is part of a diverse group of artists and technicians who give ongoing input about the show in a lab. Hirschfield works in film special effects at Industrial Light and Magic.
At the end of the fight scene, dancer Jamie Duggan is the victor -- so she must face a final challenge.
"She's the last element to fight. Then she has to break out of the deepest video game element: fighting the unending enemy," Hirschfield said.
She karate-chops a never-ending stream of slowly advancing fuzzy green monsters. The monsters fall down after she kills them, then get right up again to come back at her.
She is unable to win against her malevolent -- if slightly comical-looking -- fuzzy adversaries until she breaks out of the game. She is knocked down, then looks at the audience with an sly smile and bounds up to do a vigorous polka with one of the monsters around the stage, knocking all of them out.
Capacitor's next performance, which will include multimedia and dance excerpts from Avatars, will be at the Crucible Fire Festival in Berkeley, California, on June 22. The company will also perform aerial and dance scenes from the show at the San Francisco club DNA Lounge on June 29.
A full performance is scheduled for Nov. 22 and 23 at the Hollywood Central Performing Arts Center in Florida. Capacitor is looking at venues for a weekly run of the show in San Francisco, where the nonprofit group is based.
