Indeed, a sense of play suffuses every moment of the work, from the virtuosic to the absurd. Amid the beauty and chaos of it all, one thing remains certain, a golden thread running taut through a tangled web of possibilities: their “Open Machine” is consummately alive. This life pulsates through performers just as it courses through the data that transmits their words, images, and imaginations to the array of speakers and screens around them. In this arena, technology doesn’t merely serve as a design element, nor does it attempt to hide. Three large screens hang from the proscenium frame, spanning the width of the stage space; each performer wears a microphone, and a small, brick-like pack and snaking wires nestles within each brightly-colored costume. Live sound builds layers over Charmaine Lee and Mas YSA’s musical ground, which rings and titters through sparse, rounded hums and whirling cacophonies. Davison Scandrett bathes the stage in gray gloamings, lurid washes of neon, and softly-puddled rainbows; the house lights rise, dim, and flicker to further unsettle our perception.

The work’s arc forms a complete circuit, opening and closing with the same image: a column of performers filed still and neutral at center stage. From this ordered lineup springs a stunning range of possibilities, guided by a series of games that define the parameters of the performers’ active decision-making in movement and speech. As they navigate their individual choices, each performer remains acutely aware of the others around them, together creating a corpus of material for the technologies to take in and reinterpret. Bodies are rendered as stuttering clusters of letters or juddering images of the words they speak; in one section, their live, larger-than-life forms become doppelgangers hovering in a technological firmament.