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Performance group Osseus Labyrint’s new work, “Modern Prometheus LLC,” was comm

In the past, performing duo Hannah Sim and Mark Steger of Osseus Labyrint have hung upside-down like bats from a bridge over the L.A. River and imitated pachyderms and slugs on stage. Their UCLA Live performances from now through Nov. 21 of “Modern Prometheus LLC” at New Deal Studios in Marina del Rey will certainly be no less bizarre when they simulate the transformation of vat-grown tissue into fully functional human analogues while having electricity arched off their bodies by electro-mechanical installation artist Barry Schwartz, who, by the way, they met in a Czechoslovakian insane asylum.

As strange as the experimental movement-based art performing group Osseus Labyrint sounds, to co-director Sim, performing what the Los Angeles Times calls “off-the-wall virtuosity,” was natural even at an early age.

Growing up in the Pennsylvanian countryside, Sim developed a love of nature early on, but unlike other children, she would often go into her bedroom, close her door, and start imitating animals and plants in front of the mirror.

“I’m really a very emotional and sensory person,” Sim said. “I would always find myself just getting absorbed or tripping out on watching a preying mantis walk up a stem and imagining what it would feel like to be that creature or plant. Eventually, I came to the conclusion that I have been all those things because I’m made up of molecules that have been recycled a zillion times.”

Eventually, forming the group seemed inevitable in the late 1980s when Sim, who had been performing the Japanese experimental theater style Butoh, met Osseus Labyrint co-founder Steger through mutual friends. Sim and Steger found that they were performers with a similar rhythm, style of movement and fascination with nature and science fiction.

At the time, Steger was performing in an experimental theater group in San Francisco. Steger, formerly a professional animator, had originally been invited to do set design for the theater group, but when people in the theater noticed his ability to dissect movement down into small increments, they invited Steger to perform with them on stage.

“We kept running into each other and then realized we were supposed to be doing something together, and so we started trying to figure it out,” Sim said. “We never really decided we’re going to be a movement-based group. We just felt compelled to do this thing. We’re very organic about the progression that we’ve gone through. We haven’t really done it in an organized fashion or gotten on touring circuits in this country or Europe. We’ve always booked ourselves, just kind of word-of-mouth thing.”

Their organic progression has led to some seemingly random opportunities. They’ve done two video presentations and panel discussions at UCLA for the World Arts and Cultures department in 2000 and 2001, as well as performed alongside the progressive metal band Tool at Coachella in 1999, and on the band’s North American and Australian tours to promote the album “Lateralus” in 2001 and 2002. Sim and Steger also performed in the music video for Tool’s song “Schism.”

Perhaps their prior engagements seem random because Sim and Steger have always allowed their intuition to guide Osseus Labyrint. Even the group’s name was intuitively derived.

One morning on a camping trip, Sim and Steger stopped to stare at a pile of debris that had part of a crawdad, a sea creature like a crayfish and other miscellaneous things on it. They felt the debris was trying to speak to them, so the two wrote down words that came to them over breakfast.

The resulting list included bones and architectural structures. When they got home, the two searched their dictionary and thesaurus for a word or phrase to accurately capture both ideas. They found osseous labyrinth, or the bone of the inner ear that is the center of hearing and balance for humans.

For Sim and Steger, both self-taught and self-directed artists, much of their movement is also derived from intuition. Instead of following strict choreography, the duo relies on structured improvisation in performance.

With intuition as their guiding light, the group embodies the idea of “art for art’s sake.”

“We knew we were supposed to be doing it, but we didn’t know why,” Sim said. “People have been asking us that for 15 years now. We don’t have a manifesto or some surfacing goal we’re trying to accomplish or message we’re trying to get across to people. The movement we do is like a Rorschach test, a psychological ink-blot test where somebody sees an elephant and somebody else sees a mouse.”

Without a distinct message, this type of avant-garde art will likely bewilder many viewers. For Sim, however, performing in one of the world’s most unusual, progressive movement-based art groups is just a normal part of everyday life. Just listen to her explain the 1999 Coachella performance.

“It was crazy,” Sim said. “This big, huge music festival. I mainly remember it being really hot. But there was a lot of good music, and we were just there, just wandering around and checking things out all day, and we went on stage and hung upside down and did a couple of songs with Tool.”