It’s not everyday that one witnesses a dancer pelted by a head of wet lettuce. A tomato maybe, but never lettuce.
Sarah Wilbur will include the vegetable in her performance. Wilbur, alongside second-year world arts and cultures graduate students Sarah Leddy, Heather Coker and Herman Moore, will perform their yearly student showcase of original choreographies in “Watch This,” a dance concert that will take place Friday at 8 p.m. in the Glorya Kaufman Dance Theater.
The yearly showcase is a one-night event that the four student choreographers have developed throughout the quarter. Each student choreographed a 15- to 20-minute routine experimenting with issues that they find provocative.
“People always ask, “˜So do you guys do “So You Think You Can Dance” type of dance?’ This (concert) is our chance to show that there are other things going on inside of dance,” Wilbur said.
Through her performance, titled “Progress,” Wilbur said that she questions the notion of whether or not dance succeeds or fails as an art form.
“It’s sort of ironic and very much using humor and failure to underscore … the social relationships (between the audience and dancers) that get produced when a dance gets put onstage,” Wilbur said.
The concept of failure is first illustrated in the dance through a six-minute solo in which Wilbur fails miserably at a game involving 20 super balls.
Wilbur also features a head of lettuce in the dance, which she regards as absurd but not random.
Wilbur said that her choreography was influenced by her frustration with the repetitive nature of conventional dance, which she compared to a soggy head of iceberg lettuce, bland and absent of nutritional value.
“A lot of the shapes and the physical drops and actions that the dancers do are like wilting and dropping to the ground like a big head of wet lettuce. It’s very much associative movement language,” Wilbur said. “I wanted to give this idea of something that’s … almost failing and dying and wilting before our eyes.”
Many of the performances challenge the conventional notions of dance by experimenting with new dance mediums. Sarah Leddy’s piece, “Seen,” uses a comedic theatrical style that incorporates singing and talking while focusing on the idea of seeing and being seen.
“It’s funny because (the choreographers) all bill ourselves differently,” Leddy said. “There’s talking in every piece, and there’s singing in three out of four of the pieces, so I think it partly speaks to where the genre of experimental dance is going.”
While both Wilbur and Leddy will perform their own choreography, Moore takes the opposite approach with his work.
Moore cast a handful of dancers for his urban dance piece, “1838 West 78th Street,” which centers on the deconstruction of hip-hop vocabulary and was inspired by his own memories of the 1992 L.A. riots.
“This piece is very personal to me. When the riots happened, I lived in that community. It was one of those things that I just wanted to revisit,” Moore said. “It was really a challenging time being in the middle of that, and when I watch (this dance) and they are really performing it, it always hits me right where it needs to hit me.”
Following the concert, the student choreographers will host a discussion and reception providing the audience the opportunity to critique the performances.
“We want people to enjoy (the concert) and engage in it,” Leddy said. “We are at a university where research is very important, and this is our research in a way. We can’t do our research without an audience, and we want their feedback to find out what they think.”