The lights dimmed and the audience became quiet. Three tables with accompanying chairs stood out underneath blue spotlights. A group of student performers began parading around the chairs to the song “This Land is Your Land” creating a musical chairs type of display.

Each person, once eliminated, attempted to defend themselves and explain why they should stay, but in the end, they were dragged off mid-speech. The last person remaining in the group was a white man whose presence and dialogue represented a stereotypical American.

Wednesday night at the 9th annual Line Breaks Festival, First Wave students and University of Wisconsin student performers explored issues of race, white privilege, nature and feminism. Line Breaks started as a collaborative project which has now grown into the biggest hip-hop centered performance in the Midwest. The creative director of the festival, Rain Wilson, put together this week-long string of events to create a space for collaboration in experimental theater, she said during the show.

The first section of the Line Breaks Festival titled “Staying Hungry” featured members from First Wave’s 8th Cohort. Their performance mainly highlighted the issues of racism in Madison while still maintaining their restaurant-theme.

In one skit during the first section, a performer dressed as a waitress spoke out about cat-calling and how she could no longer stay quiet. Her tagline was, “You call it complacent, I call it tired,” which encouraged quiet finger-snaps throughout the audience.

Another tagline that stuck was “People want three courses, not triple threats.” This was referring to the fact that the performer was an African-American woman who was also Muslim. She expressed her frustration about people’s confusion when trying to label her as one stereotype.

First Wave’s last performance ended with a “reservation list” of names of people the police force had who were unjustly killed this year by police force.

This provided a good segue into the second act of the festival titled “Labels.” Joseph Verge put together this segment that he introduced as a free space for performers to voice their opinions on racial issues. These powerful acts of expression ranged from poetry and raps to a mock conversation. Wilson posed as the mother of Tony Robinson alongside a performer playing Tony’s aunt.

In the third section of the festival, “Spill,” LaLa Bolander ran a collaborative dance piece. Before the performance, some of the collaborators walked around the theater handing out light-refraction glasses to the audience. These glasses, as LaLa explained, were meant for the audience to hear the music as she did: in color.  Bolander’s original work was done in Spanish but she translated some of the words. The piece was representative of the journey of wind, starting off small and slow but eventually becoming a collection of dancers moving fluidly amongst each other on the stage. Each dancer was meant to represent a color between sunrise and sunset, except for one whose focus was to breathe heavily, representing the wind. The artwork accompanying her performance helped to emphasize her desire to display a transformation. The first picture was a piece representing the formation of skies; the last piece was a full storm.

At the end of each skit, the performers engaged in short Q & As with the audience. When the audience members asked First Wave performers if it was hard for some of them to play a certain stereotype, most agreed that they channel the biases they see in their lives to fuel their inspiration for the characters they play. In regards to a question asked about their overall goals, they said they would like “for the audience to see how we see the world.”

First Wave students and other artists will be performing spoken word, skits, plays and various other art forms until Tuesday night as part of the Line Breaks Festival.