From the outset, the trio of pieces on the Dance Centre’s latest Pulse series program seem to have nothing in common. A performer tapes himself into a cardboard box and then rolls around. Dancers push themselves to physical extremes to embody gluttony. And a quartet moves with modern grace to Arvo Pärt’s haunting music.

The link is that they all spring from artists who trained at Simon Fraser University’s cutting-edge, interdisciplinary School for the Contemporary Arts. The fact that they’re so diverse speaks to the unique, freewheeling approach of an institution that encourages its students to cross genre boundaries.

Seated in a breakfast haunt on Commercial Drive, choreographer-dancer Sara Coffin and visual artist Reece Terris say the school offered them the chance to use 24-hour studios, collaborate with artists from other disciplines, and study media outside their own. “I actually took dance,” says Terris, whose work spans installations, video, and performance pieces like the one on the Pulse program for Friday and Saturday (May 9 and 10). “It [the class] exposed me to dance, I like going to see it now, and the dance community in Vancouver has been very welcoming.”

Terris’s untitled (my big brown box) finds performer Gwendal Castellan climbing into one of five cardboard boxes on the stage, rolling backward over duct tape to close himself in, and then attempting to roll back into line with the other boxes. The struggle can be read as a metaphor for the rigid choreographic demands of dancing in unison, Terris says.

Terris, who is also a renovator-carpenter, has always pushed the bounds of visual art, from 2006’s four-storey arched bridge between two Vancouver houses to a 2003 installation of 15 working urinals in SFU bathrooms. “I have all these skills, and if I can shift them just a little bit and use the same tools and call it art, that’s fantastic,” says Terris, who will create an installation for the VAG rotunda this fall.

Coffin’s creation for Pulse is a more straightforward dance piece. The trio on the theme of gluttony is by her bicoastal collective SINS (Sometimes in Nova Scotia) Dance. Coffin, who hails from Halifax, regularly develops projects with two long-time colleagues, Jacinte Armstrong and Susanne Chui, who are based there. Their performance reflects the different styles of each dance artist (Armstrong studied at Miami’s New World School of the Arts, and Chui at Toronto Dance Theatre), as well as Coffin’s own apprenticeship with the body-crashing Holy Body Tattoo. “It’s aerobic, it’s an exhausting piece, so the dancers are really consuming a lot of energy,” Coffin explains of the work, called How much is TOO much?. In another School for the Contemporary Arts connection, the score is by composer Phil Thomson, whom Coffin collaborated with in an interdisciplinary course there.

Rounding out the program is Now, by the collective 30Toes, made up of SFU grads Krista Adamic, Shallom Johnson, Katie Brownhill, and Jenessa Stobbs. Set to Pärt, the quartet is based on Megan Walker-Straight’s father’s last hours.

As a showcase for emerging artists, the Pulse series always has something unexpected, but this program promises, in the true interdisciplinary tradition, to expose both dance and visual-arts audiences to new ideas.