Always game for a challenge, longtime Sweet Briar dance director Mark Magruder likes his department’s performances to offer something fresh every time.

SBC’s Spring Dance Concert will be held 8 p.m. Friday, April 13 and Saturday, April 14 in Murchison Lane Auditorium. Admission is free and open to the public.

Senior Betty Skeen will perform a solo part in “One Rib Traveling to the Garden,” in Sweet Briar's Spring Dance Concert.
Photo by Andrew Wilds.It has the hallmarks of a Sweet Briar production: a mix of choreography by faculty and students and a bit of something for everyone. Modern dance evolves along with popular culture and current trends, often borrowing from other art forms, Magruder says.

“That’s what makes it so eclectic and why it’s exciting to go to a dance concert. Because you should find some kind of variety in this concert and in any modern dance concert that at least some of it you’ll probably get excited by and say, ‘That was cool.’ ”

For his own choreography, a three-part piece titled “One Rib Traveling to the Garden,” Magruder is planning something he’s never done before a live audience. He is writing and performing his own score, switching between three instruments – electric bass guitar, electric guitar and the Brazilian cuica drum, while operating a loop effects machine.

Senior Betty Skeen will perform the opening solo in the part of “One Rib,” an allusion to woman’s creation. The second part, “Traveling,” calls for five dancers in constant motion. In the “Garden” part, 14 dancers will evoke images of fantastical creatures, leading to a finish with all 20 performers on stage.

Four students – sophomores Emily Brown, Nikki Pham and Mary Sinclair-Kuenning, and junior Heather Coley – will choreograph routines. About 25 dancers will perform in pieces ranging from solos to the group of 20.

Brown’s duet, called “Playground Breath,” expresses the choreographer’s discomfort with reality’s harshness, using lots of rolling and skipping movements to convey the mood. “It’s very playful, it’s kind of like, what if love made the world go ’round in reality?” she said.

For the accompaniment, she is rearranging Stina Nordenstam’s, “The World is Saved,” to follow the action of the dance. “The first scene or section of the piece is actually the end of the story, and then we go back in time,” she said.

Brown’s whimsy ought to contrast with Pham’s grittier blend of modern dance and hip-hop. It’s a strong, athletic quartet with an “urban feel,” Magruder said.

The piece begins in silence, with the four characters – including Madison Heights resident Mallory Duff ’10 – crossing the stage as if on a sidewalk.

“The music starts with an energetic DJ-mixed percussion beat,” Pham said, noting the hip-hop influence was unintentional. “That is only because I have a hip-hop background. The piece makes a drastic change when the percussion is overplayed with music that has a sad, dreary feel to it.

“In a way, the dance is about [the characters’] instincts to reach out and help each other, and the fear they have that despite the other dancers, they are still very much alone.”

This year’s spring concert also will feature choreography by SBC ballet instructor Petrus Bosman. He is the former artistic director of the Virginia School of the Arts and was a principal dancer with the Royal Ballet Co. in London.

Bosman has created a tribute to Isadora Duncan in three solo parts, titled “Water,” “Love” and “Spring.” All three dancers will join on stage for the tribute’s finale.

Duncan is recognized as one of the first modern dancers, and had a profound impact on the art form. A feminist who loved and lived freely, she favored diaphanous, flowing gowns, rejected the constriction of corsets and embraced dancing barefoot. She was influenced both in appearance and philosophy by the ancient Greeks.

As a dancer she cared less for the conventions of formal ballet, and was inspired by music, poetry – Walt Whitman in particular – and nature’s movements, such as the ocean’s rhythms.

“She was known as a free spirit,” Bosman said.

Duncan died tragically in 1927, when her over-long scarf caught in the wheel spokes of the convertible Bugatti she was riding in, breaking her neck.

Bosman’s piece will give the concert a “classical, old modern dance feeling,” Magruder said. “You’ll have the students doing newer stuff, and then you have this insane music score that I’m doing. So, it’s going to be a cool concert on a lot of levels.”

For more information, contact Magruder at (434) 381-6150 or mmagruder@sbc.edu.

– By Jennifer McManamay, SBC staff writer