“Paper or plastic?” might seem like an odd question when you’re talking about a dance concert, but not for Nikki Pham.

On Friday and Saturday, Nov. 9 and 10, the Sweet Briar College junior will combine her majors — dance and environmental studies — to make a point: that we’re up to our eyeballs in plastic grocery bags.

“It started out as a Sweet Briar eye opener, a way for people to realize and think about how many plastic bags they’re using,” she said of the solo routine, which she also choreographed. “I just sort of wanted it to be an awareness piece.”

Junior Nikki Pham is one of more than three dozen dancers performing in the Fall Dance Concert Nov. 9 and 10.Pham’s performance is one of more than a dozen on the program for the Fall Dance Concert at Sweet Briar College. The curtain rises at 8 p.m. each night in Murchison Lane Auditorium. Admission is free.

Earlier this semester, about 40 students auditioned for the annual show — a “huge group” according to dance professor Mark Magruder. When you include behind-the-scenes folks like costume and lighting, there will be as many as 60 Sweet Briar students involved in the production.

“[That’s] ten percent of our population, which is a lot,” Magruder said. “There’s going to be a good thirty-seven people dancing, which is probably the biggest one we’ve had in many, many years.”

Although the concert will include many group and solo dances, most choreographed by students, Pham’s routine immediately piqued her professor’s interest. “She’s doing this really cool thing on plastic bags and how we’re knee deep and beyond in plastic bags,” Magruder said.

Pham said she came up with the idea for the dance last summer. At the grocery stores she frequents in her hometown of Tigard, Ore., many people use reusable, canvas bags or brown paper bags instead of the plastic bags that are more common in this area.

It got the fledgling environmentalist thinking. “It doesn’t sound like a lot, but when you’re using a grocery bag — a canvas one — you can carry about four plastic grocery bags of food in one canvas bag and you can use it ten million times,” she said.

“So, I was just doing that all summer and my goal was to see how long I could go without using a single plastic bag. The only plastic bags I ever used were for produce, which was a pretty big feat for [me], and I thought that was pretty cool.”

As her dance routine has developed this fall, Pham says what started out as an “awareness piece” has turned into more of a “personal issue” with plastic bags being a symptom of a bigger environmental crisis.

“It’s about how now environmentalists are just sort of like up to their necks in environmental issues,” she said. “They don’t know how to solve them, how to start, and nothing they do is making a big difference. It’s because there’s just so much of it. So now the plastic bags are just one environmental issue and the piece is about many.”

In rehearsals, Pham said she is using 50 to 75 bags “just to keep it minimal while rehearsing. My goal is one hundred, maybe two hundred. There’s a section where I have a couple of fans and they just get blown on stage all at once … so they’ll be in and out throughout the piece.”

Pham also will use the bags as costumes. “I’ll have one that’s on my arm that I can’t really get off for half the piece and I have two that are tied around my feet and. They’re like little slippers, plastic bag slippers.

“I have a section where I can’t really dance or move around or stand up and fall. I have to walk around with them on me, like they’re a part of me now. That part’s about a habit, like you can’t shake off a habit; that you’re stuck with them now.”

Magruder is impressed with his student’s ingenuity. “[It’s] a wonderful use of props,” he said. “She gets inside of the bags, and uses them as costumes and instruments.

“I think she’s really going to make people think about the environmental degradation that’s going on with plastic bags. … Of course were just killing our environment with these things. She’s using both of her of majors to put together this really brilliant piece.”

When she graduates, Pham plans to be a conservationist, working with environmental issues. Although she is unsure how, or if, dance will fit into her future, she has enjoyed the opportunity to express her views on the stage.

“I like doing arts of all sorts,” she said, “and so it’s really important to me to be able to express my life and my other views and whatnot. I’m also very political and [want] to express that stuff in an artistic way.

“I think that to me art is a really expressive way to make a point or to affect someone’s opinion about something, and so I really like doing that right now. I really don’t see myself doing that in the future for too long, but maybe for a little while.”

For more information on the Fall Dance Concert, contact Magruder at 381-6150.