Sweet Briar’s Fall Dance Concert will be held at 8 p.m. Friday, Nov. 7 and Saturday, Nov. 8 in Murchison Lane Auditorium. A third performance, a solo concert by Sweet Briar dance program director Mark Magruder, will be held at 4 p.m. Sunday, Nov. 9.

Magruder’s solo concert, “Kinetic Playground,” features his original sculpture, choreography and music. The show’s elements were largely produced during an intensive one-week stay at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts while he was on sabbatical.

Mark Magruder will perform a solo dance concert, “Kinetic Playground,” featuring his original choreography, artwork and music.The concert promises to be grand in scale as Magruder dances through, over and under the sculpture – an enormous 16-foot-wide by 8½-foot-tall ladder-like creation that he plans to remove from his second-floor home studio through the window.

“It’s scary being on that thing,” Magruder said, not entirely joking.

He also will perform the compositions he wrote for the concert, featuring a number of instruments including bass, electric and acoustic guitars, harmonica, saxophone and flute.

Magruder spoke appreciatively of the time he spent at the VCCA, where he logged 14-hour days in the studio. It enabled him to write much of the score for the solo concert, choreograph the dances and develop the concept for the sculpture.

“For me it was such a productive time,” he said. “To get a whole evening of work is extraordinary.”

For the Friday and Saturday evening shows, about 35 student dancers will perform works by dance faculty, students, and guest choreographers Martha Faesi and Samantha Angus-Arbaugh ’05.

Faesi, the director of dance at the Virginia School of the Arts, teaches ballet at Sweet Briar. She is choreographing senior dance majors Nikki Pham, Mary Susan Sinclair-Kuenning and Emily Brown in a work that captures each dancer’s “predilection for movement,” Faesi said. The result highlights their individual strengths through short solos within the whole.

Faesi said the effect juxtaposes Brown’s intensity and drama, Sinclair-Kuenning’s “strong and bold” style and Pham’s intricate “filigree”-like dancing.

Angus-Arbaugh recently completed a Master of Fine Arts in dance at Sam Houston State University. She teaches at Valley Dance Theatre in Waynesboro and Staunton and is starting up a company, ArbaughArts, with her husband, Alex. Alex, a guitarist and songwriter, is composing the music for her choreography and will play it live during the performance.

Themes for students’ choreography range from friendship and the ups and downs of everyday life to junior Courtney Hurt’s circus act adapted to the Sweet Briar stage.

Hurt attended a two-month circus school at the National Institute of Circus Arts in Australia last summer. While training in aerial acts, hand balancing and hula hoops, she also studied the history of circus during the Victorian era. She became interested in how audiences perceived the “sort of grotesque, sort of creepy” elements of circus entertainment in much the same way passersby can’t help gawking at a traffic accident.

She hopes to create for viewers a sense of watching a circus spectacle. Six dancers will represent various roles – two contortionists, an acrobat, a slightly creepy clown, a tightrope walker, and Hurt performing with hula hoops and as a hand balancer.

Life’s weighty obligations inspired junior Beth Thomasson’s work. “I wanted to do a piece where the dancers’ wrists were tied together, making the movement more difficult. I wanted to explore dancing where you weren’t free to use your arms,” she said.

Yet, through one of her dancers, she also allows an escape from the responsibilities that make us feel tied down. “She helps the other dancers free themselves from the things that they are constantly forced to do,” Thomasson said.

Sophomore Sara Buttine will evoke the contemplative mood of campfire gathering in Sun River, Ore., last summer. Her inspiration was “listening to the wind and to the horses, bugs and the crackling of the fire. It was the feeling on how you become relaxed and your mind becomes free as it goes through all the hardships, excitements, frustration and confusion going on in your life,” she said.

Her dancers tell stories around a figurative fire, but they help one another, too, at times being there to “save them from doing something they shouldn’t.”

Magruder is planning to contribute two works for the Friday and Saturday shows, including performing “Last Bow” in a tribute to the late Petrus Bosman. The other is a duet titled “Two Tied,” which he choreographed last summer for the Flux Dance Project of Scottsdale, Ariz. Pham and Brown will perform the piece.

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