Kinetic concept

By Casey Gillis

Published: November 5, 2008

A taste of Cirque du Soleil is coming to Sweet Briar College this weekend.

Mark Magruder, director of the college’s dance program, will be performing in a solo show called “Kinetic Playground,” which mixes dance, music and art, at 4 p.m. Sunday in the Babcock Fine Arts’ Center’s Murchison Lane Auditorium.

For the show, he’s created a wooden, ladder-like sculpture that is 16 feet long, 8½ feet tall and 7 feet wide. It’s been in the home studio where he built it, and it’s so big that Magruder will have to get it out through the window in time for Sunday’s show.

“I will be dancing in, around, over, under and through it during the course of the concert,” he says, adding that the show will have that Cirque de Soleil feel.

“I’m doing some really very scary things on this sculpture. There’s a little bit of daredevil in it that will keep people on the edge of their seats.”

Magruder was inspired to create the show during a one-week stay at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts — just across the road from the college — when he composed its score, choreographed dances and came up with the idea for the sculpture.

“It was really great to just have that time to work on only art,” he says. “Not only am I a dancer, I’m a musician, and I also do some sculpture, too.”

He says the concert will have a coffeehouse feel at first, with him playing the bass, electric and acoustic guitars, saxophone, flute and harmonica. Then it’ll get theatrical as he starts incorporating dance into the program.

“It’s gonna be kind of a treat for the eyes and the ears.”