Another Fantastic Fall Arts Festival at Buxton (in spite of the Swine Flu!)
Fall Arts choral performance
On November 20–22, we hosted our annual Fall Arts Festival. Although some of you may remember when Buxton hosted this event over Thanksgiving itself, we now put on the complete Fall Arts program the weekend before and allow students to leave with their parents for a Thanksgiving break right afterwards. Regardless of when the weekend happens, it is always an amazing, surprising, heartening, and well-attended event.
This year, Fall Arts was an especially important community gathering, as we had just gotten over our version of the Swine Flu Epidemic of ’09. In the weeks preceding the festival, we had had dozens of cases of swine flu, with kids who could going home to be cared for by Mom and Dad, and kids who couldn’t go home being cared for here. We were able to offer the vaccine (finally!), but only after many students and faculty members had already succumbed.
In any case, on the Sunday before Fall Arts, everyone was miraculously better and back at school, and we had a final week to pull everything together. And the results were terrific: The fall play was the screwball comedy Room Service, and was performed on both Friday and Saturday nights. The Drama II class performed a series of monologues by authors ranging from Samuel Becket to Beth Henley. The Orchestra performed works by Mozart and none other than our musical director, David Denhard. The Chorus sang the “Lacrimosa” from Mozart’s Requium and Vivaldi’s Gloria. There were a number of small musical ensembles, from singing trios to electric guitar solos, to original compositions played and sung by the composer and friends. The new art show featured a number of large oil paintings—both abstract and realistic— as well as gorgeous, colorful ceramics, intriguing black-and-white photographs (still produced in the darkroom, the old-fashioned way!), wood and metal sculptures, and drawings, watercolors, and collages.
Fall Arts African drumming
We also had a performance of Balinese music and dance by the students who attended our Buxton in Bali program this summer and those they are now mentoring. That was followed by a rousing performance of African drumming and dance: a short preview of the Drum & Dance extravaganza that is such a highlight of the Spring Arts Festival.
The best part of Fall Arts is finding out new and surprising things about students: discovering that your star English student is also an amazing painter; seeing a painfully shy sophomore get up on stage full of energy and confidence; seeing through a photographic lens a part of someone you had never been privy to before. Buxton is never more inspiring than it is at these moments.