Kemper Auditorium was filled with spectators for last Saturday’s Abbot Cabaret, a student-driven showcase featuring a wide range of performances. The program included orchestral arrangements, K-pop choreography, and martial arts demonstrations, providing students a platform to debut new ensembles and present independent projects to the campus community.
Bruce Ru ’28 and the Fanfare Festival Orchestra opened the evening with an arrangement for chamber ensemble and solo erhu of “Galloping War Horses,” a well-known Chinese instrumental piece. Ru said that Fanfare, formed earlier this winter, was created to expand performance opportunities for high school musicians.
“It is insanely painful to know the amount of talent that is out there and how little opportunity there is for high school students to get experience as a soloist with an orchestra, to conduct an orchestra, and to compose original music for an orchestra. These are opportunities that normally would require students to win a major competition or to pay four or five figures to hire musicians. So it is not feasible for lots of people. By forming [Fanfare], we definitely wanted a high profile opportunity to have a debut. Abbot Cabaret came up, and we thought that was the perfect way to get our first performance in,” said Ru.
The martial arts club performed a demonstration that included Taekwondo, karate, board breaking, splits, and choreographed sparring. Celine Lee ’28 described the group’s preparation process.
“The first part was choreographing the demonstration, which was done by Erin [Lee ’27], Satabhisha [Sarkar ’27], and a little bit by me. Then we looked for people who were interested in doing the demo. After that, we started practicing a lot. We met once or twice a week to practice, teach everyone the demo, and go over the kicks, especially because we had some people who had not done martial arts before,” said Lee.
Allegra Lee ’27, who performed a K-Pop dance duet with Izzy Park ’26, described Abbot Cabaret as an accessible performance opportunity for students outside of established groups.
“Official dance groups like Fusion, Hypno, or Blue Shot will automatically sign up to do ADF and Grasshopper. But for people who are not in those official groups and still want to perform, [Abbot Cabaret] is a great way to showcase talents that might not be seen in bigger shows. It is also a stepping stone for people who are just starting to explore the performing arts and want something that is still big but somewhat lower stakes,” said Lee.
Chance Hernandez ’29 attended the event to support his peers and celebrate the breadth of talent at Andover. When asked to highlight a specific act, Hernandez pointed to Channel 9, a newly formed band composed of Juniors.
“All of the acts were wonderful and possessed the Andover spirit and energy. Though if I were to spotlight one in particular, I’m going to go with Channel 9 because they really [brought] out the energy of the class of 29, and are just newly formed, so they’re filled with synergy and energy. They get along great and have a really good stage presence. You can tell all of them are not just confident, but enjoy what they’re doing and do it pretty well,” said Hernandez.
Though smaller than some of Andover’s largest productions, Abbot Cabaret drew an audience that Ru described as notably supportive.
“Abbot Cabaret[’s] attendance is a little bit less than one single performance of Grasshopper, but the warmth of the crowd, the loudness of the cheering, and the absolute level of supportiveness really stood out. We could see the crowd was really there, taking time off their penultimate weekend to support all the acts, including us. Instantly, we knew that it was the right choice to have that as our first performance,” said Ru.
