Last week, Grasshopper, the annual fall talent show at Andover, released its line-up for performances featuring student talent. Performers from SLAM x Drumline, Indigo, Yorkies + Azure, Downbeat, and Photon Flow Arts Club gave behind the scenes insights on their performances and shared their interpretations of this year’s theme, “Extravagance.”
SLAM x Drumline:
Silvia Ng ’23
“To me, extravagance means out of the ordinary and over the top. Our Grasshopper performance fits perfectly into the theme of extravagance because SLAM is having a never-done-before collaboration with Drumline. Combining SLAM’s rhythmic stepping and choreography with Drumline’s thundering beats and tricks, our SLAM x Drumline performance is going to raise the bar for extravagance.”
Yorkies + Azure:
Phoebe Adams ’22
“This year, Azure and Yorkies decided to do a combined performance—we’re going to sing ‘Feeling Good’ by Nina Simone… [The song] talks about feeling good and a brand new day with a bird flying high, which applies to the experience of 2020 and coming out of the pandemic… It doesn’t just tie in the 1920s themes of jazz, but it also applies to the 2021 experience.”
Sean Meng ’22
“Grasshopper is something that the entire school looks forward to. It’s not only important to the [Theatre and Dance] department—it’s important to the entire school. [As] a place to really show off the arts, music, [and] dance, we want to raise the energy. We want to raise people’s spirits.”
Indigo:
Dylan Oh ’23
“I think that… the theme of extravagance is about how we all work on our image and we all have our social lives, but under that there’s this layer of drowning in drama and school work. Extravagance is like a façade. It shows the contrast between how we live and how we show ourselves.”
Downbeat:
Kate Horton ’22
“Grasshopper is one of the few events on campus in which the entire student body is excited to celebrate the arts. A lot of the other performances either have smaller audiences or not as much hype around it. Grasshopper is very big and very well-known across campus, so everyone runs to get a ticket for it. I want people to walk away thinking, ‘Wow. They were so cool. That was amazing.’”
Photon Flow Arts Club:
Josie Banson ’22
“[To me,] ‘extravagance’ also means being able to fully show off your skills with flair and style, which I think is a great way to celebrate all the artistic talents here at Andover. Every group and the tech team will have put so much energy into these performances and we all have a lot of pride in what we do—that’s why the theme of ‘extravagance’ is very fitting in giving us the perfect stage to show it off to our audience.”
