Return of Arts Night

By LIVIA WOOD ‘19

This evening, April 26th, 2019, students and faculty will gather in the Kellner Performing Arts Center to see a diverse collection of student performances and displays from performing arts, visual arts, and music classes at Arts Night. The event will begin at 7 p.m. with a performance from Milton’s Orchestra. For an hour and a half, Orchestra, Dance, Drama, Project Story: Narrative Journalism and Performance, Spoken Word Poetry class, Creative Writing, and Hamlet will be performing simultaneously in three rotating rounds; students can choose which presentations they’d like to attend. To conclude the evening, Improv will perform for approximately one hour. Throughout the night, visual arts classes will also have pieces on display in the Commons. To current students, Arts Night might seem like a novelty—a new SAA activity to showcase performing and visual art classes. However, tonight’s Arts Night is actually a revival of a beloved arts tradition at Milton.

According to Louise Mundinger, a music teacher who has taught at Milton since 1986, Arts Night began decades ago. Kelli Edwards, chair of the Performing Arts department, says that Arts Night was “really a celebration of all the arts at Milton—visual, performing, and music—and it was centered around the Arts program classes.” These classes include introductory arts courses such as Drama or Photography, which students can take starting in their sophomore year, but also encompass advanced courses that have a prerequisite course students must take, such as Improv or Advanced Drawing. According to Edwards, Arts Night used to be more of a “weekend-long thing” than a single evening; she references rumors she’s heard about Arts Nights of years past, including “Mr. Cheney bringing in an elephant” and “a parade down Centre Street.” This year, Arts Night will occur on a much smaller scale, but nonetheless the evening promises energy.

None of the faculty can quite recall why, around eight years ago, Arts Night stopped happening. Edwards cites the lack of an Arts Program chair; the event is fueled by contributions from the Visual Arts department, the Performing Arts department, and the Music department, and historically one faculty held the position of overseer of all three departments. All the arts faculty would convene to plan Arts Night; when the position of Arts program chair began to dissolve, Edwards says, the event did too. Mundinger credits the size of the event as its downfall: she says that Arts Nights were “really huge, and then they got to be too huge and then they sort of collapsed.” Peter Parisi, Milton Performing Arts teacher, suggests that, perhaps, “one year the calendar was such that [it] couldn’t fit it in, and then [Milton] just stopped doing it.” Although no one can agree on Arts Night’s collapse, Edwards, Mundinger, and Parisi agree that the evening’s revival was a group effort.

Discussions about resurrecting Arts Night began last spring, Edwards says. According to Parisi, he, Ian Torney ‘82, and Adrian Anantawan had a conversation about bring the evening back, and then brought up the topic to their respective departments. Louise Mundinger volunteered to be the event’s coordinator. According to Mundinger, the evening that this year’s Arts Night falls on is “traditionally one of the music concert nights,” and this year, Mr. Anantawan offered to incorporate the arts programs as well. This year, Arts Night is on the same evening as Science Symposium. “In the absence of Arts Night,” Edwards says, “Science Symposium sprang up.” Faculty wanted Arts Night to be in collaboration with Science Symposium and in celebration of students in these Science and Art programs. Mundinger thinks that Science Symposium and Arts Night will complement each other well: “this is the place where you can knit together all the stuff that you’ve been thinking about… [Mundinger has] gone over to the Symposium and [seen] the tremendous creativity in the poster sessions and then kids are so excited about it.” Parisi agrees that Arts Night’s succession of Science Symposium works in students’ favor; it’s an evening “when [Milton has] a critical mass of people already here on campus: faculty, students, parents, they’re here for the Symposium, they’re here for Orchestra, [they] might as well stay for some… stuff from classes.”

Similarly to the old iteration of Arts Night, this evening will be a celebration of Arts Program classes, and it will give students in these classes an opportunity to showcase their hard work. Unlike past Arts Nights, however, tonight has brand new material; Parisi says that his Hamlet class has cut down Shakespeare’s Hamlet into a fifteen minute play for performance. His Project Story class is “doing something they’ve never done before. They’ve interviewed folks anonymously about their secrets, and their secrets are so powerful, and [they] have come up with a way of performing that [Parisi has] never seen at Milton before.” Above all, according to Parisi, Arts Night is a chance for “kids who might never perform any other time or explain their art at any other time” to do so. Dessert will be provided for all who attend Arts Night and stay for the whole evening.

Generally, participating students are excited; Alyssa Dunn and Jack Panarese ‘19, both in Improv, are both looking forward to “bring[ing] [the evening] home,” as Panarese puts it. This is only Improv’s third opportunity to perform—the class had an assembly and an evening show in January. Panarese admits being a “little nervous”; after all, according to Edwards, “it is a performance, so the stakes are always high.” Dunn looks forward to seeing “what everybody else has to perform or present and then be[ing] able to perform for them.” Faculty hope that the evening will truly be the culmination of a year’s worth of hard work and fun in Arts classes, and they are excited for an evening dedicated to celebrating art. Mundinger “love[s] walking around Kellner, when you can hear tap dancers coming out of the dance studio and then there are singers coming out of the chorus room and then there’s somebody playing a tuba down in the orchestra room and a guitar player over there and then there’s jazz over there.” She is describing the spirit of Arts Night.