One of the defining characteristics of our community is a robust commitment to the fine and performing arts. Unlike many schools which offer arts classes only in quarterly or trimester rotations, at Seven Hills students are taught, from a very early age, by arts specialists in year-long performance-based courses in visual arts, music, and theater. As a result, the school calendar is replete with performance opportunities for students of all ages.

Last Friday, Lotspeich’s third, fourth, and fifth graders mounted a fabulous instrumental concert for a capacity crowd in Founders Hall. The third graders performed on recorders, xylophones, and handheld percussion instruments, the fourth graders on ukuleles, xylophones, percussion instruments and a chorus (including stirring rendition of “Stand by Me”). And the concert culminated with each of the fifth grade homerooms performing challenging arrangements of eight songs scored for a handbell choir. There was a staggering array of rhythms and dynamics, including a complex arrangement of the Pachelbel Canon, which required miraculous coordination and teamwork.

Then Thursday afternoon, we gathered in The Schiff Center for a charming production of “No Strings Attached,” a musical rendition of the Pinocchio story. In a plotline that was deeply engrossing for a Lower School audience (and their parents), Pinocchio, a marionette skillfully crafted by “his father,” the woodcarver Geppetto, longs to become a “real boy” and to achieve the adult-like freedom implied by the story’s metaphorical title.  

To earn his independence, he must demonstrate his ability to assume responsibility, measured, at least in this story, by a willingness to go cheerfully to school. He falls victim to a series of temptations, evading school several times: to attend a marionette theater, to fall in with a band of thieves, or later, with an army of misfit truants, who lure him from his studies to “the Land of Toys.” 

His guides, throughout the story, are a faithful cricket and the lovely purple fairy who, in the closing twist, eventually becomes Pinocchio’s wife, presumably after a life of dedicated attention to his studies. 

It is a truly bizarre story that ends, unaccountably, in the belly of a giant shark, but charmingly and energetically performed by Doherty’s Unit III students, under the energetic and skillful direction of Maria Eynon and Natalie Bird.

What a pleasure it is to see our students’ palpable excitement about performing in front of large and appreciative audiences! So, stay tuned, right after break, for one of the highlights of our arts calendar, the all-school celebration called Arts Alive! Here is the schedule.

Until then, have a wonderful break!