Arts Festival Week 2019

Solebury School celebrates the arts every spring with a week-long festival, capped off with Workshop Day on the final day. 

Workshop Day

This year's workshops were hosted by professionals, as well as enthusiasts from our own community (teachers, alumni, students, and a parent). They featured:

  • A hip-hop workshop with dancer Tanishq Joshi, whose troupe won 2nd place on World of Dance
  • A music workshop with Rich Scanella who has played, toured or recorded with Bruce Springsteen, Lady Ga Ga, Bon Jovi, Michael Anthony (Van Halen), Adam Duritz (Counting Crows), and Joe Elliot (Def Leopard) 
  • A pottery demonstration with artist Sal Annunziato
  • Watercolor collages with artist Pat Singer
  • Indigo dyeing/shibori with Susan Mania P'11 '13 '20
  • Pet portrait painting with artist Cayley Plutnick
  • Pen, brush, and ink with artist Lindsay Neubeck
  • Paper mache bird-making with artist Lisa Schuler
  • Painting in virtual reality with artist Jane Lafarge-Hamill
  • A talk with artist Ray King on how he uses light as it interacts with glass and optics as an art medium

PLUS: Carter Winter '03 hosted a workshop on acting, writing, and producing; his experiences began at Solebury and continue today in New York City. Michael Melchiondo '18 and Roberto Rodriguez '17 hosted an electronic music demo and taught students how to loop sounds. Teacher Hanna Howe taught knitting and photography teacher Kelli Abdoney hosted a photograms workshop. Our student workshops spanned tie dye (Amel Ouiji '20) to lighting design for dance parties (Jason Burns '19) to Chinese brush and ink calligraphy (Maria Sun '21) to origami (Nils Nyberg '21) to digital illustration (James Riley '19) to screenwriting (Kiara Fox '20). 

 

More Events Throughout the Week

A Coffeehouse concert kicked off Arts Festival Week, and our Elite Ensemble and Master Singers performed, as well. A group of student musicians also spent the day at MorningStar Studios to record with Grammy-winning engineer Glenn Barrett. 

Jeremy Kipp Walker, who runs Independent Production for Netflix, video-chatted from Los Angeles with our filmmaking students. (Jeremy is the son of Solebury alum John Walker '63.) "This is an exciting time in filmmaking, more content than ever is being made," he said. And he means it; he oversees more than 50 films per year for Netflix. Jeremy talked about Netflix and the business at large, how he started out in the business, the specifics of his current job, and offered his advice for our students.

At our all-school assembly, Michael Dennis spoke about architecture and urbanism and how they will need to adapt to pressures related to the world's environmental crisis. A principal of Michael Dennis & Associates in Boston and Emeritus Professor of Architecture at MIT, Michael taught Urban Design and Theory.  In 2011, he was awarded the CNU Athena Medal for his contributions to urbanism. He has lectured widely and is a published author.

Check out our 2018 Arts Festival Week