Dartmouth High School Marching Band takes its talent to the national stage
DARTMOUTH - For the first time in more than 20 years, a New England high school marching band is heading to Indianapolis for the Grand National Championship. The last school to go was King Phillips Regional High in 2002. This year, the Dartmouth High School Marching Band will be making the trek to Indiana with the hopes of making noise.
The team has won seven straight U.S. Bands National Championships. That competition is mostly teams from the northeast, and now, they will face the best competition in the country.
"Some of the best high school marching bands in the country are located in Texas, and around that area of the southwest," said Calvin Higgins, a senior in the band. "I think it's one of the only things that you can do that you can really achieve almost perfection in."
The team is going to have to be perfect if they want to win. Typically national teams have more than 200 students, and Dartmouth has 92 children, including some middle schoolers.
"You have to have the right students to be able to compete at that level, and we think we have the right students this year," said Ian Flint, music director at Dartmouth High School. "It's not something we've been working on for a few months; it's something we've been working on for years."
The group will be performing a series of songs centered around the world famous street artist Banksy.
"We kind of explore four different pieces of his art, and they're four different emotion sets. It's a play on music at an art gallery but a modern art gallery," said Flint. "It's full costume, so not a typical band uniform. They have makeup on. The whole thing is more like a theater performance put on a football field."
Dartmouth High will make the roughly 16-hour drive to Indiana on Wednesday. If they get past the preliminary round, then the field will be cut from roughly 90 bands to 30.