Lickskillet will make its debut Sunday.
There also will be skits written by Hannah Kerkhof, Kate Mau and others, siblings Conner and Brooklyn Covey will perform together and other drama, choir and band students will show off their talents.
Plus, paintings and refurbished furniture completed by Hope Cockerham, drawings and a three-dimensional piece done by Kash Siefker and other works by introductory to advanced art students will be on display.
Trinity Lutheran High School is presenting its inaugural Fine Arts Festival on Sunday at the school, 7120 N. County Road 875E, Seymour.
The art show, also featuring work from students at St. John’s Sauers Lutheran School and Immanuel Lutheran School in Seymour and St. Peter’s Lutheran School in Columbus, will start at 1 p.m., and the FurnARTure Auction will go from 1 to 3 p.m. with proceeds benefiting Trinity’s Art Club. Both will be in the commons.
Finally, at 3 p.m., the variety show will start in the Bollinger Athletic Complex, featuring Trinity students in music and drama classes.
Festival admission is free, and the event is open to the public.
It all came about when TLHS art teacher Carrie Adler realized Seymour Community School Corp. wasn’t planning to have its annual art show, which in the past has featured students from all Seymour schools, including Trinity.
“This is like our state finals or our sectional for our art kids,” she said. “They don’t have a platform, so this is their one time that they would be seen by anybody who wants to come and see them, which is really nice. They’ve worked on all of these things all year long, and they see them one at a time, but then you get this body of work, and they are like, ‘Wow! We really did all of this art this year.'”
Lickskillet is a band that recently came up with its name and includes juniors Caleb Williams, Jacob Sabotin and Kade Hill and sophomore Sage Broughton, who are all in Leah Schneider’s guitar class.
They will perform a song written by Williams, “We’ll Get There.”
“I started writing on my own a couple of years ago. When I just started playing guitar, it kind of came naturally, just a good way to express myself,” he said. “I’ve been playing guitar since freshman year. I started playing in here, and I’ve always loved country music and kind of just led me to learn it.”
The foursome came together in guitar class. The band is named after a road where Williams used to live.
“We were just talking about playing and came up with a little riff. We were going to do a song in the variety show, but then that (song he wrote) kind of came about, so we decided we were going to do our own song,” Williams said.
So far, they have only played for Trinity Principal Clayton Darlage, and Broughton said that went pretty good.
“He liked it,” Broughton said. “We got some compliments from people walking by.”
On Sunday, they will have a much larger audience.
“It will just be fun to do, good group of guys, good experience,” Broughton said. “You never know, maybe we’ll start something.”
Schneider said that’s one neat thing about her music classes. Students could find they are good at singing or playing an instrument and turn it into a passion or even a career.
“We can actually get them skills where they go out in the world,” she said. “Part of the class is to get them so that they can go out after this and actually put a group together. We learn how to read music, tech. They do the whole thing.”
She’s impressed with Lickskillet and the other students who have stepped up to perform. She said the school has had a variety show for 20 years, but the Fine Arts Festival is new.
“What has been nice is to coordinate it with the art department and the drama department,” Schneider said. “I’m a firm believer of interdisciplinary and getting the whole school involved in areas.”
On the drama side, Kerkhof wrote three skits and received help from another student in directing them.
“In high school, everyone across the country reads the same books, so we wrote summaries that kind of change the plot of ‘Romeo and Juliet,’ ‘The Scarlet Letter’ and ‘The Great Gatsby,’ which are just some of the favorites that we learn here at Trinity, and then we added a fun little twist to some of them,” the junior said.
“The Scarlet Letter” was made into a musical, so that skit will have some songs.
“We wrote the skits first, and so then we have been casting them with some of our friends that are in our drama class or in our choir class that we have here, too,” Kerkhof said. “Recently, we’ve been working on blocking and staging, so then everyone can have a good performance for the variety show.”
Mau wrote a skit, “Trinity Idol,” that’s a spoof on the television competition shows “American Idol” and “America’s Got Talent.”
“It’s going to be like a mini talent show inside a talent show,” the freshman said. “It’s pretty cool. We have some people singing in there, some people doing dances, just stuff like that.”
Both girls are in Jayme Lowe’s first period drama class and are glad to showcase their talents at the festival.
“I feel like especially in high school, there’s a lot of focus put on sports, and one of the great things about Trinity is we’re all in sports, but we’re also all in art and other extracurriculars that we do,” Kerkhof said. “Variety show is just really good because people get to come out and show off their individual talents. … The whole school comes, and it’s a really supportive atmosphere for the creative outlet that they have.”
For those interested in one of the arts as a career, Mau said the festival is a good opportunity to get a feel for it.
“It’s a really good chance to get the students out there with the teachers’ help,” she said. “I’m really excited for it. I think it’s going to be a really good variety show.”
Lowe said the show is great because it’s very student-driven.
“I’m really more of a facilitator,” she said. “In our drama class, we work together to come up with the concepts for all of these skits, and the kids really have been the ones hunting down props and costumes and running their rehearsals for their individual skits that they are in charge of. … I get them the materials, and they make the art.”
For the art side, Cockerham, a junior, has a few paintings entered in the show and three pieces of furniture in the silent auction.
She said she is self-taught, having watched speed drawing videos on YouTube before starting to draw. Now, all of these years later, her work will be featured in the Fine Arts Festival.
“I think it’s really fun because we’ve got different stuff together and it’s not just one thing, it’s not just the same picture over and over again like some schools will have all of us do the same picture,” Cockerham said. “That way, we get to have our own variety and style.”
Siefker has had a longer interest in art.
“I’ve just been doodling for as long as I can remember,” the senior said. “One of our family members did caricatures, and after I saw him do that, apparently, my dad said I started doing actual faces and forms and stuff. Apparently, I just started doing actual recognizable figures, so I just kept going with it. I’m hoping to make a career out of graphic design.”
He’s excited for others to see his work at the festival.
“I like it because it exposes what we’re actually doing throughout the year,” Siefker said. “Last year, we didn’t get to have (an art show), so all of the projects just kind of flew under the radar and nobody really talked about them. This way, you can show your family and your friends what you’ve been up to and what you’re capable of doing and what you’ve learned.”
Adler said the art will remain on display through Trinity’s honors program so students are able to see it.
Looking forward, she said she plans to reach out to all of the schools again in the fall so they have more advance notice about next spring’s festival.
“This is our first go, and it would be real nice to make this a thing for us,” she said.