MITCHELL — The Mitchell High School marching band took its show on the road last weekend, but it wasn’t a winter competition at an indoor venue in South Dakota. It wasn’t even in the upper Midwest.
The band traveled over 1,600 miles to Orlando, Florida, where the renowned local marching band performed in front of thousands of vacationers at the Magic Kingdom at the Walt Disney World Resort. The band returned from the six-day trip on Tuesday.
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“The students did great,” Joel Van Peursem, director for the band, told the Mitchell Republic. “Every four years the high school band travels on a trip. It’s gone all over, but the last few years it’s been down to Disney World in Orlando. We go down there, do some team bonding things and we explore the park. This year we actually got to march on Valentine’s Day.”
The group, which included about 94 student musicians and color guard members, plus support staff, spent about 30 hours on three charter buses to make the trip. The band makes such trips about once every four years, with Florida being a popular choice for the experience, although the band has in the past traveled to other locales like New York City.
The band marched down Main Street USA, a section of the Magic Kingdom known for its nostalgic, turn-of-the-20th century look based on Walt Disney’s hometown. The area welcomes around 50,000 visitors every day, according to statistics, though Van Peursem suspects there were far more people there the day the band performed, possibly due to it being Valentine’s Day.
It was a bigger audience than the band is used to seeing, and it was one that hailed from all over the world.
“I think the kids enjoyed the sheer amount of people that were there watching. It was tough to tell, but doing a Google search, it looked like the Magic Kingdom had about 80,000 to 100,000 people there that day,” Van Peursem said. “The streets were just totally lined while we were marching.”
The band performed and marched to “Hooked On A Feeling,” a 1974 cover tune made famous by the group Blue Swede and popularized recently in the film “Guardians of the Galaxy.”
The event is non-competitive — it is strictly performative — so the trip is a great way for students to show off their skills to a crowd that is unfamiliar with the band, and to do it without the pressure of having to score high for judges or to worry about their placing. It is also a great chance for many of the students to expand their horizons beyond the borders of the South Dakota region.
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One perk of making such a long trip to perform is visiting places members of the band had never been before.
“It was the first time (for some of them) being in Florida. We got to go to Cocoa Beach on Monday — and it was, for a lot of them, the first time they’ve ever been to an ocean,” Van Peursem said.
Students hold fundraisers for the trip, though it is not required that students participate. Upperclassmen are polled prior to each trip to gauge where the group would prefer to go for that particular trip, so the destination for each trip can change depending on the preference of the juniors and seniors. Time restrictions and travel costs are figured into making a final choice.
Van Peursem expects that cycle to continue into the future, as the trip is not just beneficial for its unique performance opportunities, but also for the chance it provides for students to view the world far away from their home state. That’s something he and other marching band boosters plan to support for years to come.
“A lot of these kids probably aren’t going to get the opportunity to travel that far again, so for them to be able to see different cultures, different ethnicities, I think that is super-important. I also think it’s really important for them to get outside of South Dakota, see other parts of the world,” Van Peursem said. ”It was a really, really great trip.”
[ Erik Kaufman](https://www.mitchellrepublic.com/Erik Kaufman)
By [Erik Kaufman](https://www.mitchellrepublic.com/Erik Kaufman)
Erik Kaufman joined the Mitchell Republic in July of 2019 as an education and features reporter. He grew up in Freeman, S.D., graduating from Freeman High School. He graduated from the University of South Dakota in 1999 with a major in English and a minor in computer science. He can be reached at ekaufman@mitchellrepublic.com.