It was all thrills and excitement for 140 West Geauga High School students at Walt Disney’s Magic Kingdom Amusement Park March 25.
It was all thrills and excitement for 140 West Geauga High School students at Walt Disney’s Magic Kingdom Amusement Park March 25.
The Wolverine Marching Band had the honor of entertaining the masses in the Magic Kingdom with a very special parade over spring break.
“The West Geauga Marching Band had a great experience in Disney. We had a fantastic parade performance, participated in a recording and dance studio workshop and had beautiful Florida weather every day,” school band Director Jason Branch said in an interview April 5.
The students were afforded free time to visit several of the Disney parks, including Hollywood Studios, Magic Kingdom and Epcot during their stay and also made a stop at Universal Studios before returning home, according to a district press release.
It has been a long-time tradition every four years for the district to visit the Magic Kingdom, Branch said.
“I have taken the band to Disney in the 2011-2012, 2015- 2016, 2019-2020 and the 2023-2024 school years. The director before me had also taken them every four years, so it is an ‘inherited tradition’ dating back to the 1990s,” he said. “We began planning the trip in January of 2023, so a little over a year in the works, and for the students’ band practice, many hours of music and marching practice to get them ready for the performance.”
A few highlights of the trip included a dance studio workshop for the Wolverettes, where they met a professional Disney dance instructor to learn about performance techniques and were taught several dance sequences performed to a custom Disney soundtrack.
Band students in the brass, woodwind and percussion sections spent time in a Disney band recording studio workshop learning the fundamentals of sight reading and performance through the lens of a professional studio musicians.
The WGMB then recorded several Disney songs that were mixed/produced into a video montage aligning with clips from a Disney movie. Music included pieces from “Indiana Jones,” “Star Wars,” “The Haunted Mansion” and “Moana.”
Branch expressed the difficulty of picking just one fun moment during the trip.
“Every day is an adventure and there were too many fun moments. For many of our students, they had never been to a ‘Buc-ees’ gas station/travel center and some of them spent all of their souvenir money on Buc-ee’s merchandise,” Branch said.
He called the opportunity of bringing students to a unique performance and to display their talents a highlight of his teaching career.
“In the past 15 years, this is my seventh trip with the West Geauga band program and we have traveled to Disney World, Chicago, Columbus/The Ohio State University and as far as London, England,” he said. “Every trip is full of unique and amazing memories and we are thrilled to be able to provide such opportunities for our band students.”
