By Mikey McGuire
Center Grove Indoor Percussion left the floor feeling like heroes after closing the book on their 2025 program “Faded Heroes.”
Exploring ideas of comic book heroism and the meaning behind our love of superheroes, Center Grove made an indelible impact on finals night. When designing the show, director Josh Torres and designer Sarah Huffman knew they had to go big.
“ It has to be larger than life. It has to have that epic quality.” Torres said. “So that was something first and foremost we were talking about. To try to bring people into that world and make it feel believable.”
“Faded Heroes” was one of the more visually striking shows of the season in the Percussion Scholastic World Class. The show’s dark and grimy color palette gave way to vibrant hues by the show’s end. With an epic, superhero score to accompany the visuals, Torres and Huffman had everything they needed to leave an impression.
“ When we began it, it kind of started with the music,” Torres said. “We were looking for music that would encapsulate the superhero theme, but not necessarily be over the top like the ‘Superman’ theme. We wanted to do something that was a little more modern than that.”
“ One of the first things I brought to the table was ‘Spider-Man: Into The Spider Verse’ just because it’s so fresh, and she hadn’t seen that. I played her some of the music and talked about a setting of ‘Spider-Man’ with a current day feeling. So we started there, and then she talked about how she really liked that graffiti element. She really liked the idea of a hand-drawn comic and starting there from an aesthetic standpoint,” Torres continued.
Another key element of the show is its main character. Centered around a young boy discovering himself though comic book heroes, Center Grove had a very special opportunity to highlight an accomplished student in their district.
A seventh grader attending the local middle school had recently returned from the national Broadway tour of “Les Misérables,” where he played Gavroche. A connection in the program convinced him to participate, and a key piece of the show fell into place.
“The student had danced in the same studio as Sarah’s daughter. She was friends with the mom. There was some talk of if we took this show, and we created an essential character, perhaps we could entice him to become involved,” Torres said. “ It was definitely built around him for a little bit. But when you have a highly successful student like that, you run into scheduling conflicts. So before he even took the gig, he had told us he was in the middle school play, and he really would like to do it, but their performance is on Saturday afternoon of WGI Finals.”
In order for him to make it to both performances, Center Grove would have to place in the top 10 going into finals – and that’s exactly what they did.
Having such an accomplished performer made the show even more special, and it also inspired the whole ensemble to rise to another level.
“Henry was a seventh grader, and the rest of the students are [high school] freshmen through seniors; he was definitely in uncharted territory around the group. And so I wanted to be careful about how and when I used him as the example,” Torres said, “but towards the end of January we were at a rehearsal at the end of practice I commented how this kid is amazing. Every single rep, he brought the same exact performance energy. There were no off reps. There was no experimenting. It was like a script. He scripted out every facial expression, every step, every motion.”
“So we talked with the students about how this is what being a professional is. You know exactly what it is that you’re going to do, and then you do that every single time. The students caught onto that. They embraced Henry and enjoyed having him around. They realized like, ‘Oh man, we’ve gotta step up our A game,’ so that the judges aren’t telling us that you can’t have one dynamic performer and the rest are not.”
A visually and technically detailed show requires a lot of time and effort on and off the tarp. The performers stepped up to the plate and gave a great performance, but Torres emphasized they couldn’t do all that without the real heroes: band parents.
“ We were only able to bring the vision to life through the help of our amazingly talented parents and artists that we had. We have a parent who’s an art teacher in the program, and she hand painted all of our stage props to fit the black and white hand-drawn color palette,” Torres said. “We also had a staff member who has an artistic background who helped hand paint all the drum wraps to make things look hand-drawn.”
“It all started from an idea, but to make an idea like that come to life, you have to look around and see who is able to help you build that vision,” Torres finished.
About the author:
Mikey McGuire has marched three seasons of WGI percussion, playing cymbals with Crystal Lake Thunder in 2018 and then Pi Percussion in 2019 and 2020. Mikey also writes for missedapexpodcast.com as well as his personal blog mikeymcguiref1.com.
