One of the most important aspects of a school dance to perfect is the decorations, which help bring the theme together and transform the school into another world. This year, Sam Barlow’s Leadership team executed yet another successful Snowball dance with the theme Moonlight Jungle.
When dance themes are pitched, each Leadership student creates a mood board for their theme idea with decoration inspiration photos and a color scheme. Each student’s mood board is printed and placed around the room so the class can have a gallery walk and vote on their favorite theme. Decorations are the main factor when deciding on a theme; Mrs. Anderson, the Leadership teacher, said it can be difficult to choose a theme, and many good themes are passed on because “there are a lot of themes that are good, but it’s difficult to make decorations for them.”
Leadership students took heavy inspiration from the movie Rio when choosing and finalizing the Moonlight Jungle theme after seeing other schools use the theme for their Homecoming dance. To make it more formal, they created a theme that is moody and mature and simplified the color scheme to green with accents of mauve, purple, and pink. Mrs. Anderson also noted the Leadership team “really wanted to avoid the child’s birthday party look, so no animals,” and there would be a heavy focus on jungle foliage to emphasize the formal theme.
The Leadership team has spent the past few weeks creating decorations, supplemented with some store-bought decorations. The Leadership class split into small groups, assigned different areas of the school to decorate, like the entrance, photo booth, and dance floor. Each group has its own pet project the students are excited to showcase, like the photo booth backdrop and the entrance’s balloon arches. Many of the decorative elements are upcycled from past school dances and transformed into a new decorative piece that matches the theme and immerses students when they enter the school, and helps keep ticket prices low, so all Barlow students have the opportunity to come to Snowball. The upcycling also helps differentiate this year’s Snowball from previous dances, along with the heavy focus on green in the color scheme, which Mrs. Anderson says she has never done before.
Another differentiating feature from previous dances is the art on the entrance windows, something Barlow’s National Art Honors Society is known for creating throughout the school. After seeing the autumn art on the windows created by NAHS, Mrs. Anderson went to Mrs. Gibson, Barlow’s Art teacher and head of NAHS, and asked if NAHS could paint the windows again for Snowball, to which NAHS happily agreed. Mrs. Gibson said Leadership “gave us a lot of creative freedom,” within the theme. Maggie Zielinski, the NAHS President, said the artists don’t often plan out what they will paint on the windows; instead, “We have ideas and then do what feels right in the moment.”
This year’s Snowball was a great success for the Leadership team. The decorations they created pulled everything together to immerse students in the Moonlight Jungle theme and give them wonderful, lasting memories for years to come.
