- Hello, I'm Beth Macmillan and welcome to "Arteffects."

Each school year, right before the holidays, a number of local high schools start preparing for indoor percussion and winter guard programs.

High school musicians make up indoor percussion and fuse music with theatrics.

While students in winter guard, also referred to as color guard, use carefully crafted choreography while using flags, mock rifles, and other props to create a stunning indoor show.

We caught up with students and instructors at McQueen High School in Reno to show you the collective spirit of these young artists across northern Nevada.

(drum thumping) - When I think of indoor percussion, I really think of the cooperation and the exciting moments you have.

- It's joyful.

(drum thumping) - It's engaging.

It takes a lot of dedication.

- It pushes your limits and it's loud.

(drum thumping) - Indoor percussion takes the percussion section from the marching band and creates a show that's just for them.

So there's the battery part of the percussion section and then also the front ensemble with all the mallets and synthesizers, and we've got a bass guitar and drum set.

- In the drum line, typically, you have a snare line, which is just one drum and it's really, really high pitch.

It's got a snare on the bottom.

You have a quad line, which is five or six different drums.

You have a bass drum line, which is the vertical drums.

They're playing side to side.

And we also have a tom line, which is essentially like a snare line except for they don't have quite as difficult music, as much responsibility so that they can focus more on the visual aspect of it.

There's also no drum major or no conductor, which means that all of the communication is done non-verbally player to player, and there's no singular person controlling all the time, which is really, really cool, and makes it a really collective activity for all the students.

- I play snare drum.

(drumsticks tapping) I personally love how vibrant it is.

- The snare drum can be like so technical.

You can be very expressive with it since it's just one drum and you have like your full body movement like left, right, forward, and backwards.

- There's a very strange difficulty when it comes to the tenor drums.

It is six drums, and you have to always play each one almost all the time.

The only thing that's difficult is trying to get the sound out, and there's a lot of technical things that come with it, but I like challenging myself in making the best of what I can.

- I play bass three.

I like it because of how much it stands out and I can have a lot of fun with it.

The bass drums aren't just one drum playing the entire part split between two to five people, in our case, five people for this indoor season.

- We do our auditions right after the fall season.

So as soon as marching band season gets over, we start auditioning for indoor percussion.

And we kind of treat our auditions like clinics.

So the kids come, they learn.

There's a bunch of wind players who had never played percussion before.

They learn at those clinics, and then we place them where we want them.

We start with learning the music.

(lively chiming music) After we learn the music, then we can start to incorporate the drill.

'Cause if you don't have the music down, you can't do the movements with it.

- Sometimes we have to do things individually like bass drums have to learn our parts individually, like all their splits and then bring 'em together.

(upbeat percussive music) We have to learn our choreo individually and then bring it all together.

- From there, we add the props, and then the front ensemble joins us later in the season so we can piece the whole show together from there.

- Our show for this winter is called "Unchained."

It's based off of the idea of the students being puppets and the chains being like their strings pulling them.

- We break free in the first act, and then the more and the more the show goes on, we realize that we were never truly free or unchained.

And at the end of the show, we realize that we are still chained.

- There's like a underlying theme of trying to break free of like the things that hold you back.

- We are given more creative expression with how we can manipulate the chains, how we can manipulate the music itself as like a groove or as like some sort of way for people to feel it.

- Our coaches told us to be extra with it.

In their words, if you feel silly doing it, then you're doing it right.

(upbeat electronic music) - I was the overall program coordinator for the Unchained show where I took the staff ideas for what they wanted to do and then I mapped that out and storyboarded it.

You get to be super creative, and I try to do things that are new.

- I do think the kids really responded well to it.

And I think that once they got to start hearing some of the music and some of the things that Aaron Hines wrote for us, I think it really did a lot to get the kids excited about the season.

(bright music) When we're creating these shows, whether it's for percussion or color guard, it's a collaborative process between me and the coaches.

- We describe color guard as the sport of the arts.

It's a visual performance including dance, flag, and rifle, and saber, and then we throw in drill, and choreography, and all of it together.

- Set, find that angle.

- You learn the dance technique, the different kind of body positions that you're gonna utilize, and just making sure that you're doing it correctly so that you don't hurt anything once you start incorporating different equipment with it.

- I'm normally on flag, and I really, really enjoy being on flag, is probably my favorite equipment.

Such a big piece of equipment, it's like a six-foot long pole, and so you have to learn how to maneuver it in a way that looks not like you're struggling to get it over yourself or you're struggling to toss it, and also making sure that you're like maintaining your space around other people and yourself.

- I do flag, saber, and rifle.

It's definitely really scary to get used to because you're tossing a sword in the air.

Guard definitely comes with injuries, but once you get over that, it's really fun, and to move up and tosses, and to learn different things once you get more advanced.

- Practice is very focused on technique.

The biggest thing in color guard is building a foundation of where, oh, you're just automatically know to keep your feet pointed.

You automatically know to stay in your boundaries for this part with your flag.

You have to have the mindset to be like, "Hey, I'm completely fine with picking up this super heavy piece of equipment and throwing it around."

- It's definitely exhausting, but it's also very stimulating.

You're always focusing and doing something using your brain.

It's not always something that you can go autopilot on.

- Every single aspect of our performance is building into creating a story.

- The show this year is called "Primary," and we are honoring the art of Piet Mondrian, who is a Dutch artist.

- [Student] He was an abstract artist that would do landscapes in the form of squares and primary colors, usually with the black outline.

- He is an artist that has very geometric artwork.

And we are basically a part of the artwork and we're coming to life, and the flags and everything are supposed to show how happy we are to have our color.

- It's one of my favorite shows that we've ever, ever done.

It's just such a cool opportunity for me as an art teacher to tie in what I teach into this extracurricular activity.

Instead of painting or drawing something on paper, they're expressing themselves through their bodies and through the teamwork.

It's creatively fulfilling.

I get to help write a whole show and have it come together.

We have to design the show from the very beginning and say, "This group of people are over here, this group of people are over here," and how you're getting there, how long you spend there, all that kind of stuff.

- That's the big part of it.

Being comfortable with the choreo and the equipment, and then adding your own expression to it, and add that little bit of artistry of your individual performance.

I get to do a bit of rifle in the show.

It's a lot of repetition, but it is really rewarding when we perform the tosses either together or in a ripple.

And the audience gets to see that cleanliness during the performance.

- There's this one specific spot in the show where the rifles do a ripple catch where it's catch, catch, catch, and we have worked a lot to try and get that clean, like repping it over and over again.

And when they finally get it, it's just like, see, I told you you could do it.

I knew you could do it.

(lively music) - Championships is our final performance for the year, where a vast majority of the indoor drum lines and winter guard programs from all over northern Nevada come together and compete to see which groups are the best for the season.

We've got different divisions that they compete in, and so you're ranked within your division based on the size of your program and then also the difficulty of what you're performing.

- You're gonna see the best that those kids can do for that season 'cause it's the last time.

- That's the thing I love the most about indoor percussion and indoor guard as well.

There's such a wonderful culture, right?

Every school is cheering on every school.

It's not like a football game where it's a rivalry or they're obviously rooting for their own team.

Every school wants to see every school succeed.

It's still a competition.

We still wanna win.

But every school cheers for each other.

They're super excited for each other.

It's just such a good culture.

- Competitions are some of my favorite parts 'cause you get to, you know, you get to dress up and just actually perform our show for an actual audience and be like, "Man, that feels so worth it in the end."

I think that's the best feeling.

- It is a very artistic form of both music and just performing arts itself.

- At the end of the day, we're all percussionists who are trying to just share our passion and put on a good show that people will hopefully enjoy.

- So I am a professional show designer, and I have the honor of being able to be an adjudicator for these events on the weekends.

Adjudicators for NNIA, the Northern Nevada Indoor Association, are looking at four different captions.

One is the music, one is the visual, another is how effective the music is, and then another is how effective the visual is.

The level of what the kids are doing, it's evolved so much from when was doing this.

It's like the layers of an onion, like there's so many layers to each show, like what they're doing simultaneously while drumming, moving, their bodies doing choreography to like represent things visually.

And then trying to have a performance quality on that, like this is how this is supposed to feel, and then trying to get other humans to be invested and to consume that with you, and be a part of that, and understand it and be on the same page, it's a lot to ask this age range to do.

(lively music continues) - [Announcer] McQueen High School Indoor Percussion.

(audience cheering and clapping) McQueen High School Winter Guard.

(audience cheering and clapping) - Participating in music, it teaches students the skills that they need to be able to get good at something, and that's a transferrable skill.

Whether they want to go into really any career, they've gone through the process once of learning what it takes to really start to master something.

And so then they know that it takes hard work, it takes practice, it takes dedication to get good at whatever they choose to do after they're finished in high school.

(audience cheering and clapping) - [Announcer] Funding for "Arteffects" is made possible by Sandy Raffealli with Bill Pearce Motors, Heidemarie Rochlin, Meg and Dillard Myers, in memory of Sue McDowell, the Carol Franc Buck Foundation, Chris and Parky May, and by the annual contributions of PBS Reno members.

(upbeat music)