From April 10-12, the HanUnder Art Festival will turn Hanover into a celebration of student creativity.
This festival is for everyone — from the student majoring in theater or music to the student who struggles to find a chord on their guitar alone in their dorm.
The festival includes an extremely broad variety of student art including music, dance, poetry, theater, visual art, film, virtual reality, digital projections and more. The art will be showcased in various locations, including the Black Family Visual Arts Center and Sawtooth Kitchen.
Sawtooth Kitchen founder Kieran Campion stressed the value of highlighting a variety of artists in an interview with The Dartmouth.
“The very diversity of artists that perform really gives everybody an opportunity to see a wide array of styles and genres and techniques and personalities at play,” he said.
Student Hop Fellows helped create HanUnder after performing a needs assessment within the student community, the Hopkins Center manager of student initiatives Daniel Burmester said. Through the survey data and interviews it became clear that student artists wanted more opportunities to showcase their skills in a formal setting. The festival, currently in its second iteration, was developed to provide students with the opportunity to be paid and give them access to various venues and production support. It was also created to help the Hop Fellows learn about management, organization and leadership.
“The festival is really about having our students ensure that we’re creating vibrant platforms for our beautiful, creative community to learn in and grow and present their work,” Burmester said.
Throughout the year, the Fellows work with various mentors and postgraduate fellow Lucy Biberman ’23 to learn about professional presenting and production. The cohort of Fellows is broken up into four teams: marketing, engagement, community outreach and production and general management. The teams work together to conceptualize, advertise and produce the festival from start to finish.
“We’re so lucky to have so many talented, passionate, engaged students,” Burmester said. They’re so invested; they care about it, and they care about each other. They care about the students they’re trying to serve.”
“This effort by [the Fellows] is essential to make everybody in the arts community realize that they’re part of this whole, not only for festivals like HanUnder but for our entire creative community here,” Burmester said.
Lydia Jin ’26 is one of the over 70 student artists hired to perform at HanUnder. Jin is classically trained in violin, experimented with songwriting throughout high school and will be performing a variety of her own original songs this weekend. She emphasized the importance of fostering a space of community and creativity for students on campus.
“I treat music as a really integral part of my identity, but it is not a part of my studies,” Jin said. “It’s very much something that I seek out on my own, and that I try to engage with outside of my academics.”
One of Burmester’s favorite memories from last year’s festival took place at Sawtooth on the final day during a performance by House of Lewan, a drag performance group on campus. He recalled looking over at the Fellows dancing, hugging and high fiving to the show.
“Everyone was happy, and the performers were excellent,” Burmester said. “I saw them enjoying the thing that they made, looking around and absolutely having this moment of like, ‘Yeah, we did this.’”
HanUnder has expanded since last year’s festival, including the addition of projection art on the Blunt Alumni Center on Thursday and Friday. Advertisement for the event has also expanded — from posters adorning the walls in every building, to social media advertising, to chalk drawings on the pavement.
“My hope is that this continues to be something that our students grow,” he said.
