“We have a million things going on at the end of the year,” says Audrey Shulman ’09, “but we stay up late and get up early to finish projects before Sunfest.”

Held at the end of May, in the final days before summer break, Sunfest is Bennington’s annual all-day music festival. It’s part outdoor concert, part campus tradition, and part holiday—occasionally served with a side of antonymic weather. Rain or shine, it’s not to be missed.

Sunfest is part outdoor concert, part campus tradition, and part holiday—occasionally served with a side of antonymic weather.

Months in advance, student coordinators on the Campus Activities Board (CAB)—the student-run body that plans campus events—begin to assemble a packed day of music and entertainment. Even students who aren’t on CAB take a role, putting in requests for activities and favorite bands, including indie music’s best kept secrets and rising stars. Morgan Whitaker ’09 remembers his first time hearing about Sunfest as a transfer student this year. “My house was really into planning for Sunfest, and I asked what it was,” he said. “Everyone got nostalgic and talked about bands that they saw a year or two ago that are huge now.” The day-long lineup of touring acts is spiked with campus bands, who score stage time after rising to the top of Bennington’s lively Battle of the Bands.

“In a way, it’s about music,” says recent alumnus Billy Ulmer ’05, “but really it’s like Christmas.” Sunfest does have an air of all-out celebration: In years past, the festival has been rounded out by everything from circus sideshow performers, student craft booths, and henna body painting to inflatable bounce houses, lawn games, and huge matches of tug-of-war. And like any good celebration, Sunfest draws guests. The show is open to the public, and with tour schedules posted in advance on several of the bands’ websites, music fans from outside the campus community come to rock out on the lawn (or in the Student Center, as the case may be) along with students.

In years past, the festival has been rounded out by everything from inflatable bounce houses to circus sideshow performers.

Even with the crowds, there’s an intimacy and laid-back atmosphere that characterizes the day. Catching a set on Commons Lawn is a lot like watching a band play for you in your backyard. “I went to see The Spinto Band [the now-internationally touring rock band that includes Thomas Hughes ’06 and Sam Hughes ’08] on tour when they performed in Nashville, but it was definitely different at Bennington,” says Shulman. “There’s a connection here between the band and all of us.”

After a term’s worth of hard work, students welcome a day of revelry in the sun. But even rainy Sunfests bring on revelry of their own. Ulmer’s favorite Sunfest was during his junior year, when a thunderstorm left indie-pop rockers Of Montreal wondering how they could go on without damaging their electrical equipment. In the spirit of the day, they headed inside and improvised. “They were like, ‘does anyone have a guitar we could borrow?’ And someone handed them a guitar. Then they needed sticks for the drummer, so someone got them sticks....” The result: “A packed Commons Lounge with the band improvising the music with borrowed instruments. The drummer was playing on chairs, walls, whatever was in front of him. We loved it and you could tell the band loved it.”

Want to see what bands are playing at this year's Sunfest? Click here for a smattering of this term's musical events and the 2008 Sunfest lineup.

More:

• More feature stories about life at Bennington
• The Music Scene: Bands at Bennington
• Postcard from the Classroom: Song for Ireland and Celtic Connections
• Living at Bennington

Click here to browse the archive of campus feature stories.