Dressed as cooks, waitresses and diners from the mid-to-late 1900s, Dartmouth High School indoor percussionists performed “After hours at the diner,” a show about what happens after a diner closes.

“People come in and have a good time. You meet a lot of different characters. There’s some happy tunes and some sad ones and it’s just really following what it was like at the time in that setting,” said Zachary Benoit, who plays the marimba.

Indoor percussionists perform their show in a gym with props while telling a story through the songs they play and the choreography they perform.

The musicians performed their show on Thursday, March 27, one week before the group heads to Dayton, Ohio for a competition against other groups from across the country.

In indoor percussion, there are three competition classes that are determined by a team’s performance grade.

Teams just starting out are in A class, those with intermediate skills are in the open class and teams with advanced skills are in the world class.

According to senior Zachary Amaral, Dartmouth has been performing in the world class for the past 30 years.

“Because we’ve maintained that high level of performance and playing, we’ve been able to maintain our spot there,” Amaral said.

Leaving for Dayton on Wednesday, April 2, the group will spend Thursday and Friday practicing their routine and performing for judges who will offer critiques and ways they could improve when it comes to the competition on Saturday, April 6.

“You have a little time to work on it,” Amaral said. “It makes your show a little better, fixing out the little kinks that you might have had.”

On the day of the competition, the group won’t perform until the afternoon or evening and it won’t be until almost midnight that awards are given out and groups learn how they placed.

Senior Colby Edgcomb said they have competed against some of the groups that will be at the Dayton competition before, including two groups from schools in California that have placed in first and second place for the past several years.

“We’ve been trying to do better than them,” Amaral said.

He added they’ve put in a lot of time and patience into “After hours at the diner,” preparing for the competition since November and ramping up their work in January.

“It’s almost like a sport,” he said. “You have to come to practice and you basically learn the music, learn how to move, you learn how to play with other people, you learn how to make it good.”

The group sometimes practices for three hours straight, honing their choreography and perfecting the songs, and at other times scrap ideas or routines they had previously spent hours practicing.

“It’s all about kind of that patience of being able to work together as a team toward that one vision that is the show,” Amaral said.