Interlochen Arts Camp — Interlochen, Michigan

Interlochen Arts Camp is organised by arts area and by age division rather than as a single course. Programmes run in music, theatre, dance, visual arts, creative writing, film and new media, and interdisciplinary arts, and each student applies to one specific programme. Days are built around classes, rehearsals, studio work and performance, taught by professional artist faculty, with some programmes offering coaching from visiting guest artists. Music students may take weekly private lessons alongside sectionals, theory and technique classes. Several programmes require an audition or portfolio; others enrol on a first-come, first-served basis.

Tuition is set by session length rather than by arts area, so a three-week programme in creative writing carries the same tuition as a three-week programme in music. It covers the programme itself, instruction, cabin accommodation and meals in the campus dining halls. A non-refundable application fee is charged separately when the application is submitted, by domestic and international families alike. Travel to and from campus and personal spending are extra. Need-based financial aid is open to students in programmes of two weeks or longer, and merit awards are considered automatically for audition or portfolio programmes of that length; one-week Intensives are not eligible for either.

Campers live in rustic cabins with others in their own age division. Junior and Intermediate campers share a cabin with twelve or fourteen other campers and two counsellors; High School campers room with ten to sixteen campers and one or two counsellors. Students are housed according to sex and age, and cabin-mates are typically within a year of one another. Counsellors are drawn from colleges and universities, many studying education, child development or the arts, and many are former Interlochen campers themselves.

Junior and Intermediate campers take their meals at the Lochaven and Pinecrest dining halls, while High School campers dine at the Stone Cafeteria. Menus feature hot entrees, house-made soups, sandwich and salad bars and a range of beverages, with fresh, local and seasonal food including produce from the camp's own garden. Vegetarian, vegan and gluten-free options are available for students with special dietary needs. The Melody Freeze serves soft serve ice cream, pizza and snacks.

Most of the day belongs to classes, rehearsals and performances, but there is real free time built in. Campers make crafts, swim, read, play games with cabin-mates, join a pick-up basketball game, or put in extra practice hours. Field trips run to local spots such as Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore for canoeing, swimming and dune-climbing. Performance is itself part of camp life: students appear on the camp's stages and in its galleries, and music campers can compete in the Concerto Competition or, in the Junior division, be selected by video audition for a Junior Honors Recital.

The camp occupies a wooded lakeside campus in the north-west of Michigan's lower peninsula, with cabins, dining halls, teaching and rehearsal spaces and performance venues. Sports facilities support both individual and team activity, and an on-campus health clinic is typically open sixteen hours a day and staffed by registered nurses, with a Health Services Clinic for students who need supervised care and nurses on call for emergencies.

Interlochen has run a summer arts camp on this campus for close to a century and draws young artists from across the United States and around the world. The division structure means a nine-year-old and a seventeen-year-old each work at their own level, in their own housing and dining spaces, while sharing the same campus and the same expectation of serious artistic work. Faculty are practising professionals, admission looks at potential and readiness as much as finished skill, and the programme is built so that students spend the summer immersed in a single art form among peers who care about it as much as they do.