Were you to encounter the scene outside Henrico’s Rolling Hills Elementary School on a recent Sunday afternoon, you’d be forgiven for being confused. It appears as though a marching band, a jazz rock marimba ensemble, and a dance troupe with large, oddly-shaped props on wheels, have decided to rehearse together all at once.

The group would rather be inside, in its natural habitat of the school’s large gym, but Spectre Percussion, an independent competitive indoor drumline, is forced to rehearse outside on this windy, late-January day. Ryan Scott, standing and surveying the cacophony, says that finding places to rehearse a 50-member group—one that makes quite a din—is always a challenge. On weekends during the winter months, you’ll find Spectre practicing in schools as far ranging as Chesterfield, Powhatan and here in Henrico.

People often hear the word ‘drumline’ and get visions of marching bands in their heads. But that’s only part of what is happening.

“They think of ‘Drumline’ the movie,” says Scott, the co-founder and program director of Spectre, which formed in Richmond last year. “But if you took a dance team, a theatre department, and a drumline and kind of smashed them all together, you might kind of get into the neighborhood of what we are.”

Scott’s been involved in these kinds of drumlines since he was a student at Henrico’s Mills Godwin High School. He comes by the drums honestly; his dad, Mike, is a drummer in the longtime country band, Main Street Station, and also taught high school marching band.

The 33-year-old Scott was seasoned in the form at George Mason University, which has a world-class indoor drumline program. He later taught at Mason and also oversaw Powhatan High School’s drumline. In 2023, he started an earlier independent drumline, Empyrean, that lasted for one season. “It was a total mess. But through all of those connections, I founded this program,” he says.

Spectre competes in events sanctioned by Winter Guard International (WGI), a nonprofit cold month league that oversees “the marching arts.” In its very first season, as an independent unaffiliated with a college or high school (which is where you traditionally find indoor drumline programs), Spectre placed 12th overall out of 35 ensembles from around the country at the WGI World Championships in Dayton, Ohio.

While some states, such as California and Texas, have an abundance of independent groups such as this, Spectre is Virginia’s only example.

“With the success we had the first year, we got put on a bit of a national stage,” Scott says. The spotlight has enabled Spectre to attract, in its second year, an eager cadre of players and performers aged 16-22. While there are independent drumlines that accept all ages, Spectre’s open independent status means that members have to age out at 22—this is still considered a youth activity.

“They come from all over the state, plus places like Maryland and New Jersey,” he says. “We have a big population from JMU and UVA, since neither have an affiliated drumline. Up until last year, Liberty University had its own program but they shut it down. So we’ve taken in some of those members as well.”

Spectre’s out-of-the-box success is yielding opportunities. The Virginia Commonwealth University Music Department recently announced that it would be collaborating with the group, although the details of that relationship are still being worked out.

“This partnership with Spectre Percussion is a fantastic opportunity for our students and faculty to engage with some of the most innovative artists in the field,” Dr. James Wiznerowicz, chair of the VCU Music Department, said in a statement. “We are excited to see how this project will inspire creativity and expand our musical horizons.”

Today, at Rolling Hills, Spectre is rehearsing to get back to the world championships and do even better in its second year.  “Things are coming together,” assistant director Will Vinson says, adding that the group’s first competition is two weeks away. “We’ll have two thirds of the show ready and on the floor.”

Tournaments early in the season are a way for indoor drumlines to get feedback on their often elaborate, six-minute performances, which they will continue to hone and refine through competition.

“You want to get a read,” says Vinson, 30, who worked with Scott at George Mason and then, later, Empyrean. “You want to get a feeling for how it will be received. The judges are judging hands, how well you’re playing your instruments, judging feet, how you’re moving and how you are doing the dancing. Then you have music effect, how effectively the art is conveyed in a musical way, and visual effect, how you’re looking and presenting yourself. For each of those, you get scored on a scale of 1 to 20.”

Even without costumes and set design in place, an indoor drumline performance is a feast for the senses.

The music is an eclectic, boisterous mix of front ensemble percussion instruments (marimbas, xylophones, vibraphones), a drum kit, and oddball textures from synthesizers and guitars. This is integrated with a small cadre of dancers, choreographed along with the kind of marching drummers you’d normally associate with the word, ‘drumline.’

All of this is in service of an overall theme. “We have a concept that we portray and that concept can be anything from something very literal to something very figurative and esoteric,” says Scott, who comes up with the season’s theme. “There’s a wide range of artistic styles within the competitive scope of our world.”

Last year, Spectre’s theme involved painter Claude Monet and the impact of Impressionist art. “We played delicate music and had delicate organic choreography that helped us to portray the softness of impressionism,” says Scott. “There was music by Claude Debussy and French composers, and we also used Bjork’s music because I felt she had a modern impressionist quality about her.”

The theme for Spectre’s six-minute performance this year is titled “These Walls,” and is a meditation on home.

“Those props, when you put them together, they form a house,” he says. “All of the memories that are contained inside the house. Home is where the heart is, they say, and a home is a vessel of different memories for countless people that go through it. You go to a new home and impart memories into that new space.”

It’s a theme, he adds, that may have emotional resonance in a group of young adults just entering or leaving college, often far away from their own homes.

“We have staging, technical parts, and we play hard music, but at the end of the day, it’s to make one big picture,” says Jess Mishico, Spectre’s choreographer. “Not all drumlines approach it that way, they are a little more regimented. But our show has a kind of softness, it’s about home and indescribable feelings that all humans experience. Some drumlines don’t go that direction. A common emotion for drumlines to go for is anger, and that’s easy. Drums are loud. Some of the groups do that really well, but we’re interested in pushing what being a performance art group means.”

“There aren’t many of these kinds of groups, especially around here,” says Jason Leung, 22, an engineering major at VCU who is one of Spectre’s dancers. “In the U.S., there are maybe 20 to 30 higher end, open, world-class groups.”

He describes the modern indoor drumline as musical theatre that takes its influence from marching bands as well as ballet and contemporary dance.

“It’s very theatrical, which is one of the reasons I love the activity,” he adds. “It’s very freeing in that kind of physical expression.” Leung says that he connected with the show’s theme of memories tied to physical locations. “I felt very comfortable tapping into that emotional realm.”

In March, during a WGI qualifier at Powhatan High School, Spectre aced its prelims, capturing, for a time, the highest score of any national group in its category.

“I think the judges appreciate that we are doing things a little differently,” says Mishico, 27, who met Scott when she was a student at Powhatan. “They liked that we were purposeful and intentional. A kind of palette cleanser.”

After performing for a send-off show on Sunday, April 6 at Hermitage High School, the Spectre Percussion group will travel on to the WGI championships in Dayton on the weekend of April 10 [The WGI Percussion/Winds World Championships will be held April 10-13 and can be streamed live on FloMarching.]

The choreographer is quick to credit Ryan Scott for much of Spectre’s specialness.

“I think Ryan is very unique in his approach. We are creating art. Forget the sticks in your hand and the dot on the floor,” she says. “We’re creating art and that’s what makes it so earnest and makes people buy in and care about it, the members included.

That’s what makes Spectre successful.”