On Saturday, Hoxsey Street was buzzing with students in neon clothing carrying gallon jugs full of mysterious liquids. The daytime party — the “darty” known colloquially as “Sensations” — is an annual event on the first Saturday of May. But the Record wanted to know more: When did the tradition begin, and why?
A scrupulous Record investigation — that sent us digging through bygone Facebook events and indulging in other undercover activities — revealed that the party has more wholesome origins than the debauchery of its present-day iteration might suggest.
Rebecca Elkins ’15, one of the original organizers of the annual darty, had developed an interest in the Middle East after taking a course on the topic with Professor of History Magnús Bernhardsson, Elkins said in an interview with the Record. Observing Elkins’ interest in the course and athletics — she was a member of women’s tennis — Bernhardsson told her to look into Reclaim Childhood, a nonprofit organization that raises money for refugee girls and women in Jordan to participate in sports through after-school and summer programs. At the time, the organization had an affiliated chapter through the Center for Learning in Action.
“We were always trying to come up with ways to raise money for the nonprofit,” Elkins said.
“We would always see the football guys raising money,” she explained, referencing other annual darty fundraisers. “It was clearly a means we thought that we could [use to] get people to donate to the cause.”
Thus, “Sensation Hoxsey” was born in May 2013.
This name — which has since evolved to the abridged “Sensations” — was a play on “Sensation White,” the European electronic dance music event popular in the 2000s and 2010s. The theme of the original Williamstown version also followed the “Sensation White” rules: Attendees were supposed to dress in all white. However, the theme changed to neon in 2018, according to several students who were on campus at the time, though the reasons for the switch are unclear.
When Sensation Hoxsey first started to take over Hoxsey Street, it didn’t hold the same status as “the party of the spring” that it does today. According to Elkins, the darty was just one of many that were held on spring weekends as the weather warmed in Williamstown.
In the weeks before the darty, members of Reclaim Childhood would table at the front of the Paresky Center, giving out the required cup, sunglasses, or hat for attending the event in exchange for a $10 donation. Though she couldn’t remember the exact amount, Elkins estimated the event would raise a few thousand dollars for Reclaim Childhood every year.
Fundraising wasn’t the only piece of preparation necessary to pull off the annual event. Each year, members of Reclaim Childhood petitioned for the Town to close the street, communicated with the residents of the houses on Hoxsey, and scheduled DJ sets for the duration of the party.
The darty has not always gone off without a hitch. In a Dec. 6, 2019, Record article, a landlord on Hoxsey Street complained that students left trash outside for weeks after the event and had little respect for the non-student residents on the street. Similarly, a Town community member wrote a critical op-ed on May 10, 2023 about her experience driving up a crowded Hoxsey Street during Sensations. This year, student organizers did not arrange for a permit to block off the street, according to Lauren Kauppila ’24, who helped plan the event; as a result, several police cars drove through the party and repeatedly told drunken participants to clear the street.
While the darty has traditionally fallen on the Saturday before the final week of classes in May, there was one instance when Sensations took over Hoxsey off-schedule — the March 2020 weekend before the majority of students were asked to leave campus due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Naturally, this was also the first Sensations that was not a fundraiser for Reclaim Childhood — and it hasn’t been since.
In an interview with the Record, Edmond Laird-Raylor ’24, who was a first-year at the time, said the campus erupted into chaos as soon as students received the announcement on Wednesday, March 11, that they would be required to leave by the following Tuesday.
“I walked to Frosh Quad, and there were people with cases and bongs in the middle of Frosh Quad openly drinking and smoking,” he said. “That was like the entire week after.”
The bender continued into the weekend, when the campus took a break from packing and descended on Hoxsey for a final send-off as moving boxes littered the campus.
“It was like the whole fucking school was on campus for that Sensations,” Laird-Raylor said. One attendee was a student who returned to campus from Barcelona, Spain — where they had been studying abroad — to pick up their car. Several days later, they became the first member of the College community to test positive for COVID-19.
After the campus reopened and masking restrictions were loosened, the Sensations tradition continued.
This year, the date for Sensations was set about a month and a half before the event, Kauppila, a resident of one of the off-campus houses involved in planning wrote to the Record, though the details of the event came together mostly over the last week.
“The four houses (70, 71, 66, and 63) are all pretty close friends, so we worked together,” she wrote. “Each house mostly took care of their decorations and games outside their house, but we would constantly communicate.”
Members of each house chalked the streets and sidewalks, painted sheets to hang on the porches of each house, and filled water balloons, which Kauppila said was “the most fun part of it all.”
According to Kauppila, there was no official process to pass down the tradition — it’s just something that those who live on Hoxsey Street are expected to do. “I think we all really enjoyed it in years past, so we knew from moving in that it would be our responsibility,” she wrote. “We were excited to get to host it.”
The most recent addition to the decade-long tradition is not the fashion, per se, but the vessel through which people imbibe. The borg, short for “blackout rage gallon” — an emptied plastic milk or water jug filled with a combination of liquor and some kind of electrolyte beverage — started to sweep college campuses in 2021 and 2022, and Sensations was no exception.
Last Saturday, in addition to the regular neon drip, Sensations attendees carried borgs, many of which were given a clever name (“Borg of Trustees,” “down with the borgeoisie,” and “Record editorial borg” were some of our favorites). In the wee hours of Sunday morning, several of the borgs still remained, scattered across Hoxsey and the yards of the connecting houses, some still containing the final sips of their brightly colored liquids.
(Kauppila wrote that, though she didn’t borg this year — “a perk of hosting the party is that you can refill whenever you need” — she loved the new tradition and “seeing everyone’s clever names.”)
When Elkins and some of her friends organized the first Sensation Hoxsey, they never knew it would become the annual tradition it is today.
“We had no idea if it would work,” Elkins said. “It recurring was definitely like a, ‘Oh, wow, that went really well. We should do it again. We raised a lot of money.’”
“It’s great,” Elkins said of the tradition’s continuation long past the year she graduated. “I guess it would be better if money were still going to a good cause for it, but I’m glad to see that it lives on.”
