BAR HARBOR – The relentlessly contagious beat of a samba band traveled Friday morning through the halls of Mount Desert Island Regional High School, alerting all listeners that the finale weekend of the 2005 Summer Festival of the Arts had begun.

“The consensus is that it’s our best year yet,” Kyle DeVaul, interim director said. “The kids are happy, parents are happy and teachers are very happy.”

More than 200 young artists from Maine and around the country frolicked through their last day of camp, putting finishing touches on hand-painted windsocks, homemade jewelry and theater pieces.

Junior campers bounced like purposeful frogs around a dance studio under the guidance of teacher Ann Ross. The group was getting ready for that night’s improvisational dance performance, and their energy was almost palpable in the air.

“I like that you get to, like, move a lot and have fun,” Nick Wright, 8, of Ellsworth said.

Lyle Gilpatrick, 9, of Bar Harbor said he enjoyed another aspect of performing as much as getting a chance to move freely.

“It’s really fun because it’s like I get all the attention,” the grinning dancer said.

As she watched boys wheel around the studio, arms outstretched like airplanes, and girls move together using stretchy fabric bands, Ross said that the group was surpassing her expectations.

“They are awesome,” she said. “They’re very smart, very creative, very motivated.”

The young dancers, artists, writers, musicians and jewelry makers who comprise the three-week arts day camp get to choose which classes they would like out of a roster that included West African dance, an all-girl rock band, nature photography, comics and making castles.

The costume-bedecked members of the samba band, which DeVaul described as “our house marching band,” are a good example of the free-thinking creativity that permeates the arts camp.

The band had its origins in a class called Found Instruments, but one section decided that they preferred samba.

“They said, ‘we found our instruments – now we’re the samba band,'” DeVaul said, laughing.

Quieter moments of artistic creation are also found in the high-school classrooms. Tony Mullane, 13, of Bar Harbor showed off a folder packed with poems he had written at the camp, reading one about his now-deceased grandparents. The poem is somber but lovely, and Mullane read it slowly and carefully.

“I just wanted to dedicate a poem to them,” he said. “To tell them I still love them, if they’re anywhere out there. … I like expressing what I feel in poetry, talking through poetry.”

The not-too-structured environment of SFOA is perfect for nurturing this kind of moment of self and artistic discovery, writing teacher Tom Lee of Brooklyn, N.Y., said.

“I find [students] really enthusiastic,” he said. “They love the social aspect of being with people who like to do the same thing. They’re not forced into classes they just have to take.”