Blue Devils 2014 Thread

[perc2100]

the drill was lost in the shuffling around of the props that eventually became the house.I dont know why, but I kept waiting for Ty Pennington to jump out and yell "move that bus" when it finally came together.

Ha; that would've actually made the show entertaining to me

[Jeff Ream]

me too. i joked about it all summer long LOL

[Brutus]

Selecting an abstract art theme for a corps show is a cop-out. Abstraction gives show designers complete artistic license to incorporate random, nonsensical, unstructured elements in a corps show and call it “art.” Babies make abstract art in their diapers every day. It’s easy. When show designers use an abstract theme for a corps show it’s like using a human shield against the judges because abstract art has no rules. Abstraction is random, alienating, and it has no place in a 12-minute marching music youth program where crowd reaction, shared joy and unified sense of purpose are so important.

If I want to experience a random subconscious event I’ll take a sleeping pill. If I want an absurd experience at a drum corps show, I’ll sit on the visitor side. That’s not why people come to a drum corps show. Abstraction is as easy as putting lipstick on a hamster. But getting 30,000 people in a stadium to feel the same thing is near impossible. Yet that’s what Carolina Crown did last year. That’s why they won. That’s what Madison did last year. Everyone agreed about their sense of purpose. Everyone stood on their feet. And a solid narrative is a lot harder to create than walking an imaginary tightrope or managing 160 meaningless folding chairs.

But this year, as with last year, if BD is not careful, audiences are going to be alienated again by a miserably disjunct, incoherent, juvenile, random, subconscious free-for-all performance art piece, just like last year with red balls, human sacrifices and elephant tusks, all of which left Fathom semifinals movie theater audiences scratching their heads so hard that there was blood in the popcorn.

Here’s a dada-like paragraph of random words, similar to a Blue Devils show. Now everyone can argue about their meaning, but eventually everyone realizes, it’s just annoying, it’s meritless and stirs no emotion. Alsjdf asd a;sld jkfas; dlfjasl o9r ;asd lkfjq ;2jrqn ssdf asd;fl q2x asd ihaspod fu8xq984 ua;. Af jazx lcjvwot pim qwcptu pgq;I giuh ihiuhas ldukhs. Are you bored yet? I typed it in less than 20 seconds. It required no technique, it required no thought about structure or purpose, and if it were twelve minutes long, paying customers would be angry that they were swindled.

The Blue Devils’ obsession with alienating abstractions and random artistic absurdities helps them avoid getting to the purpose of musical performance—shared human truth.

DRUM CORPS AND ABSTRACTION DON’T MIX

Absurd theater, film and orchestral pieces often use random, subconscious, unstructured, anti-establishment elements. By its nature, abstract performance art is completely antithetical to the drum corps medium in every way. Think about it-- every aspect of the drum corps activity has been shaped over the years for audience reaction, group mind, and shared sense of rhythm and purpose.

• Music is an art form that by its very nature contains repeating patterns that grow and build for dramatic effect. On the other end of the spectrum, abstraction thumbs its nose at patterns and delights in unresolved randomness.
• Drum corps shows are only 12 minutes long and capture the essence of musical pieces that are often longer. (Fellini has a lot longer to develop his complex themes and to create meaning and story over two hours and still manages to confuse.)
• Drum corps has a caption for judging audience outward response and acceptance. Fellini's films are the complete opposite.
• Drum corps horns are uniquely designed, shaped and held to project toward the bloody audience, for God's sake. If the instruments were designed by Fellini, they’d be pretzel shaped and sound like mastadons in pain. But corps instruments are intended to literally project to the audience for their reaction. It's direct, clear and purposeful invitation. It’s embracing, not rebuking. Projecting, not hiding. Clarifying, not obfuscating.
• There are captions which judge precision and unison of form. Can it be any clearer? Drum corps is not a performance medium suited for confusion and disagreement.
• Drum corps shows by their musical nature have an underlying agreement, a rhythm that’s shared by audience and performer. Unlike in a Fellini story, the characters in drum corps are literally in step with one another the entire time.
• Absolutely nothing about the nature of marching music is random, improvised, subconscious, left to chance or fate. The entire corps show is choreographed within an inch of its life.
• The nature of the entire drum corps activity is musical unison with clear emotional intent.
• The drum corps medium, because it’s a large scale music activity that is projected to the audience in a huge venue that battles for your attention doesn’t jibe with abstract, alienating elements. Corps already fight to get your focus and attention without making it worse.
• Corps shows are designed to be performed toward the audience in one direction. Everybody agrees.

There is so much agreement and unison in the drum corps experience that to subject drum corps audiences and young performers to dissonant, meaningless, patternless absurdities is harmful and rude. Last year, there was a palpable disgust at the Blue Devils when their show was over. The gut feeling was that audiences had been swindled. Audiences had been presented a riddle with no answer. Unsatisfying, mystifying, patternless, unresolved randomness, similar to looking into a trash can. If I want an entertainer to abuse me, I'll hire an escort with electro-stim equipment and a sounding rod.

What’s more bothersome than the lazy selection of an abstract performance art theme like Fellini, or any number of the other Dada-dabbling shoulder-shruggers that the Blue Devils have done in previous years, is that the Blue Devils are evading the purpose of the activity under the guise of artistic merit.

The purpose of the drum corps activity is the shared enjoyment between performer and audience during marching music routines with a single-focused dramatic action or musical emotion. That's the challenge. Everyone is gathered to feel and see the same thing. It's a collective exprience. A shared emotion by 30,000 people is an incredibly hard thing for show designers to achieve. The audience is all facing the same direction. We are all facing the performers, and the performers are facing us, and playing music for us. They are inviting us to share a specific series of themes, patterns and music that together help us create a shared vision of our humanity. Whether it’s Velvet Knight’s Wagnerian opera singer and the shark, or BD’s long missed When a Man Loves a Woman. Peformers are not there to confuse, obfuscate, fog, question, stumble, delay, muddy, mix up, or fail. Drum corps performers are there to clarify, deliver, and elevate specific musical passages to audience members, and convey a specific, clear underlying dramatic action or musical emotion to them in 12 minutes.

Good shows invite the audience, not alienate them. Every good corps show invites the audience to understand the world of the piece. From the joy of the Bridgemen's collapsing at the end of the William Tell Overture finale, to the breathtaking end of Phantom's Juliet show, good shows have a single dramatic action or sense of purpose that everyone in the audience understands. There is agreement between the players and the audience about what is being communicated, and the audience is swept away, in unison with the bold humanity and clarity of artistic purpose.

The performers shouldn’t alienate their audience like BD does with abstract, random, unresolved, vague designs. Toddlers with finger paints can do that.

With abstract themes like The Rite of Spring, audience members sat dumbfounded, wading in a sea of tattoos and elephant tusks, desperate to feel an emotion, any emotion-- anger, rage, delight, sadness, hilarity, freaking anything, any pattern or truth about our human experience. Instead, we were left with a barage of randomly selected, but briliantly executed abstract woven moving shapes and choreography in an alienating ballet without purpose or pattern, presenting no shared experience or meaning, making BD’s performers appear insane.

BD seems to be using Cirque du Soleil as a model, with one major difference. Cirque du Soleil’s abstraction has an underlying structure, a narrative arc, and the intention to draw specific emotion from the audience. For example, the Cirque clowns interact with an audience member, bring him up on stage to develop a character, and in less than a minute, the clowns find a human truth in that audience member, and that truth elevates the reason why the audience is here-- to understand the human experience and to share our universal, unique natures.

Not wallow in unsatisfying abstraction and randomness.

For the last several years, BD has been like a college kid hanging out at a Jean Genet short play festival, smoking clove cigarettes and reveling in the lofty complexity of Genet’s themes rather than getting off their butts and writing something of their own that has a clear, focused dramatic action that appeals to all of humanity—a task that’s much harder to do.

Drum corps is a large scale performance activity suited only for instant, excessive agreement by performers and audience. There's no getting around it. That's the nature of the beast.

SHOW SUGGESTIONS:

Now that I’ve completely eviscerated BD’s selection of abstract themes, I have some pointed Fellini show design suggestions. These two show concepts use abstraction only as a potent spice, but still provide a clear narrative arc, emotion, and meaning for drum corps audiences.

Here are two show ideas.

1) SHOW CONCEPT #1 Based on Fellini’s The Clowns, a TV movie. 30 guardmembers are dressed as clowns. Each guard member has in tow as their piece of guard equipment a lifesize, light-weight clown dummy that looks like a twin—each guard member spins, drags and throws his lifesize dummy like a flag, spinning their dead twin partners around wildly and dragging him by its feet, trying animate and resuscitate their dead twin, the entire show. The clown guard members lament their dead partners and try to revive them throughout the show, throwing, wooing, spinning, and animating them, even kicking them in anger, to no avail. By the end the guard members one by one give up their dead twins, drop their own clown costumes, and return to the signature guard uniform and flag/rifle. But there is only one clown left by the end, still trying to revive his dummy, finally giving up. But surprise. The dummy comes to life and angrily chases his partner, who now regrets having revived him. The End. This show idea has a singular visual theme. It’s absurd, it’s hilarious, and has a sense of humanity about death, relationships and our human desire to control and hang on to our past. This idea incorporates a SINGLE piece of equipment that becomes the center of the dramatic action and is used the entire show. That SINGLE piece of equipment becomes a metaphor for relationships and death. It’s absurd, funny, and fun to watch, and ultimately moving for audiences on the theme of meaning and loss in relationships.

2 SHOW CONCEPT #2 Fellini, played by one guard member, is a director who sees the corps on the field marching in a tight box. Fellini toys with the corps, tries to pull the box apart, tries to push some of the members, and encourages them to break rank. Fellini pushes and pulls at the corps’ tight square block which rotates around the field. He pulls the corps block apart, as if with an unseen rope, huge wedges of horns and drums break off as he attempts to scatter them, a metaphor for his films breaking tradition. The corps begins to break apart at his command. He controls the field action as if images in a dream in his own mind. He is in heaven. Fellini creates the action on the field. But suddenly, it starts to spin out of control. Sometimes he pulls two wedges of horns together, but wait, they crash into each other. Oops. Nothing works as he planned. Sometimes he pulls them toward him but the corps becomes out of control and tramples him. In a slow passage, he begs the guard to become impassioned, and eventually they do. They become so lively that they chase him around the field. Exhausted at the end of his life, tired from chasing, cajoling and orchestrating, he hobbles toward his director’s chair. As a clown presents the director’s chair to him, paying tribute to Fellini and finally giving him the accolade he deserves, just as Fellnini tries to sit down in it, the clown pulls the chair out from under him. Fellini falls. The clown helps Fellini up, apologizes and offers the chair again. Fellini hesitates, tries to sit down and the chair is yanked again. Fellini falls. Fellini angily tries to grab the chair from the clown, and after some wreslting, Fellini succeeds. Fellini, in a triumphant move, dances with his chair, sets in a final resting place, sits on the chair and it breaks into pieces as he falls to the ground a final time. The end.

Edited June 12, 2014 by Brutus

[GUARDLING]

Hey Jeff Ream..you were wrong....it didnt take a month....lmao

[OrlandoContraAlum]

me too. i joked about it all summer long LOL

And still do... 3 years later. (Not that it's old by now or anything...)

[OrlandoContraAlum]

Large wall o' text

Do you perhaps have a Cliff's Notes, or (for the kids) TL;DR version of this? Because, wow.

[Jast45]

I truly hope few will respond to all these opinions one by one--it will be more Felliniesque than The Blue Devils show, which looks like it is going to be great.

[jjeffeory]

Selecting an abstract art theme for a corps show is a cop-out. Abstration gives show designers complete artistic license to incorporate random, nonsensical, unstructured elements in a corps show and call it “art.” Babies make abstract art in their diapers every day. It’s easy. When show designers use an abstract theme for a corps show it’s like using a human shield against the judges because abstract art has no rules. Abstraction is random, alienating, and it has no place in a 12-minute marching music youth program where crowd reaction, shared joy and unified sense of purpose are so important.

If I want to experience a random subconscious event I’ll take a sleeping pill. If I want an absurd experience at a drum corps show, I’ll sit on the visitor side. That’s not why people come to a drum corps show. Abstraction is as easy as putting lipstick on a hamster. But getting 30,000 people in a stadium to feel the same thing is near impossible. Yet that’s what Carolina Crown did last year. That’s why they won. That’s what Madison did last year. Everyone agreed about their sense of purpose. Everyone stood on their feet. And a solid narrative is a lot harder to create than walking an imaginary tightrope or managing 160 meaningless folding chairs.

But this year, as with last year, if BD is not careful, audiences are going to be alienated again by a miserably disjunct, incoherent, juvenile, random, subconscious free-for-all performance art piece, just like last year with red balls, human sacrifices and elephant tusks, all of which left Fathom semifinals movie theater audiences scratching their heads so hard that there was blood in the popcorn.

Here’s a dada-like paragraph of random words, similar to a Blue Devils show. Now everyone can argue about their meaning, but eventually everyone realizes, it’s just annoying, it’s meritless and stirs no emotion. Alsjdf asd a;sld jkfas; dlfjasl o9r ;asd lkfjq ;2jrqn ssdf asd;fl q2x asd ihaspod fu8xq984 ua;. Af jazx lcjvwot pim qwcptu pgq;I giuh ihiuhas ldukhs. Are you bored yet? I typed it in less than 20 seconds. It required no technique, it required no thought about structure or purpose, and if it were twelve minutes long, paying customers would be angry that they were swindled.

The Blue Devils’ obsession with alienating abstractions and random artistic absurdities helps them avoid getting to the purpose of musical performance—shared human truth.

DRUM CORPS AND ABSTRACTION DON’T MIX

Absurd theater, film and orchestral pieces often use random, subconscious, unstructured, anti-establishment elements. By their nature, abstract performance art is completely antithetical to the drum corps medium in every way. Think about it-- every aspect of the drum corps activity has been shaped over the years for audience reaction, group mind, and shared sense of rhythm and purpose.

• Music is an art form that by its very nature contains repeating patterns that grow and build for dramatic effect. On the other end of the spectrum, abstraction thumbs its nose at patterns and delights in unresolved randomness.
• Drum corps shows are only 12 minutes long and capture the essence of musical pieces that are often longer. (Fellini has a lot longer to develop his complex themes and to create meaning and story over two hours and still manages to confuse.)
• Drum corps has a caption for judging audience outward response and acceptance. Fellini's films are the complete opposite.
• Drum corps horns are uniquely designed, shaped and held to project toward the bloody audience, for God's sake. If the instruments were designed by Fellini, they’d be pretzel shaped and sound like mastadons in pain. But corps instruments are intended to literally project to the audience for their reaction. It's direct, clear and purposeful invitation. It’s embracing, not rebuking. Projecting, not hiding. Clarifying, not obfuscating.
• There are captions which judge precision and unison of form. Can it be any clearer? Drum corps is not a performance medium suited for confusion and disagreement.
• Drum corps shows by their musical nature have an underlying agreement, a rhythm that’s shared by audience and performer. Unlike in a Fellini story, the characters in drum corps are literally in step with one another the entire time.
• Absolutely nothing about the nature of marching music is random, improvised, subconscious, left to chance or fate. The entire corps show is choreographed within an inch of its life.
• The nature of the entire drum corps activity is musical unison with clear emotional intent.
• The drum corps medium, because it’s a large scale music activity that is projected to the audience in a huge venue that battles for your attention doesn’t jibe with abstract, alienating elements. Corps already fight to get your focus and attention without making it worse.
• Corps shows are designed to be performed toward the audience in one direction. Everybody agrees.

There is so much agreement and unison in the drum corps experience that to subject drum corps audiences and young performers to dissonant, meaningless, patternless absurdities is harmful and rude. Last year, there was a palpable disgust at the Blue Devils when their show was over. The gut feeling was that audiences had been swindled. Audiences had been presented a riddle with no answer. Unsatisfying, mystifying, patternless, unresolved randomness, similar to looking into a trash can. If I want an entertainer to abuse me, I'll hire an escort with electro-stim equipment and a sounding rod.

What’s more bothersome than the lazy selection of an abstract performance art theme like Fellini, or any number of the other Dada-dabbling shoulder-shruggers that the Blue Devils have done in previous years, is that the Blue Devils are evading the purpose of the activity under the guise of artistic merit.

The purpose of the drum activity is the shared enjoyment between performer and audience during marching music routines with a single-focused dramatic action or musical emotion. That's the challenge. Everyone is gathered to feel and see the same thing. It's a collective exprience. A shared emotion by 30,000 people is an incredibly hard thing for show designers to achieve. The audience is all facing the same direction. We are all facing the performers, and the performers are facing us, and playing music for us. They are inviting us to share a specific series of themes, patterns and music that together help us create a shared vision of our humanity. Whether it’s Velvet Knight’s Wagnerian opera singer and the shark, or BD’s long missed When a Man Loves a Woman. Peformers are not there to confuse, obfuscate, fog, question, stumble, delay, muddy, mix up, or fail. Drum corps performers are there to clarify, deliver, and elevate specific musical passages to audience members, and convey a specific, clear underlying dramatic action or musical emotion to them in 12 minutes.

Good shows invite the audience, not alienate them. Every good corps show invites the audience to understand the world of the piece. From the joy of the Bridgemen's collapsing at the end of the William Tell Overture finale, to the breathtaking end of Phantom's Juliet show, good shows have a single dramatic action or sense of purpose that everyone in the audience understands. There is agreement between the players and the audience about what is being communicated, and the audience is swept away, in unison with the bold humanity and clarity of artistic purpose.

The performers shouldn’t alienate their audience like BD does with abstract, random, unresolved, vague designs. Toddlers with finger paints can do that.

With abstract themes like The Rite of Spring, audience members sat dumbfounded, wading in a sea of tattoos and elephant tusks, desperate to feel an emotion, any emotion-- anger, rage, delight, sadness, hilarity, freaking anything, any pattern or truth about our human experience. Instead, we were left with a barage of randomly selected, but briliantly executed abstract woven moving patterns and choreography in an alienating ballet without purpose or pattern, presenting no shared experience or meaning, making BD’s performers appear insane.

BD seems to be using Cirque du Soleil as a model, with one major difference. Cirque du Soleil’s abstraction has an underlying structure, a narrative arc, and the intention to draw specific emotion from the audience. For example, the Cirque clowns interact with an audience member, bring him up on stage to develop a character, and in less than a minute, the clowns find a human truth in that audience member, and that truth elevates the reason why the audience is here-- to understand the human experience and to share our universal, unique natures.

Not wallow in unsatisfying abstraction and randomness.

For the last several years, BD has been like a college kid hanging out at a Jean Genet short play festival, smoking clove cigarettes and reveling in the lofty complexity of Genet’s themes rather than getting off their butts and writing something of their own that has a clear, focused dramatic action that appeals to all of humanity—a task that’s much harder to do.

Drum corps is a large scale performance activity suited only for instant, excessive agreement by performers and audience. There's no getting around it. That's the nature of the beast.

SHOW SUGGESTIONS:

Now that I’ve completely eviscerated BD’s selection of abstract themes, I have some pointed Fellini show design suggestions. These two show concepts use abstraction only as a potent spice, but still provide a clear narrative arc and emotional meaning for drum corps audiences.

Here are two show ideas.

1) SHOW CONCEPT #1 Based on Fellini’s The Clowns, a TV movie. 30 guardmembers are dressed as clowns. Each guard member has in tow as their piece of guard equipment a lifesize, light-weight clown dummy that looks like a twin—each guard member spins, drags and throws his lifesize dummy like a flag, spinning their dead twin partners around wildly and dragging him by its feet, trying animate and resuscitate their dead twin, the entire show. The clown guard members lament their dead partners and try to revive them throughout the show, throwing, wooing, spinning, and animating them, even kicking them in anger, to no avail. By the end the guard members one by one give up their dead twins, drop their own clown costumes, and return to the signature guard uniform and flag/rifle. But there is only one clown left by the end, still trying to revive his dummy, finally giving up. But surprise. The dummy comes to life and angrily chases his partner, who now regrets having revived him. The End. This show idea has a singular visual theme. It’s absurd, it’s hilarious, and has a sense of humanity about death, relationships and our human desire to control and hang on to our past. This idea incorporates a SINGLE piece of equipment that becomes the center of the dramatic action and is used the entire show. That SINGLE piece of equipment becomes a metaphor for relationships and death. It’s absurd, funny, and fun to watch, and ultimately moving for audiences on the theme of meaning and loss in relationships.

2 SHOW CONCEPT #2 Fellini, played by one guard member, is a director who sees the corps on the field marching in a tight box. Fellini toys with the corps, tries to pull them apart, tries to push some of the members, and encourages them to break rank. Fellini pushes and pulls at the corps’ tight square block which rotates around the field. He pulls the corps block as if with an unseen rope, huge wedges of horns and drums, attempting to scatter them, a metaphor for his films breaking tradition. The corps begins to break apart at his command. He controls the field action as if images in a dream in his own mind. He is in heaven. Fellini creates the action on the field. But suddenly, it starts to spin out of control. Sometimes he pulls two wedges of horns together, but wait, they crash into each other. Oops. Nothing works as he planned. Sometimes he pulls them toward him but the corps becomes out of control and tramples him. In a slow passage, he begs the guard to become impassioned, and eventually they do. They become so lively that they chase him around the field. Exhausted at the end of his life, tired from chasing, cajoling and orchestrating, he hobbles toward his director’s chair. As a clown presents the director’s chair to him, paying tribute to Fellini and finally giving him the accolade he deserves, just as Fellnini tries to sit down in it, the clown pulls the chair out from under him. Fellini falls. The clown helps Fellini up, apologizes and offers the chair again. Fellini hesitates, tries to sit down and the chair is yanked again. Fellini falls. Fellini angily tries to grab the chair from the clown, and after some wreslting, Fellini succeeds. Fellini, in a triumphant move, dances with his chair, sets in a final resting place, sits on the chair and it breaks into pieces as he falls to the ground a final time. The end.

Kind SirMadam,

After seeing 8 minutes of their show, what you describe above doesn't seem to be what they're going for this year. Just sayin'. Wrong year for this rant.

We may still not like the show, but it's not what you describe for this writer at least,

[Cappybara]

Selecting an abstract art theme for a corps show is a cop-out. Abstration gives show designers complete artistic license to incorporate random, nonsensical, unstructured elements in a corps show and call it “art.” Babies make abstract art in their diapers every day. It’s easy. When show designers use an abstract theme for a corps show it’s like using a human shield against the judges because abstract art has no rules. Abstraction is random, alienating, and it has no place in a 12-minute marching music youth program where crowd reaction, shared joy and unified sense of purpose are so important.

If I want to experience a random subconscious event I’ll take a sleeping pill. If I want an absurd experience at a drum corps show, I’ll sit on the visitor side. That’s not why people come to a drum corps show. Abstraction is as easy as putting lipstick on a hamster. But getting 30,000 people in a stadium to feel the same thing is near impossible. Yet that’s what Carolina Crown did last year. That’s why they won. That’s what Madison did last year. Everyone agreed about their sense of purpose. Everyone stood on their feet. And a solid narrative is a lot harder to create than walking an imaginary tightrope or managing 160 meaningless folding chairs.

But this year, as with last year, if BD is not careful, audiences are going to be alienated again by a miserably disjunct, incoherent, juvenile, random, subconscious free-for-all performance art piece, just like last year with red balls, human sacrifices and elephant tusks, all of which left Fathom semifinals movie theater audiences scratching their heads so hard that there was blood in the popcorn.

Here’s a dada-like paragraph of random words, similar to a Blue Devils show. Now everyone can argue about their meaning, but eventually everyone realizes, it’s just annoying, it’s meritless and stirs no emotion. Alsjdf asd a;sld jkfas; dlfjasl o9r ;asd lkfjq ;2jrqn ssdf asd;fl q2x asd ihaspod fu8xq984 ua;. Af jazx lcjvwot pim qwcptu pgq;I giuh ihiuhas ldukhs. Are you bored yet? I typed it in less than 20 seconds. It required no technique, it required no thought about structure or purpose, and if it were twelve minutes long, paying customers would be angry that they were swindled.

The Blue Devils’ obsession with alienating abstractions and random artistic absurdities helps them avoid getting to the purpose of musical performance—shared human truth.

DRUM CORPS AND ABSTRACTION DON’T MIX

Absurd theater, film and orchestral pieces often use random, subconscious, unstructured, anti-establishment elements. By their nature, abstract performance art is completely antithetical to the drum corps medium in every way. Think about it-- every aspect of the drum corps activity has been shaped over the years for audience reaction, group mind, and shared sense of rhythm and purpose.

• Music is an art form that by its very nature contains repeating patterns that grow and build for dramatic effect. On the other end of the spectrum, abstraction thumbs its nose at patterns and delights in unresolved randomness.
• Drum corps shows are only 12 minutes long and capture the essence of musical pieces that are often longer. (Fellini has a lot longer to develop his complex themes and to create meaning and story over two hours and still manages to confuse.)
• Drum corps has a caption for judging audience outward response and acceptance. Fellini's films are the complete opposite.
• Drum corps horns are uniquely designed, shaped and held to project toward the bloody audience, for God's sake. If the instruments were designed by Fellini, they’d be pretzel shaped and sound like mastadons in pain. But corps instruments are intended to literally project to the audience for their reaction. It's direct, clear and purposeful invitation. It’s embracing, not rebuking. Projecting, not hiding. Clarifying, not obfuscating.
• There are captions which judge precision and unison of form. Can it be any clearer? Drum corps is not a performance medium suited for confusion and disagreement.
• Drum corps shows by their musical nature have an underlying agreement, a rhythm that’s shared by audience and performer. Unlike in a Fellini story, the characters in drum corps are literally in step with one another the entire time.
• Absolutely nothing about the nature of marching music is random, improvised, subconscious, left to chance or fate. The entire corps show is choreographed within an inch of its life.
• The nature of the entire drum corps activity is musical unison with clear emotional intent.
• The drum corps medium, because it’s a large scale music activity that is projected to the audience in a huge venue that battles for your attention doesn’t jibe with abstract, alienating elements. Corps already fight to get your focus and attention without making it worse.
• Corps shows are designed to be performed toward the audience in one direction. Everybody agrees.

There is so much agreement and unison in the drum corps experience that to subject drum corps audiences and young performers to dissonant, meaningless, patternless absurdities is harmful and rude. Last year, there was a palpable disgust at the Blue Devils when their show was over. The gut feeling was that audiences had been swindled. Audiences had been presented a riddle with no answer. Unsatisfying, mystifying, patternless, unresolved randomness, similar to looking into a trash can. If I want an entertainer to abuse me, I'll hire an escort with electro-stim equipment and a sounding rod.

What’s more bothersome than the lazy selection of an abstract performance art theme like Fellini, or any number of the other Dada-dabbling shoulder-shruggers that the Blue Devils have done in previous years, is that the Blue Devils are evading the purpose of the activity under the guise of artistic merit.

The purpose of the drum activity is the shared enjoyment between performer and audience during marching music routines with a single-focused dramatic action or musical emotion. That's the challenge. Everyone is gathered to feel and see the same thing. It's a collective exprience. A shared emotion by 30,000 people is an incredibly hard thing for show designers to achieve. The audience is all facing the same direction. We are all facing the performers, and the performers are facing us, and playing music for us. They are inviting us to share a specific series of themes, patterns and music that together help us create a shared vision of our humanity. Whether it’s Velvet Knight’s Wagnerian opera singer and the shark, or BD’s long missed When a Man Loves a Woman. Peformers are not there to confuse, obfuscate, fog, question, stumble, delay, muddy, mix up, or fail. Drum corps performers are there to clarify, deliver, and elevate specific musical passages to audience members, and convey a specific, clear underlying dramatic action or musical emotion to them in 12 minutes.

Good shows invite the audience, not alienate them. Every good corps show invites the audience to understand the world of the piece. From the joy of the Bridgemen's collapsing at the end of the William Tell Overture finale, to the breathtaking end of Phantom's Juliet show, good shows have a single dramatic action or sense of purpose that everyone in the audience understands. There is agreement between the players and the audience about what is being communicated, and the audience is swept away, in unison with the bold humanity and clarity of artistic purpose.

The performers shouldn’t alienate their audience like BD does with abstract, random, unresolved, vague designs. Toddlers with finger paints can do that.

With abstract themes like The Rite of Spring, audience members sat dumbfounded, wading in a sea of tattoos and elephant tusks, desperate to feel an emotion, any emotion-- anger, rage, delight, sadness, hilarity, freaking anything, any pattern or truth about our human experience. Instead, we were left with a barage of randomly selected, but briliantly executed abstract woven moving patterns and choreography in an alienating ballet without purpose or pattern, presenting no shared experience or meaning, making BD’s performers appear insane.

BD seems to be using Cirque du Soleil as a model, with one major difference. Cirque du Soleil’s abstraction has an underlying structure, a narrative arc, and the intention to draw specific emotion from the audience. For example, the Cirque clowns interact with an audience member, bring him up on stage to develop a character, and in less than a minute, the clowns find a human truth in that audience member, and that truth elevates the reason why the audience is here-- to understand the human experience and to share our universal, unique natures.

Not wallow in unsatisfying abstraction and randomness.

For the last several years, BD has been like a college kid hanging out at a Jean Genet short play festival, smoking clove cigarettes and reveling in the lofty complexity of Genet’s themes rather than getting off their butts and writing something of their own that has a clear, focused dramatic action that appeals to all of humanity—a task that’s much harder to do.

Drum corps is a large scale performance activity suited only for instant, excessive agreement by performers and audience. There's no getting around it. That's the nature of the beast.

SHOW SUGGESTIONS:

Now that I’ve completely eviscerated BD’s selection of abstract themes, I have some pointed Fellini show design suggestions. These two show concepts use abstraction only as a potent spice, but still provide a clear narrative arc and emotional meaning for drum corps audiences.

Here are two show ideas.

1) SHOW CONCEPT #1 Based on Fellini’s The Clowns, a TV movie. 30 guardmembers are dressed as clowns. Each guard member has in tow as their piece of guard equipment a lifesize, light-weight clown dummy that looks like a twin—each guard member spins, drags and throws his lifesize dummy like a flag, spinning their dead twin partners around wildly and dragging him by its feet, trying animate and resuscitate their dead twin, the entire show. The clown guard members lament their dead partners and try to revive them throughout the show, throwing, wooing, spinning, and animating them, even kicking them in anger, to no avail. By the end the guard members one by one give up their dead twins, drop their own clown costumes, and return to the signature guard uniform and flag/rifle. But there is only one clown left by the end, still trying to revive his dummy, finally giving up. But surprise. The dummy comes to life and angrily chases his partner, who now regrets having revived him. The End. This show idea has a singular visual theme. It’s absurd, it’s hilarious, and has a sense of humanity about death, relationships and our human desire to control and hang on to our past. This idea incorporates a SINGLE piece of equipment that becomes the center of the dramatic action and is used the entire show. That SINGLE piece of equipment becomes a metaphor for relationships and death. It’s absurd, funny, and fun to watch, and ultimately moving for audiences on the theme of meaning and loss in relationships.

2 SHOW CONCEPT #2 Fellini, played by one guard member, is a director who sees the corps on the field marching in a tight box. Fellini toys with the corps, tries to pull them apart, tries to push some of the members, and encourages them to break rank. Fellini pushes and pulls at the corps’ tight square block which rotates around the field. He pulls the corps block as if with an unseen rope, huge wedges of horns and drums, attempting to scatter them, a metaphor for his films breaking tradition. The corps begins to break apart at his command. He controls the field action as if images in a dream in his own mind. He is in heaven. Fellini creates the action on the field. But suddenly, it starts to spin out of control. Sometimes he pulls two wedges of horns together, but wait, they crash into each other. Oops. Nothing works as he planned. Sometimes he pulls them toward him but the corps becomes out of control and tramples him. In a slow passage, he begs the guard to become impassioned, and eventually they do. They become so lively that they chase him around the field. Exhausted at the end of his life, tired from chasing, cajoling and orchestrating, he hobbles toward his director’s chair. As a clown presents the director’s chair to him, paying tribute to Fellini and finally giving him the accolade he deserves, just as Fellnini tries to sit down in it, the clown pulls the chair out from under him. Fellini falls. The clown helps Fellini up, apologizes and offers the chair again. Fellini hesitates, tries to sit down and the chair is yanked again. Fellini falls. Fellini angily tries to grab the chair from the clown, and after some wreslting, Fellini succeeds. Fellini, in a triumphant move, dances with his chair, sets in a final resting place, sits on the chair and it breaks into pieces as he falls to the ground a final time. The end.

What the hell did I just read...

Okay. Firstly, who are YOU to tell everyone what drum corps is? Drum corps can mean a different thing to each person on this forum. I think a good thing to emphasize with you is that nothing is black and white, only shades of grey (please no 50 shades of grey jokes...).

2nd, drum corps in its most basic form is an art form. I can already tell you're an anti-modern art type of person, and you know what? That's totally okay. Some people like certain kinds of art and other people like others. Art can mean anything to a person. It's all open to interpretation. That's what's so great about music. Have you ever listened to a song with lyrics that are a bit ambiguous? I love reading up on people's different interpretations of those lyrics. People love art, music, etc. because it is flexible to each and every person. To somehow claim that BD's shows are WRONG and anti-drum corps is arrogant, insulting to the performers, and even more insulting to the artists, yes artists, who created the masterpiece on the field. I'm going to kindly ask you to get off your high horse sir.

3rd, Although audience entertainment should always be a factor when creating a drum corps show, you do have to remember that this is a competition. The Blue Devils have as much of a right to experiment with different genres of music as any other corps and they do a hell of a job with these more abstract themes and have evidently had great success with shows such as Through the Glass, Darkly, Cabaret Voltaire, and the re:Rite of Spring.

Finally, you're creating a blanket statement by saying absolutely everyone enjoyed Madison's and Crown's 2013 shows. No, not EVERYONE enjoyed it. That's the point. You can't get absolutely everyone to enjoy a show. Everyone has different tastes. I know some people who were a bit offended with Madison's presentation of war on the field as well as those who hated the narration in Crown's show. I don't like every single Crown show, every single BD show, etc. I do have favorite shows from each corps and I'm sure you do too.

Have a bit more respect for the people putting on one hell of a masterpiece on the field every summer, respect that not everyone will like the same shows as everyone else, and have a nice day.

[BRASSO]

Selecting an abstract art theme for a corps show is a cop-out. Abstration gives show designers complete artistic license to incorporate random, nonsensical, unstructured elements in a corps show and call it “art.” Babies make abstract art in their diapers every day. It’s easy. When show designers use an abstract theme for a corps show it’s like using a human shield against the judges because abstract art has no rules. Abstraction is random, alienating, and it has no place in a 12-minute marching music youth program where crowd reaction, shared joy and unified sense of purpose are so important.

If I want to experience a random subconscious event I’ll take a sleeping pill. If I want an absurd experience at a drum corps show, I’ll sit on the visitor side. That’s not why people come to a drum corps show. Abstraction is as easy as putting lipstick on a hamster. But getting 30,000 people in a stadium to feel the same thing is near impossible. Yet that’s what Carolina Crown did last year. That’s why they won. That’s what Madison did last year. Everyone agreed about their sense of purpose. Everyone stood on their feet. And a solid narrative is a lot harder to create than walking an imaginary tightrope or managing 160 meaningless folding chairs.

But this year, as with last year, if BD is not careful, audiences are going to be alienated again by a miserably disjunct, incoherent, juvenile, random, subconscious free-for-all performance art piece, just like last year with red balls, human sacrifices and elephant tusks, all of which left Fathom semifinals movie theater audiences scratching their heads so hard that there was blood in the popcorn.

Here’s a dada-like paragraph of random words, similar to a Blue Devils show. Now everyone can argue about their meaning, but eventually everyone realizes, it’s just annoying, it’s meritless and stirs no emotion. Alsjdf asd a;sld jkfas; dlfjasl o9r ;asd lkfjq ;2jrqn ssdf asd;fl q2x asd ihaspod fu8xq984 ua;. Af jazx lcjvwot pim qwcptu pgq;I giuh ihiuhas ldukhs. Are you bored yet? I typed it in less than 20 seconds. It required no technique, it required no thought about structure or purpose, and if it were twelve minutes long, paying customers would be angry that they were swindled.

The Blue Devils’ obsession with alienating abstractions and random artistic absurdities helps them avoid getting to the purpose of musical performance—shared human truth.

DRUM CORPS AND ABSTRACTION DON’T MIX

Absurd theater, film and orchestral pieces often use random, subconscious, unstructured, anti-establishment elements. By their nature, abstract performance art is completely antithetical to the drum corps medium in every way. Think about it-- every aspect of the drum corps activity has been shaped over the years for audience reaction, group mind, and shared sense of rhythm and purpose.

• Music is an art form that by its very nature contains repeating patterns that grow and build for dramatic effect. On the other end of the spectrum, abstraction thumbs its nose at patterns and delights in unresolved randomness.
• Drum corps shows are only 12 minutes long and capture the essence of musical pieces that are often longer. (Fellini has a lot longer to develop his complex themes and to create meaning and story over two hours and still manages to confuse.)
• Drum corps has a caption for judging audience outward response and acceptance. Fellini's films are the complete opposite.
• Drum corps horns are uniquely designed, shaped and held to project toward the bloody audience, for God's sake. If the instruments were designed by Fellini, they’d be pretzel shaped and sound like mastadons in pain. But corps instruments are intended to literally project to the audience for their reaction. It's direct, clear and purposeful invitation. It’s embracing, not rebuking. Projecting, not hiding. Clarifying, not obfuscating.
• There are captions which judge precision and unison of form. Can it be any clearer? Drum corps is not a performance medium suited for confusion and disagreement.
• Drum corps shows by their musical nature have an underlying agreement, a rhythm that’s shared by audience and performer. Unlike in a Fellini story, the characters in drum corps are literally in step with one another the entire time.
• Absolutely nothing about the nature of marching music is random, improvised, subconscious, left to chance or fate. The entire corps show is choreographed within an inch of its life.
• The nature of the entire drum corps activity is musical unison with clear emotional intent.
• The drum corps medium, because it’s a large scale music activity that is projected to the audience in a huge venue that battles for your attention doesn’t jibe with abstract, alienating elements. Corps already fight to get your focus and attention without making it worse.
• Corps shows are designed to be performed toward the audience in one direction. Everybody agrees.

There is so much agreement and unison in the drum corps experience that to subject drum corps audiences and young performers to dissonant, meaningless, patternless absurdities is harmful and rude. Last year, there was a palpable disgust at the Blue Devils when their show was over. The gut feeling was that audiences had been swindled. Audiences had been presented a riddle with no answer. Unsatisfying, mystifying, patternless, unresolved randomness, similar to looking into a trash can. If I want an entertainer to abuse me, I'll hire an escort with electro-stim equipment and a sounding rod.

What’s more bothersome than the lazy selection of an abstract performance art theme like Fellini, or any number of the other Dada-dabbling shoulder-shruggers that the Blue Devils have done in previous years, is that the Blue Devils are evading the purpose of the activity under the guise of artistic merit.

The purpose of the drum activity is the shared enjoyment between performer and audience during marching music routines with a single-focused dramatic action or musical emotion. That's the challenge. Everyone is gathered to feel and see the same thing. It's a collective exprience. A shared emotion by 30,000 people is an incredibly hard thing for show designers to achieve. The audience is all facing the same direction. We are all facing the performers, and the performers are facing us, and playing music for us. They are inviting us to share a specific series of themes, patterns and music that together help us create a shared vision of our humanity. Whether it’s Velvet Knight’s Wagnerian opera singer and the shark, or BD’s long missed When a Man Loves a Woman. Peformers are not there to confuse, obfuscate, fog, question, stumble, delay, muddy, mix up, or fail. Drum corps performers are there to clarify, deliver, and elevate specific musical passages to audience members, and convey a specific, clear underlying dramatic action or musical emotion to them in 12 minutes.

Good shows invite the audience, not alienate them. Every good corps show invites the audience to understand the world of the piece. From the joy of the Bridgemen's collapsing at the end of the William Tell Overture finale, to the breathtaking end of Phantom's Juliet show, good shows have a single dramatic action or sense of purpose that everyone in the audience understands. There is agreement between the players and the audience about what is being communicated, and the audience is swept away, in unison with the bold humanity and clarity of artistic purpose.

The performers shouldn’t alienate their audience like BD does with abstract, random, unresolved, vague designs. Toddlers with finger paints can do that.

With abstract themes like The Rite of Spring, audience members sat dumbfounded, wading in a sea of tattoos and elephant tusks, desperate to feel an emotion, any emotion-- anger, rage, delight, sadness, hilarity, freaking anything, any pattern or truth about our human experience. Instead, we were left with a barage of randomly selected, but briliantly executed abstract woven moving patterns and choreography in an alienating ballet without purpose or pattern, presenting no shared experience or meaning, making BD’s performers appear insane.

BD seems to be using Cirque du Soleil as a model, with one major difference. Cirque du Soleil’s abstraction has an underlying structure, a narrative arc, and the intention to draw specific emotion from the audience. For example, the Cirque clowns interact with an audience member, bring him up on stage to develop a character, and in less than a minute, the clowns find a human truth in that audience member, and that truth elevates the reason why the audience is here-- to understand the human experience and to share our universal, unique natures.

Not wallow in unsatisfying abstraction and randomness.

For the last several years, BD has been like a college kid hanging out at a Jean Genet short play festival, smoking clove cigarettes and reveling in the lofty complexity of Genet’s themes rather than getting off their butts and writing something of their own that has a clear, focused dramatic action that appeals to all of humanity—a task that’s much harder to do.

Drum corps is a large scale performance activity suited only for instant, excessive agreement by performers and audience. There's no getting around it. That's the nature of the beast.

SHOW SUGGESTIONS:

Now that I’ve completely eviscerated BD’s selection of abstract themes, I have some pointed Fellini show design suggestions. These two show concepts use abstraction only as a potent spice, but still provide a clear narrative arc and emotional meaning for drum corps audiences.

Here are two show ideas.

1) SHOW CONCEPT #1 Based on Fellini’s The Clowns, a TV movie. 30 guardmembers are dressed as clowns. Each guard member has in tow as their piece of guard equipment a lifesize, light-weight clown dummy that looks like a twin—each guard member spins, drags and throws his lifesize dummy like a flag, spinning their dead twin partners around wildly and dragging him by its feet, trying animate and resuscitate their dead twin, the entire show. The clown guard members lament their dead partners and try to revive them throughout the show, throwing, wooing, spinning, and animating them, even kicking them in anger, to no avail. By the end the guard members one by one give up their dead twins, drop their own clown costumes, and return to the signature guard uniform and flag/rifle. But there is only one clown left by the end, still trying to revive his dummy, finally giving up. But surprise. The dummy comes to life and angrily chases his partner, who now regrets having revived him. The End. This show idea has a singular visual theme. It’s absurd, it’s hilarious, and has a sense of humanity about death, relationships and our human desire to control and hang on to our past. This idea incorporates a SINGLE piece of equipment that becomes the center of the dramatic action and is used the entire show. That SINGLE piece of equipment becomes a metaphor for relationships and death. It’s absurd, funny, and fun to watch, and ultimately moving for audiences on the theme of meaning and loss in relationships.

2 SHOW CONCEPT #2 Fellini, played by one guard member, is a director who sees the corps on the field marching in a tight box. Fellini toys with the corps, tries to pull them apart, tries to push some of the members, and encourages them to break rank. Fellini pushes and pulls at the corps’ tight square block which rotates around the field. He pulls the corps block as if with an unseen rope, huge wedges of horns and drums, attempting to scatter them, a metaphor for his films breaking tradition. The corps begins to break apart at his command. He controls the field action as if images in a dream in his own mind. He is in heaven. Fellini creates the action on the field. But suddenly, it starts to spin out of control. Sometimes he pulls two wedges of horns together, but wait, they crash into each other. Oops. Nothing works as he planned. Sometimes he pulls them toward him but the corps becomes out of control and tramples him. In a slow passage, he begs the guard to become impassioned, and eventually they do. They become so lively that they chase him around the field. Exhausted at the end of his life, tired from chasing, cajoling and orchestrating, he hobbles toward his director’s chair. As a clown presents the director’s chair to him, paying tribute to Fellini and finally giving him the accolade he deserves, just as Fellnini tries to sit down in it, the clown pulls the chair out from under him. Fellini falls. The clown helps Fellini up, apologizes and offers the chair again. Fellini hesitates, tries to sit down and the chair is yanked again. Fellini falls. Fellini angily tries to grab the chair from the clown, and after some wreslting, Fellini succeeds. Fellini, in a triumphant move, dances with his chair, sets in a final resting place, sits on the chair and it breaks into pieces as he falls to the ground a final time. The end.

Masterfully well written commentary, imo.... the fact that judges do not subscribe to your thinking must be understandably frustrating to you, as it no doubt is to so many other equally disappointed audience goers who share your frustrations whereby confusion and randomness can be so rewarded, while more communicative show themes ( while perhaps not equally executed to the same technical levels ) are seemingly not as well rewarded. Personally, I see nothing particularly enobling to have young performers perform in a Performing Art medium in which many in the audience are in the end left with a sense of confusion and in which no enlightenment took place whatsoever for many in the audience with the performance endeavor, other than the fact that they learned that a Corps performers were perhaps more talented than their peers that day in their technical abilities according to the judges..

Thank you for your insightful and intelligent commentary. I thoroughly enjoyed reading your critique. I only wish more judges would more positively subscribe to your thought provoking and intelligent commentary assessment here, particularly in the General Effect Captions.

Edited June 3, 2014 by BRASSO