Trends, art and DCI scoring

[seen-it-all]

1 hour ago, One n Done said:

We’re not “moving” towards GE having more weight....we are fully there.  Less visual demand.  Less musical demand.  Especially less of both occurring simultaneously.  The musical clarity and passion this year from SCV, for example, is amazing.  The cost?  Very limited movement and environmental/special demands.  This is no accident on the part of their designers, and the judges buy it.  Many fans too.  I dig ‘em.  Effect rules, this is not new.  I think what IS new, is that we’re starting to see a limited bandwidth from evaluators as to WHAT is effective:  Absolute clarity and volume at all costs and programs that are obvious to the point of not requiring or challenging the audience to interpret and derive meaning.  Is this all bad?  All good?  What I don’t want to see is a Finals where 12 groups wind up being nearly indistinguishable in their use of field and variety of content.  

We're pretty much already there. 

[cixelsyd]

5 hours ago, One n Done said:

I think what IS new, is that we’re starting to see a limited bandwidth from evaluators as to WHAT is effective:  Absolute clarity and volume at all costs and programs that are obvious to the point of not requiring or challenging the audience to interpret and derive meaning.  Is this all bad?  All good?  What I don’t want to see is a Finals where 12 groups wind up being nearly indistinguishable in their use of field and variety of content.  

When has that ever NOT been the case?

[JackTripper]

Hahaha "art". In drum corps? hahahahahaha

[bluesman]

Figure skating is a good analogy.  Figure skating(especially women's) was a very highly rated Olympic sport until the pairs figure skating scandal at the Salt Lake City games forced a scoring system change.  The days of the perfect 6.0 were replaced with a system that gave a specific number of points for every type of movement.  Each of those moves were also rewarded or penalized for execution. The result is that skaters are forced to cram as many point grabbing moves into a 4.5 minute routine that the artistry of the sport gets lost.  It also makes a lot of the routines look like the music was added only as an afterthought.  It's started to look a little spastic.

Is it possible that in a rush to maximize scores designers have crammed visual programs with so many poses, gestures and other small movements that it no longer relates to the music being played?  Drum Corps is a different animal than figure skating and our changes to the scoring system have been more gradual than theirs, but some of what I've seen on the field is starting to look a little bit...... spastic.