Armchair Program Coordinator: DCI 2023 (8 to 5)
Looking back at the great shows from this year and making them even better.
Now that the 2023 drum corps season is wrapped up, we can take a look back at the shows. If you’ve read any of my articles, you probably know that I (despite not having any real design experience) love to have opinions on show design. So today, I continue to run down the finalist corps’ shows and discuss what I liked and where I think they can take the next step. Next up in this three-part series, we have the middle-placing corps from finals: Cadets, Mandarins, Phantom Regiment, and…
The Cavaliers - ...Where You'll Find Me
What I liked:
A design staff shakeup was expected by many following The Green Machine’s disappointing 2022 season, but few were expecting just how star-studded the new team would be. Combine that with the corps celebrating its 75th anniversary, and expectations will be very high. Unsurprisingly, The Cavies played some of their highlights throughout their storied history, and as a youngin, I enjoyed going back and watching the old shows where those selections came from. Another thing I liked about their performance was the props and the “plumes” on top of the Aussies. While I’m still unsure what they were meant to represent, they were very visually striking. I thought that it made for a cohesive, modern visual package while not being overboard, which would’ve detracted from the feeling of a throwback show. The staff was definitely aware of the amount of talent coming into the percussion section this season and did an excellent job centering that section throughout the entire show.
Where they can take the next step:
From the get-go, this show would already have to work hard at pleasing me, as I’m not usually a fan of throwback shows. As someone who wasn’t around to experience any of the callbacks in real time, I am not the target audience of these kinds of shows. This year’s show just felt a little too reliant on nostalgia for my liking because I (and many other young drum corps fans) don’t get excited for the callbacks that have no emotional effect on me. I wish the corps would have included highlights from some of the corps’ fantastic shows within the past two decades that younger fans could latch onto. Outside of that, I found that the brass book was written with the hornline they wanted instead of the one they had. I don’t think the writing was of poor quality. Quite the contrary, I just think the corps could have achieved more with brass writing focused on the hornline’s strengths.
Summary:
Overall, I thought the show was well-designed, just too focused on pleasing an older generation instead of making a well-rounded production for fans of all ages to enjoy. In my experience talking with people my age and much older, the perception of the show's quality couldn’t have been any more different, with most old heads loving it and most younger fans feeling indifferent at best.
Armchair Program Coordinator: DCI 2023 (12-9)
Now that the 2023 drum corps season is wrapped up, we can take a look back at the shows. If you’ve read any of my articles, you probably know that I (despite not having any real design experience) love to have opinions on show design. So today, I will start running down the finalist corps’ shows and discuss what I liked and where I think they can take t…
Phantom Regiment - Exogenesis
What I liked:
After a consistent falloff in placements starting in 2013, Phantom Regiment made key staff changes during the COVID years, which rocketed them four placements up from the 2019 season with an 8th place finish in 2023. The “new” design staff will feel very SCV to newer drum corps fans, but many of those designers worked together at Phantom before the team moved out west. The current Phantom design team has much experience working together to make a clear and cohesive show, which was evident this year. With many exciting moments for fans to enjoy, whether it’s the electric performance of Muse’s “Supremacy” in the opener or the groovy breakdown section of Oliver Waespi’s “As If A Voice Were In Them,” this year’s show was a Phan favorite for obvious reasons as a return to form for Phantom in more ways than one. The visual design across the board was a big step up from last year’s program, and I especially enjoyed using tarps to accent the field rather than cover it.
Where they can take the next step:
I will spare you from another one of my extended Phantom ballad rants. Still, I was very vocally never a fan of the use of the drumline in the ballad as it felt unnecessary and ruined the charm of the original piece, Rachmaninoff’s 2nd Piano Concerto, in my opinion. Beyond that, the theming was unclear to the viewer, and the show did not present the point very well. Is it about aliens? Kinda? The lack of a clear theme to latch onto made it challenging to enjoy the show as much as I would’ve liked to. In 2022, I was not pleased with the sound design as the amplified tubas were very overbearing, and I was disappointed when I had the same experience when I saw them live. From what I understand after talking to others, much of this may have had to do with where I was sitting (near the front on the 50). Still, I don’t think where someone chooses to sit should affect their enjoyment of the show, especially in a place where so many super fans such as myself and others often choose.
Summary:
I’m excited that Phantom Regiment is back in the conversation for a top-half placement, and the design team clearly enjoys working together and with the corps. If they can focus more on building up that nuance of show-theming, I’m sure I will be delighted with the product they put out from year to year. I also hope the designers consider audience experience more when constructing the soundscape because the amplification displeased even the biggest Phans of Exogenesis I know.
The UNPRECEDENTED Competitiveness of the 2023 DCI Season
The weeks after a recent drum corps season ends, one of the thoughts that runs through my head about the summer is wondering how that particular season will be remembered years later. After some seasons, it’s pretty obvious. For example, the 2018 season will be forever remembered for Santa Clara Vanguard winning their seventh DCI World Championship and …
Mandarins - Sinnerman
What I liked:
I will come right out of the gates and say that this was my favorite show of the season. What Mandarins have been missing for the past few seasons has been actual depth of concept and good ideas that ultimately felt half-baked by the end of the season. I’m glad to say that I did not find that to be an issue with this corps, and the design team gave us one of the most cohesive, thought-provoking, and emotionally compelling shows from any drum corps in quite some time. Mandarins this year felt like one of the corps more focused on pleasing the audience than the judges, but they still managed to be very competitive, blowing their record score and placement out of the water. The emotional peak that was the ballad hit of Hozier’s “Take Me to Church” was one of the most powerful individual moments I’ve ever experienced during my time following this activity. And who could forget the spinning props used throughout the program, ending the show with color guard members being strapped inside and spun around at dizzying speeds.
Where they can take the next step:
As much as I love this show, there is no perfect show, so I have a couple of nitpicks. Firstly, while I love the split hornline uniforms, I wish there was more musical contrast between the white and red halves. As the show stands, the call and response between the two groups are just the exact same dissonant and aggressive music passages, and I think the uniforms and overall story of the show would have been more effective if the hornline’s musical performance reflected their states as Sinnerman and not Sinnerman. Another very minor gripe I had was that there were moments where I thought more musical content could’ve been added without detracting from the emotional moment, in particular, the opening hit.
Summary:
Overall, it is a fantastic product and a strong contender for one of my favorite shows, not just this season but for all time. I loved every aspect of the show, visually and musically, and I cannot wait to see what’s next. If this is the trend that Mandarins' design team sets, I fully expect them to be in the medal conversation within the next five seasons.
GEM's Crystal Ball: WAY TOO EARLY 2024 DCI Finals Predictions
GEM writers and contributors were asked to give their final rankings of the top 15 competing corps, regardless of class, based on where they predicted the corps would end up Saturday night, August 10, 2024. Voters also picked which corps they thought would win each of the five caption performance awards.
The Cadets - Atlas Rising
What I liked:
After a successful 2022 season with a show that would’ve fit right in with The Cadets of the 2000s, the corps’ design team cooked up a show that, while different from the previous year, still felt very Cadets. Starting from the opener, you can immediately tell that the design team knew just how much talent they had on the field with a challenging drum feature to usher in the hornline on an exhilarating arrangement of Hans Zimmer’s theme from Man of Steel. The musical moments in the show continue to impress, especially with the textbook ballad and stunning flugelhorn solo. The percussion moments never disappointed with the aggressively East Coast writing that would make even the most elitist West Coast enjoyer scream in glee. I also very much enjoyed the color guard writing and performance and think it’s the most I’ve noticed the Cadets guard since I started following the activity closely.
Where they can take the next step:
Simply put, this show was confusing and a bit of a mess. Adding narration was the right call, but the point stands that your initial design failed to communicate the theme so much that a band-aid solution within the last few weeks of tour was necessary. It also bothered me how the show was described not as a portrayal of Atlas holding up the earth but as a portrayal of the Titan’s athleticism; however, the strongest visual moment of the entire show is an obvious reference to the former, which the show is supposedly not about. Speaking of that visual moment, it came in what I call the “second ballad,” which leads to my next point of how I felt the show's pacing struggled greatly. There was so much back and forth between just percussion playing to full brass ensemble that it dragged the show on with weak musical shaping. I also found the props confusing and thought they were taking up space that could’ve been used more effectively by the guard or the corps having more room to spread out.
Summary:
This is one of those shows I will revisit regularly for individual moments, but it makes me feel very indifferent as a whole package. I greatly enjoyed the music writing, even if I don’t think it was stitched together well. I know this design team can make great shows with a well-communicated theme. They just didn’t quite hit the mark with this particular show.
Aaron Blackley is one of the original contributors for General Effect Media. He has a vast knowledge and passion for the marching arts and has worked alongside the likes of HornRank as a ranker and moderator as well as the TxBands.com liveblog team since summer 2021. Aaron currently works front of house at Interstellar BBQ in North Austin. He can be found on Twitter as @GEMAaronB.
CAVALIERS - "Where You'll Find Me"
The Cavaliers' 2023 design team had no excuse for walking blindly into the typical anniversary show glue traps. They should have learned what worked from the Blue Devil's Metamorph, which dazzled audiences with a correct balance of retrospective nostalgia and forward-looking innovation. The Cavaliers design team, on the other hand, were cockroaches blindly meandering, last-minute, onto sticky shards of music, biting off their own limbs to escape from the mismatched melodies, crowded with incongruent drill sets from decades past. The show lacked even a hint of forward branding.
It's clear from the pre-season Tim Hinton interview with Cavaliers' David Starnes that the design team was well aware of the anniversary show kill jar. "We're not doing a 'best of' show, here." Sadly, that's exactly what happened. The enormous number of prior show references caused a dementia-like soup-- an overlapping Protools byte vertigo, with no clarity, focus or backbone. The interview also revealed that by June 16th, they still had not completed the drill or arrangement for the closer-- a clear sign of a last-minute scramble. When you don't have an ending, you haven't even developed a pattern that heightens and resolves at the end. That's when you call Starnes.
It's important to look at the design process for this show, which suffered from a variety of typical anniversary design team flaws.
1) The Cavaliers' show lacked a clear subject and theme. "Our Anniversary" doesn't suffice as a show subject. They needed more. Blue Devils' Metamorph relied on layered meaning-- direct visual symbolism, action set pieces, transforming stage sets, and distinct musical movements (each with a different style), ending with a series of virtuoso soloists of color-- a statement of elevation and forward momentum for the enlightened organization.
2) The Cavaliers' design team relied too heavily on Rick Saucedo's jukebox-style arrangement to magically create the impossible-- a singular, cohesive musical statement with a clear overall arc. That's a thankless task, and a minefield for any arranger, regardless of prowess. A montage of clipped melodies ends up sounding like an overture, not the main act. That leaves the visual team in a blender of mismatched old drill sets, ultimately unsatisfying like a series of Instagram reels at 2AM.
3) The feather props were shockingly amateurish push and pose rolling stock, without any transformation or "dual purpose" other than to transform into phallic symbols by the use of a rotating lever at the base of the feather to make it appear penis-like at a certain angle. Alas, the design team "pulled out" of the phallic imagery as finals neared, sheepishly returning the feathers to a safe "face front" angle, and abandoning the expensive lever-pull design technology they used all season. The phallic symbol was the only intention in the design of the rolling stock, an amateurish design decision considering that any public discussion of the planned phallic imagery would be awkward-- they'd have to explain the pubescent "why" behind their use, and reveal that the imagery had no depth or merit beyond a macho erection symbol. That's a clear indication of a lack of depth in the visual design.
4) Starnes claimed that the design was a puzzle, with the use of "Easter Eggs". Easter eggs would be an entertaining addition if there were a central theme to the show, but there wasn't. Easter eggs ended up being a whimsical expression to cleverly hide the truth-- there was no "there" there-- no main visual arc.
5) As it turns out, the Easter eggs included the phallic levers (later abandoned), and an ACT II reveal of an undershirt on the color guard with shading to make the men appear to have fully formed feminine breasts, an intentional Cesario right wing button-pusher, that had no thematic purpose, other than a random rogue statement on gender identity. You can't blame Cesario's hubris in adding the random gender identity element-- there was no other thematic backbone in the entire show. (Not that he would have restrained himself from gender-bending costume elements regardless of theme or time period, anyway. Cesario seems to be throwing caution to the wind in his later years, causing concern even a Gladiator-themed show would result in a brazen costume design of high heels and bustles for the Iron Age warriors.)
6) Starnes reveals that the "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" was a corps tradition, but sidetracked any discussion of the symbol, or what it means to the corps, specifically, and no mention of the rainbow's current social meaning, an awkward, unspoken tie-in to the membership's slowly emerging relaxation of sexual identity. (Did the Cavaliers ever really come out? No statement has ever been made, even after the clumsy "Gays are Mentally Ill" show featuring Rufus Wainwright's lyrics and gay men in cages opposite rainbow colored Rorschach blotters and John Nash's schizophrenic images as drill sets.) In 2023, Starnes claimed that the lyric "Where you'll find me" was somehow meaningful to alumni, but the vague phrase raised more questions for audiences than it answered.
7) Old set pieces have become stale and dated. The iconic "stepover" move, for example, pales in comparison to today's maneuvers. Its original form in 1981 dazzled audiences who threw babies and checkbooks when the horn line narrowly missed stomping on WGI-winning rifles who laid down before them. To top the original, this year's horn line would have had to form a 30 foot tall gymnastic pyramid to step over them in order to gain any applause.
8) Royalties become expensive for an anniversary show with twelve recognizable tunes. What to do? Why only play two measures of everything and avoid the royalties and clearance issues, that's what. But two measures of everything is hard on the ears and ends up sounding like a Hooked on Classics mash-up. "Oh, sir, MGM is on line one-- something about royalties."
9) The Cavaliers' drill lacked defined stage pictures, where the audience understood the intended "game" in any given musical moment.
Drum corps designers need to stop pretending that they work for months or years on their premises. It's becoming obvious that show design is a seat-of-the-pants, last-minute, too-many-cooks operation. Last-minute productions lack depth, lack clever visual devices, and lack a clarity of artistic purpose.
David Starnes also came to the last-minute aid of Rick Subel in his 2017 hairball "It Is", a strange collection of unrelated tunes that Starnes wrapped up with a thread of "deconstruction." (What Wicked's "For Good" has to do with deconstruction, don't ask.) Starnes seems to be the "fixer" you hire when things aren't coalescing. But Pulp Fiction proves that fixers can't fix everything.
The Cavaliers are desperate for an identity. And it will come in the form of a wise selection of a new symphonic composer, and a whip-smart visual designer that keeps the guard occupied with characters and narrative contexts, and prevents their posing and meaningless Las Vegas show-boy dance routines. The days of Cavaliers "Immortal" and "007" prove that characters are within reach for the Cavaliers' guard, and character complexity and would be a welcome respite from their shallow variety-show style of recent years, breasts or not.