Resurrecting this topic with a proposed solution - member participation in design choices.
1) One fix to the "bad design sends lambs to slaughter" problem (as experienced in Cavaliers' 2022 program "Signs of the Times", for example, or Crown's smiley and naive Right Here Right Now) is that marching members should now have an early-season hand in design decisions. This alleviates the unfair punishing of members for poor design, which members currently have no responsibility for.
2) Designers must include members in early meetings, which will likely force designers to be more responsible and timely in their design decisions, including music selections and overall visual action.
3) Marching members should be added to the design advisory board by select invitation, limiting the number participating. (We've all been in production development meetings with too many cooks.)
4) The basic rubric for teaching production design and development should be the simple structure as promoted in the Jesu Spectre video series Drum Corps Concept Design 101 on Youtube which is based on Aristotle's principles of performing arts productions: Cohesion, Authenticity, Universality, Uniqueness and Engineered Emotion. These tenets will be more than enough to weigh down new students of show design, and will prevent them from indulging in the typical freshman year folly of abstract experimentation, a tedious and painful trend found in every film school, for example.
5) Marching member involvement in design relieves some of the pressure on design teams who bear the brunt of their unilateral, unedited, late-stage, and often shortsighted design choices.
6) Marching member involvement in design encourages executive-level thinking in production development by young producers.
7) Most importantly, marching member involvement in design raises the awareness that music has intentional, articulable meaning in professional productions, either from its own inherent subject and theme, or contextually as part of a larger work. Music substance is the only aspect of drum corps that separates it from other simple-minded young adult activities like cheerleading and the breathtakingly shallow competition dance.
The score is more than fifty percent design-dependent. Design directly impacts General Effect (rep), Music Analysis (rep), Visual Analysis (comp) and Color Guard (cont). The scoresheet assesses if the design is cohesive (logical), universal (profound), unique (completely original), authentic (convincing) and engineered for emotion (scripted for audience buy-in.)
The larger issue is that some of this year's shows are completely lacking in a specific conceptual framework, but the judges aren't punishing the designers, to be frank. There doesn't seem to be any devaluing of design-impacted captions, even when the show concept is painfully shallow. SCV's "Nirvana" has no more to do with the titular Buddhist principle than a cigarette butt-clogged sewer cover in the Bronx. The rolling platforms are unintegrated, meaningless and unexplained. Sure, there's a few lotus positions and a couple of sitar Protools layers, but other than that, there is almost no translation of any subject matter, visually or musically. Crown's "Right Here Right Now" is a free swirly cupcake at a rave, with absolutely no depth or breadth or heft. There's no philosophical, literary, or even musical concept at work, underneath. And the design captions are blind to it, afraid to face the issue, head-on in critiques: "Your show has no depth of concept. It's devaluing the activity to the level of cheerleading."
The problem to me is that when you punish the designers in the way that you're arguing they should, you also punish the kids, through no fault of their own. That feels like a really difficult thing for a judge to be able to justify, especially in an activity that makes such a big deal about the performers. Do I disagree with doing so? Not especially, this is a competitive activity and we want design to be at the same level the performances are. I just think there will need to be a lot of adjustments made to the philosophy of the activity before this is something that can or will realistically happen on a consistent basis.
Design absolutely impacts the score. The point being made here is that it isn't the entire score, it just contributes to it in a way that can be enhanced (or diminished) by the performers.
The point here, I think, being that it can be argued that for some of these shows we're seeing scoring so well in General Effect, it is indeed the second subcaption of PERF that is carrying the REP subcaption. The article says that the PERF score can boost the REP score because as performers "sell the product" more, the judge buys in, understands, and is able to read out of the performance more of the design's intention - hence adding to the effect. But, if the show has design flaws, judges shouldn't be keeping the REP score at a stead pace with the PERF score. It's frowned upon to give a bottom heavy score (8.5 in REP and 8.8 in PERF,) because this seems as you're saying that what was performed on the field was perfect, so perfect in fact, that the performers are actually outperforming what's been given - they need more. It also raises the question of how can a performance be better than the design of what is being performed - we think that the PERF subcaption is mutual exclusive to the REP subcaption, and is certainly taught that way in some circles (not implying it is at DCI.) But what bottom heavy scoring like this could perhaps tell a designer is that while the design of the production needs work, the performers are achieving at such a high rate that they are, in fact, out performing the production.
I really like to view it as Repertoire Quality and Performance Quality. That helps nullify the question posed of how the performance can be better than the rep, however we still see those numbers staying super close instead of having the separation that honestly, I personally think should be there more often. If you're going to have a .5 or .6 spread in favor of the Rep, you should also be able to see that in favor of Perf.
Resurrecting this topic with a proposed solution - member participation in design choices.
1) One fix to the "bad design sends lambs to slaughter" problem (as experienced in Cavaliers' 2022 program "Signs of the Times", for example, or Crown's smiley and naive Right Here Right Now) is that marching members should now have an early-season hand in design decisions. This alleviates the unfair punishing of members for poor design, which members currently have no responsibility for.
2) Designers must include members in early meetings, which will likely force designers to be more responsible and timely in their design decisions, including music selections and overall visual action.
3) Marching members should be added to the design advisory board by select invitation, limiting the number participating. (We've all been in production development meetings with too many cooks.)
4) The basic rubric for teaching production design and development should be the simple structure as promoted in the Jesu Spectre video series Drum Corps Concept Design 101 on Youtube which is based on Aristotle's principles of performing arts productions: Cohesion, Authenticity, Universality, Uniqueness and Engineered Emotion. These tenets will be more than enough to weigh down new students of show design, and will prevent them from indulging in the typical freshman year folly of abstract experimentation, a tedious and painful trend found in every film school, for example.
5) Marching member involvement in design relieves some of the pressure on design teams who bear the brunt of their unilateral, unedited, late-stage, and often shortsighted design choices.
6) Marching member involvement in design encourages executive-level thinking in production development by young producers.
7) Most importantly, marching member involvement in design raises the awareness that music has intentional, articulable meaning in professional productions, either from its own inherent subject and theme, or contextually as part of a larger work. Music substance is the only aspect of drum corps that separates it from other simple-minded young adult activities like cheerleading and the breathtakingly shallow competition dance.
Gotta love the subtle callback to Drax' comment in Guardians Of The Galaxy...
The score is more than fifty percent design-dependent. Design directly impacts General Effect (rep), Music Analysis (rep), Visual Analysis (comp) and Color Guard (cont). The scoresheet assesses if the design is cohesive (logical), universal (profound), unique (completely original), authentic (convincing) and engineered for emotion (scripted for audience buy-in.)
The larger issue is that some of this year's shows are completely lacking in a specific conceptual framework, but the judges aren't punishing the designers, to be frank. There doesn't seem to be any devaluing of design-impacted captions, even when the show concept is painfully shallow. SCV's "Nirvana" has no more to do with the titular Buddhist principle than a cigarette butt-clogged sewer cover in the Bronx. The rolling platforms are unintegrated, meaningless and unexplained. Sure, there's a few lotus positions and a couple of sitar Protools layers, but other than that, there is almost no translation of any subject matter, visually or musically. Crown's "Right Here Right Now" is a free swirly cupcake at a rave, with absolutely no depth or breadth or heft. There's no philosophical, literary, or even musical concept at work, underneath. And the design captions are blind to it, afraid to face the issue, head-on in critiques: "Your show has no depth of concept. It's devaluing the activity to the level of cheerleading."
The problem to me is that when you punish the designers in the way that you're arguing they should, you also punish the kids, through no fault of their own. That feels like a really difficult thing for a judge to be able to justify, especially in an activity that makes such a big deal about the performers. Do I disagree with doing so? Not especially, this is a competitive activity and we want design to be at the same level the performances are. I just think there will need to be a lot of adjustments made to the philosophy of the activity before this is something that can or will realistically happen on a consistent basis.
Design absolutely impacts the score. The point being made here is that it isn't the entire score, it just contributes to it in a way that can be enhanced (or diminished) by the performers.
Yes, it’s the performance of the design that creates effect. And excellent performance can elevate a lesser designed program.
The point here, I think, being that it can be argued that for some of these shows we're seeing scoring so well in General Effect, it is indeed the second subcaption of PERF that is carrying the REP subcaption. The article says that the PERF score can boost the REP score because as performers "sell the product" more, the judge buys in, understands, and is able to read out of the performance more of the design's intention - hence adding to the effect. But, if the show has design flaws, judges shouldn't be keeping the REP score at a stead pace with the PERF score. It's frowned upon to give a bottom heavy score (8.5 in REP and 8.8 in PERF,) because this seems as you're saying that what was performed on the field was perfect, so perfect in fact, that the performers are actually outperforming what's been given - they need more. It also raises the question of how can a performance be better than the design of what is being performed - we think that the PERF subcaption is mutual exclusive to the REP subcaption, and is certainly taught that way in some circles (not implying it is at DCI.) But what bottom heavy scoring like this could perhaps tell a designer is that while the design of the production needs work, the performers are achieving at such a high rate that they are, in fact, out performing the production.
I really like to view it as Repertoire Quality and Performance Quality. That helps nullify the question posed of how the performance can be better than the rep, however we still see those numbers staying super close instead of having the separation that honestly, I personally think should be there more often. If you're going to have a .5 or .6 spread in favor of the Rep, you should also be able to see that in favor of Perf.