I just realized why drum corps kinda sucks now, and it’s something I haven’t been able to put my finger on until revisiting shows from ~2010-2013.
SCV 2013 has forms. The entire ensemble is committed to presenting a cogent set of images and there is “thematic development” of the imagery. Even when clusters form, they are dyads and triads of section members that eventually coalesce into an ensemble picture.
The forms back then were large scale, full ensemble presentations with a lot of marching and characteristic shapes like gates, diamonds to lines, rotating geometry, or interesting curvilinear abstractions, all in constant flux and reappropriation.
Nowadays the story is different, and I think it is falling out of genre and rigor for the activity.
We have different little cluster groups and scatter drill and randomness everywhere. It’s almost as fractured as our attention spans are, and to me displays a dilettantism or lack of respect for what the “craft” of idiomatic drum corps drill writing used to be. We now have theatrics and dance instead of marching, and I don’t think it reads well outdoors on a football field.
At that scale of a stage, you sort of need to limit what you do to get things across to the audience. Dilute it with bunches of activity, and you dilute the effect. Maybe you even pull the wool over everyone’s eyes because now you don’t have to clean forms or be committed to your product. You don’t have to risk anything because viewers can look everywhere and nowhere while apparently important activity is happening all over.
I hate to say that I see this as a symptom of falling standards for artistic and aesthetic awareness, and indicative of an overall decline in craft in the marching arts that is founded on a deep knowledge of the idiom.
We don’t need gestures, we need statements.
I don’t write or work in the marching arts, but as a curious bystander I couldn’t help but notice this transformation at the design level.
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Caveats
These are thoughts I have tonight.. could change as I watch more shows. Is all this scatter and dance stuff is what gets called WGI-ification of drum corps? Maybe I just like Peter Weber a lot? I don’t know. I watched Bluecoats 2025 just now, and they have forms, which is great, but it also makes me being a curmudgeon about the good old days a lot harder.
Till next time.