Dan Schack is the Battery Coordinator/Choreographer of Carolina Crown Drum and Bugle Corps and the Creative Director of George Mason University Indoor Drumline. Outside of his musical endeavors, Dan is pursuing a Ph.D. in English at the University of Delaware.

As the 2019 Winter Guard International season kicks off, designers are finally beginning to see their projects materialize, experiencing the ultimate litmus test for effect: live performances with real-time crowd response. 

Thinking about my own group and our design and implementation process, something occurred to me: even though what we all see at the end of the season is a bunch of well-crafted percussion ensembles with many similarities, HOW the organizations arrive at WGI finals is mostly a mystery.

What jump starts a show idea? 

Where does a designer go from the initial idea phase? 

What kind of ideas will make good indoor drumline shows? 

What are the next steps to composing, arranging, drill writing, choreographing, costuming, set designing, and the million other little details that need to be accounted for to design a show thoroughly? 

These questions come to my mind as I realize that there is no single way to design an indoor drumline show “correctly,” and that each show demands its own attention, effort, and experimentation.

In order to tackle this head on, I will take you through a perfected step-by-step process that will guarantee you perfect scores in all your sub-captions.

Just kidding! 

What I will do is walk through some of my own processes as to how to design an indoor drumline show. My contributions, as always, are highly subjective, and it is up to the reader to pick and choose what works for them and what doesn’t.

Down the rabbit hole we go!

Read Part 1: Answering The First Questions

Read Part 2: The Writing Stage

Part 3: Implementing The Design

In the final section of “From The Group Up,” I will discuss some of my ideas for how to think about implementing your design choices. Thinking through and going forward with a design concept hypothetically is one thing. Every idea you come up with "works" from July through October (or whatever your respective offseason is), but things take drastic turns once you actually begin implementing them on the floor with live performers.

Ideas you thought would work just don’t look right. Certain concepts don’t match the personality of your group. Other ideas seem to fall flat or lack resolve. Coming at the implementation process with a plan and an analytical mind will help you both get things right sooner and prepare you for things that inevitably need to be adjusted or completely overhauled.

Choreography

Sitting around and pontificating about future indoor drumline shows is a luxury that rarely emerges. We are generally in scramble mode, trying to meet the demands and timelines that consistently inhabit the indoor season. It is during this hectic time that the design is put on the floor and we must begin to sculpt what the students are actually doing to make the show concept come to life.

One of the difficult moving parts of implementing the design is choreography. This is a place where what you envisioned in your head may just not look the same or have the impact you thought it would. While this problem is certainly possible with the music and drill, software like Pyware and Sibelius/Virtual Drumline allow arrangers and composers to hear and see their products before they hit the floor. 

There is no computer program that shows us what body will look or feel like before it is implemented. This makes the choreographing stage particularly treacherous.

So why do our choreography ideas sometimes look wrong? I believe this problem can be broken down into two parts:

First, there may be an issue with your composition. It may be that your ideas are too dense and layered, making them difficult to read. 

Perhaps the body isn’t aligned vertically with the music in the way you thought it would. More likely, maybe the choreography you wrote just doesn’t feel good with the drumming aspect. There are endless reasons as to why a choreographed idea might not “pop,” and many of those reasons can be a design flaw from the top.

Second, the composition might be great, but the students simply cannot achieve it. This is one that I believe is the more pervasive issue. You not only should shape what you design around the student skills, but you should encourage them to move naturally so that you may see what the music suggests about what the choreography should be. 

I believe many people cultivate somewhat arbitrary choreography ideas in their head that aren’t really connected to what the students can or even want to do.

I think you will always get the best results if you extract movement concepts from the members themselves. They are the ones performing the music, not the choreographer. That being said, you must cultivate a program that enables students to move freely and comfortably (I won’t go deeply into how to do that here, so keep a lookout for my forthcoming piece on establishing a visual culture in your drumline).

The Vertical Within The Horizontal

Similar to the above discussion, surprises can emerge when hypothetical concepts are tangibly implemented and just don’t seem to work. In WGI, this goes beyond music, drill, and choreography. We must cultivate physical moments that propel the plot of the show and make clear statements about the concept. 

We want these “vertical” moments to entertain, be thought-provoking, and ultimately, make sense. Think of the vertical moments as points on the Y-axis, while the timeline and forward momentum of the show is your X-axis. They are not necessarily mutually inclusive, but should be connected and related to create a bigger picture.

It is important to consider how your vertical moments accumulate meaning over the course of your show. While there is a certain amount of wiggle room to putting forth symbolic or intellectual ideas that require interpretation, the bulk of your vertical ideas should be clear and intend to move the show forward into its next phase or plot point. 

Think of these vertical moments as “events” in a story, and how those events should somewhat logically flow in a sequence to add up to a coherent whole. If the point of an event is to skew or disrupt the horizontal flow, you must be especially clear in presenting such a move.

Overall, vertical events are always tied to the horizontal movement of a show, and designers should consider audience first when it comes to experience and absorption of the show in one viewing.

Engineering Sound Adjustments Through a Visual Lens

It is important to remember that even if you happen to write the front ensemble music and soundscape first, remember that these elements are not locked into place! I personally believe visual needs should come first based on the limitations of space and velocity. If you believe that a visual idea is being limited, or is completely broken, because it cannot meet the needs of the score, simply re-write the music. It is a much cleaner process to change a bar of music—or even a phrase of music—than it is to rewrite a visual idea.

Why is this the case? 

For anyone that deals in the visual, we know that problems, and their solutions, do not occur just in a single image or set. You must address the set before and after, at least, when attending to a visual problem. Arguably, this same issue of continuity arises with music. You can’t just change one bar and expect the surrounding music to make sense. That being said, the labor of editing music is much different than editing drill and choreography. 

This is not to say that you should never change the visual side of things. Rather, I am just alerting readers that it IS possible to craft a musical idea around a visual idea. I believe many of us limit ourselves within the constraint of the score because the score was composed first, when in truth, there is more flexibility in making a musical adjustment rather than a visual adjustment.

Assessing First Drafts

When I teach writing, the most important part of the writing phase, and the part that most students totally skip over, is the revision phase. Putting your ideas down in a first draft is always stress-relieving, but the truth is, this is just where the work begins. 

Designing first drafts is mostly thinking through an idea in its infancy and starting to conceptualize where you will actually take it. Implementing ideas into your show will inevitably lead you to a slew of realizations and even better, more mature ideas. Being open to not only the possibility, but the necessity of change is absolutely crucial for designers and arrangers/composers.

So here, as my final point to this long and laborious series, I proclaim that we as designers remain flexible to changing our own products.

We must be the ultimate critics of our own work, but also let the voices and opinions around us to seep in.

We must think critically about people’s opinions of our shows; many judges get it right but many get it wrong, too.

We must understand our shows in order to get to the heart of the issues within them. But we must first embrace the process, rather than the product, of show design.