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.

What is “visual” in the marching arts? Is it primarily about the look of the student? Is it about a mental approach each student understands? Is it merely strength, endurance, and repetition?

Questions like these leave me clamoring for answers and reconceptualizing how I think we as instructors should teach students to understand marching needs. 

“Have I been teaching this all wrong?” a nagging voice in the back of my head asks. Is there a right way? I ask back.

In the essay below, I explain some of the fundamental principles of visual programs I have established across various drumlines. As always, these suggestions are based on my own experience and some of the success I have had getting students excited about movement. As a marching member, I can still recall the dread of seeing “Visual Block” on the daily schedule, and I stand here, committed to upheave the negative stigma surrounding the visual part of our activity.

So go forth, and teach your students to love movement! It is the only thing that will save you once you hit the tarp or turf.

Yoga

While it would seem like starting with some kind of marching technique or exercise for a marching ensemble would be obvious, I am here to tell you to slow down! I believe teaching yoga to young marchers is essential to building the correct foundation and avoiding injury in the long term.

When we start teaching students their first marching visual concepts, they are usually between 14-15 years old. Many of them have very little idea as to how to move their bodies—what you mean when you identify certain body parts and their subsequent sensations—and what it feels like when they are doing something right or wrong. 

This problem leads to more mature members never developing the right skills in terms of isolation and control.

Yoga is also a low pressure way to get students engaged physically without the stresses of tempo or cleanliness. Many young students are newly grappling with the concept of tempo and physical alignment. 

We frequently start students out on exercises that challenge them in technique, tempo, alignment, and endurance. A visible breakdown in any one of these components may likely be caused by another, and therefore it is more difficult as instructors to identify problems. There are simply too many variables.

From an even broader view, yoga is an effective way to introduce students to exercise as a means of channeling their focus and attention. Many young marchers have lots of energy, but it is unrefined. Yoga allows the students to focus, slow their breathing, and get in touch with the finer motions of their body through a more paced means of isolation.

I find yoga to be an effective way to introduce a variety of “visual” concepts to students at all levels. For young students, it is an easy entrance talking about and feeling body isolation, and for more advanced students, it is a method for getting focused and preventing injuries.

Across the Floors

The next staple to any drumline's visual program should be “across the floors.” This usually means lining students up at one end of a gym or football field and having them step off in groups by row at the beginning of each structured phrase. Once students move through the allotted distance you have assigned, they will run back and join the block again. This means the exercise continues open-endedly until you cut off.

Across the floors is required because of its simplicity. Students who are new or old to marching generally need two things to improve: good information and repetition. By having your students step off in smaller groups, you as an instructor will be able to identify issues and inconsistencies more easily. The marcher will be able to focus solely on their technique and the feel of their bodies, rather than upcoming direction or step-size changes and the technical adjustments those things require. 

Across the Floors is all about carriage of the body. It eliminates overthinking and removes unnecessary distractions for both instructor and member.

Across the Floors is further important because any movement style can be integrated into its format. Students can work on the forwards and backward march, the crabbing style, and the oblique style, all depending on where you face them. Without having to program in tedious turns and repositions, Across the Floors will allow you access and unlock all marching techniques with relative ease.

Across the Floors are like vegetables, and your students need to eat them!

Box Drill

The next logical step in the exercise progression is box drill. This is a unison exercise in which a drumline marches forwards, left, back right, then forwards, right, back, left, in a solid form like a block. Generally, instructors will break down each move into a standard 8 count phrase for ease of counting, but the structure is malleable.

Box drill is useful because it begins to contextualize the marching techniques within simple drill. Students have to understand the technical requirements of going from one direction to another, which is one of the most difficult things to adopt as a young student. Box drill enables students to understand both the technical changes and the control required to move in various directions. Controlling the body through direction changes is one of the more technically unnatural things we do as drummers, and rehearsing box drill attends to that directly.

I also find box drill useful because it is easy to input simple playing exercises. Yoga and Across the Floors, while visually simple, do not enable students to build moving and playing skills. Everyone in the drumline world knows that moving and playing is our obvious bread and butter, and box drill is a great place to begin integrating playing concepts with the feet. Simple eighth-note legatos exercises, or short-short-long triplet roll exercises, are easily implemented into box drill. This will help students gain skills in synthesizing their hands and feet and enhance their ability to tackle the simultaneous demands of contemporary drumline.

Overall, when it comes to technique and fundamentals, keep it simple! People often try to reinvent the wheel with difficult exercises before the students have basic understandings about their body. Bodily awareness must be taught before students can confidently tackle more difficult concepts.

That all being said, I also see the value in...

On-the-Fly Exercises

With the upper-end groups that I interact with, I always enjoy teaching them new exercises that require moving and playing on-the-fly. A major skill in drumline is intellectual flexibility and quickness to implement changes. Teaching exercises by rote is a surefire way to bring a student’s critical learning and adaptation skills to the forefront.

Teaching new exercises trains students to be quicker and more adaptive thinkers, to engage when listening to instructions and maintain their thought process. If you can get a drumline to learn new ideas quickly, it is even easier to work on the ideas that they have had for months (such as the book and exercises). I believe that this is a method to teach those adaptation skills that we believe students gain unconsciously. 

Addressing these skills head-on will set your drumline up for patient and calm processes when they are on the field rehearsing the show—where it matters most.

Throwing new concepts at students is especially important during audition season, as these exercises will expose the great players who are not as holistically flexible or have specific visual weaknesses that are covered up through their preparation. When you challenge a student psychologically, the underlying things they have not addressed, or can only address through isolated focus, start to protrude forward in obvious ways.

Someone’s left hand that appears fixed when they are on a stand tends to revert back to its primordial version when they are being challenged through an improvised exercise—this is obviously a problem, as we do not perform with stands on the competitive field.

As you can see, there are many non-technical skills that go unaddressed when building a visual program, and I believe the above exercises and practices will improve many of those skills. While it is obviously important to teach the techniques of the carriage, leg shape, turn-out, and the various other body qualities we look for, I believe it is critical we simultaneously address the cognitive needs of the student. 

Students must be thinking a certain way towards their own body and its reactions to actively engage in what we call the “visual.” 

From a student's perspective, it is much less about the visual “look” and more about embodied sensations. This is where stepping into your student’s shoes will help you understand what kind of information they need to actively improve as marchers and students.