r/drumcorpscirclejerk

Title

BD 1977
Cavaliers 1995
Cadets 1998
Cavaliers 2004
Cavaliers 2006
BD 2015
BD 2022
Boston 2025

Tell me if I’m stupid

Judges will determine finals rankings by each show's depth of concept. That's right.

Design matters.

For example, it's the difference between Crown's 2025 show before prelims, and after. When Crown added the Fortuna character consuming an unsuspecting victim of Fate, the crowd screamed because there was meaning. (Finally.)The judges duly increased Crown's score. That's an obvious example.

Shows are ranked according to their concept design quality within slots. Concept design quality requires the following:

• Specific subject and theme (articulable, immediate, high stakes)
• Cohesion of elements
• Arc of action or imagery
• Universality of theme
• Authenticity
• Uniqueness
• Emotion/Pathos

1. Bluecoats - Gravity and Grace - The Bluecoats illustrate gravity-- using a planetary path from backfield to front, with see-saws and deflating windsock puppets. Brian Wilson's God Only Knows adds another layer of gravitational weight with its existential-adjacent lyrics. Wilson's tune is the backbone for this complex mix of elements around the ups and downs of human existence. Deep, playful, powerful, and resonant.
2. Blue Devils- BD presents an Icarus sequel where he survives his fall, and is recognized for risk-taking, rather than his failure. The show repositions our judgment of our own failed ventures. Broken wings are a path to discovery, (and a path to the urgent care.) However, the show design is scattered and episodic, with disconnected scenelettes. Designers are saving an ending until finals.
3. Carolina Crown - Alduos Huxley discovered hallucinogens as a door to enlightenment, putting the metaphysical universe within reach. But why Ave Maria? Perhaps it's an ode to the Christian madonna who appears in apparitions, and comforts those in "times of trouble", but the use of the classical piece is generally unexplained. Does it fit? Designers must tell us why.
4. Boston Crusaders - Blurred Lines gets high with A Little Help from My Friends. But that's it? There are plenty of visual depictions of blurred images, from costuming effects to drill maneuvers constantly reshaping lines, and other drill effects. Sure, the choreography occasionally pairs friends helping each another with "getting by". But the show can't be about one pot reference, can it? The ending lacks clarity and points up a missing arc of dramatic action or imagery. How do you end a show if there's no pattern of meaning to start with?
5. Santa Clara cobbled together a theme of "youths" 6 to 12 jump-roping with chains, and the breaking free of chains, repeatedly. You gotta be kidding. The entire premise is child abuse-adjacent, and lacks any specific real-world context. Designers started with prop chains and reverse-engineered the theme around kids jump roping-- the only visual you can do with them. (Crown even includes a jump rope or two this year.) Designers' then forced themselves into the awkward "youth and vulnerability" corner, which then sent costume designers scrambling to sketch "youth" in their underwear-- white boxer shorts and white underslips. (Gulp.) Paramount/Warner Brothers would laugh these bozos out of the room at any music video concept development meeting. "You want what?!" "What children could we cast in this?" [ Cue: crashbox sound, call legal]. An amateurish exquisite corpse. An unresearched, first-draft, last-minute hybrid concept. An embarrassment for DCI.

"They drop their arms you’ll see a little peek of skin." (Costumer)

6. In Phantom's fourth wall-breaking "Bloodline", designers rushed to order a truckload of huge props-- eight foot tall identical blood-draw lancets to prove some imagined membership criterion for a "blood legacy". (It was an alumni ploy on its anniversary.) Designers paid extra for the lancets to compress and lay flat for some reason-- a meaningless attribute. By the end, the lancets have done nothing but pair like bird wings, and then point inward, a metaphor for the show's theme turning on itself in seppuku, as it desperately searches for definition and real-world context. Under-developed, unresearched, uncontextualized, and lacking peer review.

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Design impacts more than 50 percent of the score. From music selections, interpretation, visual setting, to drill, choreo, and action. Design is baked in to every caption on the scoresheet. The show concept contextualizes the music. But that's not what drum corps teaches its participants.

Designers want to avoid critiques by marching members. Drum corps designers coyly teach participants not to worry about the design. Not to meddle. Not to question it. Not to learn the basics of show design. (Designers barely know them, themselves.) Keeping participants in the dark is convenient for designers. Designers know deep down they haven't done the work to create a show that is logical, engagiing and with higher purpose.

Here are the likely GE and visual judges' notes with three weeks left:

1. Bluecoats - Change opening to be more clear in its visual game. What should the audience get from the opening segment? Don't spend so much time so far away from the audience, in the "stratosphere" at the beginning. Use distance from the audience as a potent spice. Also, what is your planned final visual that wraps up the show? Right now, the ending is flat.
2. Blue Devils- Why doesn't the Icarus character who appears at the end appear earlier? Why don't we recognize him? How is the end different from the beginning? What's your final set piece? An unexpected new flight with either new or reattached wings? A pair of wings on a drone that flies away?
3. Boston Crusaders - What transformation should the audience grasp by the end? What visual pattern should the audience become aware of during the show? There's a lack of a visual pattern in this show, and the audience is lost. The audience gets the "Get High With a Little Help from My Friends" reference, but the show must be more than a simple drug reference of blurred vision. The choreography and costuming generally refer to blurriness, or altered vision. But why? How are blurred lines represented elsewhere in the show, visually, and to what point?
4. Carolina Crown - How does the Ave Maria tie into Alduos Huxley? We've all heard of visitations of the Blessed Mother, but how exactly does this tie in to Huxley's vision of the afterlife, and how is she represented visually? What changes visually after the playing of Ave Maria (Ellens Gesang III)?
5. Cavaliers- Can you heighten the use of the secret "doors" on the ramp props at the end? Could everyone come bursting out of them at the end? What action transforms the "There was a boy..." character? Could his brother Sam help him down from a ledge? How is Michael different at the end? Could Michael orchestrate the single-file charge by the whole ensemble through the secret doors on the side of the ramps?
6. Santa Clara - Why are children 6-12 being represented jump roping in their boxer short underwear and in underslips, and restrained by chains? No explanation will ever be enough. Where is the specific context for this awkward, underdeveloped, unresearched scenario? PS: You're fired, and you deserve it. This design concept took you one night, and don't pretend it didn't. Change the age and costumes.
7. Phantom Regiment - How can you develop the use and logic of your large, unexplained stage sets? What happens in this show? What is the pattern? Can you develop some relatable action this late in the season? How are bloodlines challenged or rescinded? This show design illustrates a complete lack of visual communication skill. Subject. Theme. Pattern of action. Might as well do whatever you want, but this show cannot be recognized for its structure, symbology, immediacy, or clarity. The cat is out of the bag on this one-- there's no meaning. And we learned last year, without contextual meaning, there's no way to judge the music. Add a fabric element that comes out of the tips of the lancets with some meaning tied to them. Dates. Images. Anything.
8. Blue Stars - Can you clarify the arc of action with the frames. How can the audience predict what happens next? Wha pattern are you creating with the use of the frames? What happens on the ending to tie up the progression of action? What's your point of view about the frames?
9. Troopers - No changes. A sophisticated, deep commentary on wars and wars for profit, with strong, clear references to Heart of Darkness and Apocalypse Now. This masterful show upends Troopers' jingoistic "When Johnny Comes Marching Home" repertoire of the 1970's. This concept is ballsy, immediate and high-stakes. It is a sign that the Troopers design team is next level.

Anyone else notice how the BD show this year actually references the story of Icarus?? Despite being called something else they actually make a lot of references to that Greek mythological tale I think that's pretty neat.

Just noticed on my second watch through, not sure if anyone else has realized this tho!

First DCI event will be Saturday at Southwestern Championship! How do i find warmups outside on the lot? Should I just stay inside the whole time to watch all the corps perform?? Give me any advice!!! :)

Looking at these scores, it's clear there's some score inflation going on again.

Speaking of, does anyone remember when those Sonic fans totally changed the DCI narrative through online discourse and making the top corps have even higher scores than previous seasons? Someone just mentioned it to me but I don't remember how many years ago that actually happened.

I was also told to Google "Sonic Inflation" for more information but my browsers aren't working

The following post is earnest, and not meant as satire. I've been banned from every platform except this one. My intent is to raise awareness in marching members of what they are not being taught-- principles of show design found in all professional performing arts. Know your show. Know why you're paying your designers $80,000, and whether they're following common sense principles of production design, from music videos to opera.

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Phantom's 2026 show *Bloodline* is touted as an illustration of fighting for supremacy to maintain one's identity and legacy in history. That's either an amateurish attempt at a corps anniversary theme, or a defense of racial dominance.

Gulp.

Considering our country's current state of racism, a headline-driven expulsion of Hispanics, and an administration with ties to Naziism, a show theme that alludes to dominant hereditary genes could not be more tone deaf. The fumbling Phantom design team has blundered again. Any respectable advertising agency, any corporation, any human rights organization celebrating an anniversary, any media outlet, any educational entity, any arts festival with an anniversary, any museum, any government entity would steer clear of any mention of genetic dominance. It's so amateurish and blundering, it's cringe-worthy.

If a designer wanted to do an anniversary show, you'd probably be better off by sticking with "The Calling" (sci-fi adventure recruitment theme) or "On the Shoulders of Giants" (whole corps on stilts), or get the rights to the title "The Ring Cycle", a play on Phantom's seeking and winning championship rings.

But to place lancets on the field, as if it is a literal blood test, a genetic test, shifts the focus from the muse-influenced calling of drum corps participants, and instead focuses on the ugly subject of genetic testing and racial dominance. Worse, the show makes no use of the lancets. No blood is drawn. The lancets simply roam, shift location, and end up creating a strange formal facade, as if from a castle at Mar-a-lago, or the grandiloquent border decoration on the new Trump currency. The gloomy premise of genetic dominance smacks of white nationalism.

Clumsy theme aside, nothing happens in the show. There is no illustrated challenge to the "bloodline." There is no dramatic action. There is no risk-taking, or defense of the bloodline, or other actions mentioned in their press release. There is no pattern of action or progression of imagery. There is no real-world use of the large lancet props. They serve no thematic or practical purpose. They don't transform in any way. There's only a generalized "aggression", which will soon deflate and flounder without some additional thematic layer or dramatic action by August. This is a sixth-place, push-and-pose design with studio musician-level talent that needs additional elements in order to save it:

* \--Perhaps an ending reveal of six large scale props or flags, each representing an iconic show in the corp's history. The arrow flag from New World Symphony, the cube from Mynd, Juliet in her red dress, and the yellow Beethoven flag-- all massive and stately. Each of these revealedin succession in the finale, with the last one-- one of the lancet props turns, tilts down and hurtles toward the Spartacus Roman Senator Crassus who is stabbed by the lancet and is impaled, just like Phantom's Spartacus finale. All of these represent the defense of the storied, imagined "bloodline" of the corps.
* Or another option, blood pours out of the tips of the lancets (wide bolts of red fabric) with various salient dates imprinted on them-- dates of Phantom's wins, or Shostakovich's birthday, and the like. These dates remind us of the important milestone's in Phantom's "legacy". The dated banners help create the story of the imagined "bloodline" of the corps.

In the future, PR's scholarship-level talent will soon learn to take over the production development process in order to secure a win by developing a clear, visually engaging pattern of action, required for top placement.

Really posting this so that current members who read the shit talking here will know that those are the opinions of those who did or didn’t watch Dwayne “the Rock” Johnson’s series following the 2016 Blue Devils and Cadets.