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Rubisco

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Everything posted by Rubisco

  1. Ah, it might be another Cypress Woods situation, where they'll still listed on the current entries, but aren't actually attending. That would be a bummer!
  2. Thank you, again, @Tubalord11, for your commentary! I've been violently ill all day. I wonder if it's COVID. I couldn't watch the Flo streams without feeling a bit of motion sickness. 😭🤢 I got about three into the A Class. I'm happy to see everyone did well. It's me, isn't it? I'm "some others." 😂
  3. They're still missing. And it seems like the schedules were wiped out, too. I don't see them on the event pages. 🤔
  4. Frankly, criticism is more interesting to read. Well, insightful criticism is, anyway. If the opinion is a lazily dismissive, "This show sucks!" it's even more useless than, "This show is amazing!" 😂
  5. Thanks @Tubalord11 for the fantastic and positive commentary again! We all appreciate it! Already seeing some of those late-season shifts in these early prelims results. Union! And Coppell's A guard comfortably ahead after the first two rounds of Scholastic A! Is Coppell's program finally blooming, like we've been waiting for? At least competitively; we've loved the Open shows from the past couple years regardless of placements. Glad to hear Clear Brook seems to be making a comeback. I'll have to watch that one when I catch up. Their floor is quite striking -- reminiscent of their Creep floor from two years ago.
  6. I had to look this up. I knew the show title was For Gabriel, but I let the show wash over me aesthetically and didn't really bother parsing the theme. I had no idea it's about a real-life child abuse/murder situation. I'm hesitant to use the word "exploitative" and call it a day, as it seems to imply the designers had nefarious motivations, like they sat around asking each other, "How can we use this dead child's awful story to score maximum points and manipulate the audience into crying?" Granted, any time you make art based on a true story, it's going to be at least a little exploitative. But I'd like to think the designers simply saw the Netflix documentary or whatever and were so moved by it that they thought it was an important story to tell. At the same time, I wish they had more of an actual personal connection to the story that they're telling. It's one thing to do a show "milking" Stanley Knaub's death for effect points (if you want to call it that 😂), because those designers back in 2004 had an actual relationship with Stanley. It's another thing to tell somebody's story when you don't have any direct connection to them and the person isn't a major public or historical figure. I think that's what cheapens Fantasia's concept a bit, and makes me wish they had gone with something else. All that said, I'm not offended in the slightest. It's quite difficult to offend me. And there are guard shows every year that are debatably of poor taste. Not unusual.
  7. The Goddess of Guard. Truly, it's crazy to me that the biggest and best color guard program in the country, consisting of something like 200 students, is taught by only two full-time staff members, and that the director mostly designs and choreographs all FIVE competitive indoor shows herself -- even crazier when you take into account how dominant all 5 guards are. The two at the junior high level are undefeated (again) this season, with the varsity guard only clearly surpassed in talent by PDCMS's varsity (2-year program versus 3-year program). Meanwhile, all 3 guards at the high school level scored above an 85 the weekend of WGI Austin -- rarefied territory for the very beginning of March -- and are either obviously the best in the state in their respective classes, or very close to it. Unheard of. But then so was taking a non-finalist A guard to World class in less than two seasons right after being hired. Robbins is a VERY rare talent. And yet I still firmly believe that every guard everywhere would benefit from implementing similar changes to their feeder programs, like she did in 2019. You don't have to be a genius to reap the benefits of that.
  8. I would LOVE that for Texas guard students. 😍 Some circuits hold late-season contests for individuals, but the participation rates for them are always abysmal -- not at all like the all-region/area/state process for band students, where pretty much every band in a region sends most of their kids, or at least the kids in their varsity concert bands. Curious what the "scales" and "etudes" would look like for guard auditions. Also whether there would be an actual All-State Guard performance at a convention. 🤔 Another big weekend for guard coming up. WGI returns to Texas with the Southwest Power Regional in Dallas and a "regular" two-day event in New Braunfels. The various Power Regionals will be streamed on Flo. I hope the Texas guards that are going to Dayton post some great numbers for the final standings. This season is going by so fast!
  9. I didn't mean to trigger anyone with that comment. 😂 Definitely some valid points. We could probably have a whole new thread on WGI rules and committee-related stuff. I think if the A and Open (and non-finalist World) directors were really upset by the current structure and wanted to push for more representation, they'd probably just pull out of WGI, right? Make a point by spending their money elsewhere? Anyway, probably for another thread. I'd like to complain about talent poaching being the reason Houston doesn't have a top IW guard anymore, but I'm pretty sure it's because most kids leave Houston for college, or just because they want to live elsewhere. 😭
  10. I think Dobyns-Bennett has potential, if they can clean the show. Most of the stuff they fumbled tonight seemed to be soloist or small ensemble moments. So, very exposed, but also probably easier to clean or change. Paramount has enough talent on the floor for two Independent World guards. Like others, I'm waiting for the show itself to click with me. That may take until Dayton, if it happens. I really enjoyed Etude. Obviously, they don't have the top-to-bottom talent Paramount has, but they maximize what they do have.
  11. Hey, what's wrong with Schoenberg? Rhetorical question. Pretty sure I know the answer. 😄 I liked Holly Springs well enough.
  12. Flo will be streaming the South Carolina Regional this weekend -- a two-day event. I'm especially looking forward to watching Paramount (reigning world champion), Etude, and Dobyns-Bennett. I've seen glimpses online already, but it will be nice to see how they've developed.
  13. I think they were as well. It's true that you can't easily compare scores across the country, but with the seeding process, the expectation for WGI judges is that they take into consideration what they've already seen nationwide when assigning a score. (Obviously, that's very different from BOA, where scores are nearly meaningless when comparing across contests, besides maybe the box criteria -- but even then BOA's judges are inconsistent compared to WGI's.) Of course, with Dayton over a month away, much can change. I'm looking at the schedule. I don't see TWHS signed up for another regional, so that 85 will be their score for seeding. It doesn't matter so much for the SW class, because there are so few guards. But it will still bug me to see TWHS possibly seeded outside the top 5 going into Dayton, because it's so divergent from my own opinion having seen almost all the guards in the class. 🤷
  14. I'm impressed by how they changed some of their show on the fly between prelims and finals. That front walkover toss after the opening ensemble rifle toss was not in the show in prelims. They had a nearby girl play substitute. The fact that they can just throw in such a difficult toss like that and have it be clean is really impressive. Much cleaner run. Honestly, their score in prelims was also too far off the top, even with the weaker run. I just don't see a 10 point gap between them and Avon, especially taking into consideration the depth of the talent on display in TWHS. I find their show astounding.
  15. Some very interesting shows in SW over at the SoCal regional. Arcadia is doing Bjork this year. As you might imagine, it's a bit stranger than usual. Not quite as in love with it as their past two seasons. Chino Hills is doing a very charming Seuss show with an eye-catchingly colorful set design.
  16. Ah, and an 83.6 for TWHS. That's not at all what they need here. Only a fraction of a point higher than their Houston score. Avon will be undefeated this season, if we didn't already know that. 😄
  17. Seemed like a somewhat rough run for The Woodlands. Several exposed drops at the beginning, but they ended up pulling it together. In their defense, it's probably the hardest SW show ever from an equipment perspective.
  18. I haven't watched much so far, so thanks @Tubalord11 for the updates! I'm backtracking on the stream right now to watch a few. I'm surprised to see Tarpon scoring lower than they did last week at FFCC. Well, sort of, considering how unreliable local scores are. I suspect they'll hit an 85 in finals at WGI Orlando, but that's still lower than Avon did 2 weeks ago. I'm not a huge fan of what I've seen from Tarpon this year, but that gap still seems kind of big.
  19. Another big weekend for WGI! We'll get to see both the Austin and SoCal regionals on Flo. I can't wait to see what some of those California guards are bringing this year. I loved Arcadia's show last year. I'm wondering if they'll kick it up a notch again and stay top 5 at Dayton, or if Fishers will take their spot. I wish we were getting the Orlando regional on Flo. I'd like to see how Tarpon has developed. It'll be interesting to see how they and TWHS score in SW this weekend, as the distance between their scores and 90 may tell us by how much Avon will beat them at Dayton. 😂 Of course, I'm hoping for a little bit more competition at the top!
  20. I liked Fusion well enough, but I'm not really sure what the point of the show is. It seemed a bit cerebral. I would have liked to have connected to it more emotionally. The performers were great, for sure, and there are some very cool moments in the staging.
  21. There are videos of guards we haven't seen compete at WGI yet popping up on YouTube. Falling down a bit of YouTube hole. Here's Invictus. A Creep show called I Don't Belong Here. https://youtu.be/GWDsv1WtgWQ?si=YR3Ax2LuhQD_Mt_e Here's Palm Desert High School (not middle school) performing Discov(RED). I recognize the music as Ezio Bosso. The cloud one that Onyx did in 2015. https://youtu.be/j7k7cgrFK0c?si=JwckdUm9IKxCYgx5
  22. I'm just going to post a few, I'm at work and have limited time. I want to eventually do some of the Houston Opens. I've already talked about Pearland and TWHS A. Congrats to TWHS A on their Houston Regional win! I had my suspicions that might happen. Their show might not be the flashiest one in the world, but you can clearly see the attention given to fundamental training, which is extremely important in A class. Also, congrats to Grand Oaks for making a comeback in finals. Ever so slightly off the podium, but comfortably division one. Both them and Cypress Woods should do well at Dayton. Over in Dallas, Hebron made a big splash, winning in the A class. I recall they were on the list to attend Dayton last year, but pulled out, maybe in part because of lackluster competition results compared to the prior year. So, winning Dallas is a fantastic development for them, although it makes me wish they were attending Dayton this year. Their show is called If I Only, and is of course inspired by the Scarecrow from The Wizard of Oz. This version of the song is a crooner version with a lush orchestral accompaniment. The yellow brick road curves up and around the stage, fading into the distance. Right next to it is a patch of grass and some haystacks where the performers begin, lying around a scarecrow. I'm actually pretty dazzled by the use of perspective in this set design -- it almost looks like they're actually there at times, particularly when they're on the yellow brick road. (Maybe a little less so when they're in the sky tossing rifles or flags. 😄) This version of the song is a bit slowed down, but draws out the sadder essence of the song. The performers really capitalize on that with wonderful expressive qualities, giving us some smooth, legato movement, before the tempo picks up and gives us something a little more upbeat. I like the variety here, also the attention to character. They're also already quite clean, despite some challenging phrases. Just a lovely show all around. Coppell's varsity guard in Open class is performing a show called In Fantasia, featuring the song of the same name by Kishi Bashi. It has an ethereal, futuristic sound, with trippy electronics, shifting orchestral chords, and highly evocative lyrics. "In fantasia the mirrors lie to us they plant a seed/one by one we build an empire where devils roam and breed/fading sunsets, to forget them is the mark of death/as we break in through the window of mind and greed." I'm not 100% sure what it's about, perhaps about the toxic influence man has had on nature. In any case, the show is fascinating. The set looks subterranean, like we're in a cave, with a glowing crystal in the center of the stage. The performers move onto the stage with such energy and clear articulation, it really pops upstairs. I love when the song shifts up into the Japanese, and we get that beautiful mixed sabre and flag moment. The interrelationship here between the choreography for the two different pieces of equipment is clear. This is really important in moments of close proximity, for us to see that the two sets of members aren't just doing their own thing, which looks messy and illogical from upstairs. @packwick has described it on Discord as the two needing to have a dialogue, which I like. Generally speaking, I think the staging is a lot clearer than last year's show. The performers are also killing it. The flag feature at the end is expertly done -- gorgeous and dynamic. The orchestral music there is really beautiful as well. The transition to the more quiet ending feels a little abrubt right now and could maybe be a bit smoother. Just a minor complaint. Fantastic job overall. I noticed that Coppell's A guard also did well at Dallas. They could have a real pipeline of talent funnelling into the varsity guard for the next few years. Marcus' show The Aeroplane is every bit as elegant as you might expect. After prelims, Marcus was hanging with Centerville, the top Open guard in the country, until the judges at Avon decided to bump pretty much all their scores way up. It'll be interesting to see "the truth" when Dayton rolls around. Anyway, when's the last time you've seen a guard build an airplane on the floor? Well, that's what Marcus does this season, gradually as the show progresses. It's an old-timey aeroplane made out of wood. The floor itself appears to be the blueprint, on a sort of beige parchment. The song, fittingly, is Tim Minchin's The Aeroplane -- the duet version with Asmara Feik. "If I had the blueprint or the brain/I would build an aeroplane/with fashion wings of balsa wood and glue/and I would fly to you." So, really, it's a sweetly sentimental little love song. Compared to Coppell, the movement is a tiny bit more fluid and graceful, to match the music. I love this traveling dance canon at the beginning, starting with the partnering and then those staggered temps du fleches. The sabre phrase in the top left corner of the stage near the beginning is so beautifully done, very lyrical with the blending of the movement with the equipment. I love how that follow-the-leader phrase in the pink/purple flags unwinds and pushes out to the edges of the stage during the little piano interlude. Wonderful transition. Actually, it reminds me a bit of some of Marcus' drill in their marching show last season, which was outstanding. Now Tim's voice enters, and it has got more bass than the woman's voice, so Marcus smartly brings out the rifles, which have a bit more visual volume. They also change to green flags. Amazing efforts from the performers. When the plane is complete in the center of the stage, we get that final blue flag feature, like we're up in the sky. Very lovely show. Flower Mound's World guard is doing something kind of similar. Their show is called Fly. The floor is a gorgeous blue sky with clouds. What appears to be two musical staves intersect at the top left corner of the stage. The performers are in black tights and shorts and sit on black stools on the lines and spaces of the staves, like they're musical notes, or alternately, like blackbirds on wires. The song, after all, is a female cover of The Beatles' song, Blackbird. It's just the woman's voice and the piano -- very smooth jazz, carefree, and upbeat. There's an overall sunny quality to both the song and choreography during this first part. Meanwhile, the staging designer has done a pretty expert job of maintaining our focus throughout. They've done a good job of leading our eyes to various performer moments, even right at the beginning, for example, with that diagonal that leads straight to the sabre block in the top left corner of the stage. The staging and choreography are detailed, but they don't look excessively busy, which is great. Lots of fun level changes with the stools, of course. You know you're in world class when the rifle line does that ripple of 5s with the turn and then catches them at port while seated on the ground. Wow! Now the music slows down, and the performers showcase their more lyrical talents, although only briefly before the music picks back up. Overall, it's a breezy, well-staged, and well-performed world class show. Will it make finals at Dayton this year? I think there's a chance. But I also think it could benefit from more strangeness, if that makes sense. It's that sort of It Factor that makes a show stand out in the grand scheme of things. Like, how can you make this show different enough from the "up in the sky" shows we've seen before, so that we can't stop thinking about it? The dramatic moments in the soundtrack are also a bit more subtle than other shows, so the designers have to work harder to emphasize those moments. Nevertheless, I think there's a chance they sneak in at Dayton. We'll have to see what some of the Florida and California guards look like. I've already talked about TWHS World. The Light You Cannot See. Just pure poetry, with the show's intellectual and emotional depths expressed entirely visually, no explanation needed. I love the addition of the two-sided white and murky brown unitards, both because it creates the cool visual effect of going into and out of the stage (which isn't an especially novel effect) but also because it seems to indicate that the "light" is intrinsic to the performers. Even the stillness and emptiness of parts of the opening staging bother me less, because they now seem thematic, moving from that depressed state to that magnificent ending where the white flags fill the floor with light. That's gonna be an all-time great emotional moment, buoyed by the incredible depth of the performers' skills and that unbelievably goosebumpy soundtrack. They are doing things that simply no other high school guard can do. It's a huge risk having that many kids do that many skills simultaneously. As we marching fanatics know, it just takes one kid to screw it all up. Anyway, I hope they can polish this beast of a show, can clarify some of the busier staging moments, and can connect some of the phrases a little more smoothly with movement between them. I also think they could add a few more seconds of the very end of that Gregson solo violin divisi piece to give us a fuller denouement. Regardless, I think the overall package is pretty sublime. I don't see them off the medal "podium" this year.
  23. First of all, thank you so much @Tubalord11 for providing commentary on nearly all of the guards at Dallas. All those kids and staff members really appreciate your kind thoughts. TXBands should recruit you for their live blogs for sure! Alas, I cannot sit through an entire event anymore. It's almost disrespectful to the hard work all the kids put in. 😭 Also, I think I failed at being concise. The fight for A at Avon was between Carmel and Carroll. I've already touched a bit on both. Carmel A is one of Carmel's JV guards; I believe they have another one actually called Carmel JV, which is like middle school. Anyway, Carmel A's show was called Chopinesque. The purple lounge aesthetic, black benches, and baby grand piano were taken straight from their world guard's show from last year. It's Chopin music, but filled with lots of jazzy, blue scale riffs. I'm guessing Gaines does the staging for Carmel's A, it has a pretty consistent formal clarity. The benches and piano are moved around in similar ways to the world show, as when the benches encircle the piano or are lined up diagonally across the stage. At one point, they're in a sinusoidal curve, which is a very Gainesian thing. This is another one of those guards where it's hard to believe it's a JV group, with unusually dense phrasing and the girls doing tosses off the benches and while atop the piano. Carroll ended up coming out on top in finals, squeaking out the only 80 in Scholastic A this weekend. I've already talked about this one. It's the one about the Dash between the dates on the tombstone, which represents the life a person lived. (We are reminded over and over that it's the most important part!) The floor is like white clouds in a light purple sky, and the performers are in sleek purple unitards that really pop against the white. It's a sentimental show for sure, but the performers elevate the material with their skills and expressive qualities. The stage is slyly reconfigured throughout using large white blocks. They're usually pretty smart about using equipment work to draw our eyes away from the moving of the blocks. Centerville was by far my favorite in Open. The show is called Irresistible and is a fun twist on the moth drawn to the light concept. They're really forging a willfully and imaginatively weird style for themselves. The performers start out almost camouflaged in the corners of the stage with lampshades on their heads, mixed among actual lamps. It has a rather antique store look, like if you were shopping for lamps. The top right corner of the stage has a large upright window with a patch of light shining through it onto the floor. There's an upward piano flourish, and a girl clicks on the lamp in the lower left corner of the stage. Suddenly a double bass enters in the music, very dry and expressionist sounding, like you're watching an art house movie. A few members with lampshades on their heads tiptoe out of the corners curiously, humorously. Amazing opening solo sabre toss with an attitude turn underneath it. Really all the sabres here are fantastic, wonderfully expressive -- keeping good time during what seems like an extended, free-flowing cadenza in the double bass. Suddenly a giant moth flies through the window and the music is an exciting, thumping, highly syncopated tango between the double bass and piano. This music is definitely Piazzolla. (Let me look it up. I believe it's Kicho for double bass and piano.) Everything about this show rocks: the performers, the staging, the choreography, the aesthetic. I'm wondering if it remains in Open. With a couple demotions recently, there's some space in World Class prelims. I could definitely see Centerville sneaking into World Class finals. Speaking of World class, the word on the street about Fishers is accurate. They are much improved over last year. It's a baseball show called The Great American Game. You'd probably imagine something a little more upbeat knowing that it's a show about baseball, but really it's more of an expressive love letter to the baseball of the first half of the 20th century, when it was at peak popularity. If you've seen the movie, A League of Their Own, you'll pick up on the aesthetic pretty quickly, with the skirts and whatnot -- also with the shades of sepia, which make the floor look like an old time photo or letter. The members all start out on bleachers, the first one runs out and slides. There's a lot of baseball in the choreo here. The music is a very delicate, sweetly sentimental piano, good for the overall nostalgic feel. I think I've heard this before, but I can't put my finger on it, maybe an arrangement of a piece from a movie? The bleachers are eventually split up and moved around (while the members are on it) to reshape the stage. I'm actually squinting right now to try to see if the rifles have a baseball bat appearance, because at times it looks like they're holding them like bats. Absolutely wonderful performance from those kids. Lots of difficult trick tosses and spinning phrases. Seeing Fishers place so close to Carmel is exciting, and probably indicates they'll be a lock for top 6 at Dayton. After missing finals last year, that's QUITE an improvement. Carmel World's show, Memento Mori, was my pick for most intriguing theme heading into the season. Memento Mori is a phrase essentially reminding you that you're going to die, so really a death motif. This is weighty stuff! It's a little reminiscent in tone to Carmel's 2022 production, The Unbearable Lightness of Being. The floor is a sort of solid desert color, but a little orangish, like a terracotta orange. Blue fabric is stretched across it, like a river flowing through the desert. Actually, this aesthetic is extremely reminiscent of Spring's 2014 Open Class gold medal show, the Malala one. They use the blue fabric in similar ways, making shapes on the stage. I recognize this music right away as Max Richter, reminded me of Wayne McGregor's ballet Woolf Works. Very desolate and sad sounding, but also with great expressive qualities that of course Carmel takes full advantage of. Perfect front walkover toss to open the show. Look at those hand placements on all these exposed solo tosses. They're just perfect! A narrator tells us not to fight the flow of time but to move with it. It all has a little bit of a dry lecture feel to it. I think I would have preferred a little less exposition, especially because they're already communicating much of the theme pretty clearly visually. But then the performers are just undeniable, not really that far off Avon from an equipment perspective. And then there's Avon, performing Voila, which is an absolute earworm of a song. I've been humming it in my head ALL day, it has such an infectious lilt. When I heard that Avon was doing Voila, I could tell from the graphic that there were gonna be fabric reveals, but I was expecting something cutesier and more like a magic show. Of course they do lots of cutesy tricks with the fabric, lots of ambidextrous things, but overall this show is way more serious than expected. It has more of an elegiac, heartbreaking kind of feel. Voila is a pretty repetitive song, but thankfully there's just enough of a build up that we get the variations we need to make a show that feels complete. Of course, the highlight is the climax of that build up at the end, one of two goosebump moments so far this year. It's almost orgiastic, with the fabric flung around and all the daredevil tricks, which they're already executing quite cleanly. There are a few points in the staging that look a little cluttered because of the fabric, but it's a minor complaint. Actually, it's one of the main reasons I like to avoid fabric.
  24. I wouldn't focus on scores all that much, especially at the beginning of the season when judges have pretty limited knowledge of what the overall competition looks like for each class nation-wide. It wouldn't surprise me at all if judges were trying to catch some of the other streamed events during their breaks this weekend! 👁️👁️ I'm typing up my guard thoughts, but I'm trying to be a little more concise, which is hard for me. 😄
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