Rubisco

vids from Morton Ranch are currently uploading to drive. Cy Woods to the end. ur welcome!!
standout was Grand Oaks. will be surprised if they don't win WGI Houston. general imp is that it could place near the top at Dayton also. extra points for exploring the Black Sheep idea. one of my ideas for a show actually, but their's is def cuter lol. seems like the kind of show wgi will fall hard for. amazing performance too.
Katy wasn't too far off of them imo, very different energy tho, 90s punk grunge skater whatever show. performers killed it. got tanked in movement a little. lotsa fun. loved the barbarian style ground hammering LOL. THUD THUD! it's like, you WILL pay attention to us.
Cy woods still around where they were last yr, haven't missed a beat. will be back in National A next week probably lol. also thought 7 lakes and James e Taylor were strong in the regular A class, better than half of the ones in National A imo.
open class was a bit of a cluster f b/w the top 3. thought clear brook's performers killed it but the show they've been given is not at their level right now, in terms of staging success and general aesthetic. kind of chasing last yr in terms of mood, too. prob not fully fleshed out yet. Bridgeland had by far the best show compositionally but they seemed to be overreaching a little w/ the skills, tho they've still got 2+ months to clean it. very layered and musical and dynamic however. Jordan was kinda b/w those two for me, maybe the best balance of design + performance. their opening wowed me, loved how they moved + the staging. very colorful too.

You can definitely tell I copied and pasted that block of text by the weird formatting shift. Sorry! 😅

Klein Oak's show is lovely! It's called Fool For You. The song is Pink by LEON. It's hard to make out the overall design of the floor from this angle, but I love the contrast between that red block in the front and the wispy gray and blue line, which curves sinuously, like smoke. (Appropriately the song opens "smoking blues/sipping red/and I picture us inside my head.") The girls start out in two separate pods diagonally across the stage, and slowly trickle out along the smoky line via a series of chaines turns and calypsos. I feel like the tenderness of the music and soft quality of the singer's voice is well matched by these sabre phrases -- light, airy, expressive. The back of the stage is a really deep gray, maybe black, so when those red flags pop out they really pop. (Of course, these might not be the final silks, but the color works well.) Amazing job on the sabre catches while on your knees! Wow! The performance gets a little dicier when the rifles come out, but that girl up front nails that one handed catch on the rifle 5. Alas, the other rifles seemed to go up at various heights, with the assorted partial catches and drops that come with under- and over-rotations. As is typical with this class, I think there's ample room to connect the phrases with more movement, or at least something that looks more purposeful. But it's early, and I'm really liking what they have so far. It's around a 63 for me, very solid for a January performance. Okay, let's see what they actually got... Just around a 61, pulled down a little by one of the effect judges, too many drops for him maybe. But the scores look mostly accurate to me.

I immediately recognize Talking Heads singer David Byrne's voice in this Woodlands A song, but I'm not familiar with the song itself. It's called Glass, Concrete & Stone. I'm not going to pretend to know what the theme of the song is, but it seems breezily, quirkily existential in parts. "Skin, that covers me from head to toe/Except a couple tiny holes and openings/Where the city's blowin in and out/This is what it's all about, delightfully." The floor is pretty austere, simply a black rectangle with a light bluish gray perimeter. This might be a JV floor masquerading in a class filled with varsity floors. 😅 But the girls definitely don't perform like your typical JV guard. They all start out sitting on a tiered stack of (concrete?) blocks in the top right corner, all of their bodies slumped over. The cool cat percussion creeps in, and the girls rise alertly at the first bongo hit. I love it! The first girl steps out from the blocks and demonstrates near perfect technique on the opening rifle toss caught at flat. Another steps out for a clean traveling toss duet, then a third for a trio of one-handed catches. It builds into moments of just amazing multiples on flag, rifle, and sabre, all already quite clean, although there are some lapses, obviously. The guard is big and is wonderfully talented top to bottom. Everywhere I look, the technical foundation is evident. They end their show midway through with a really well done group rifle catch at port, which is something a guard in this class has no business doing as well as they do, but there it is. Very cool, different kind of show overall. I'm going to give it a... 67.5. It's not done, there's room for growth. And let's see what they actually got. A 66. Close enough.

Speaking of David Byrne, fun fact, he produced a color guard performance film back in 2016 called Contemporary Color. It's worth a watch. Apparently Byrne stumbled on guard and was fascinated by it, so he decided to have high school performers perform to live pop music.

Pearland is making extra good use of their moon set pieces from their marching show. How cute is this! The show is called Blue Moon. As mentioned by others, the moons are still black and yellow. I don't believe Pearland has a floor yet either -- it's totally black. But the staging and choreography appear to be mostly done. The song is the crooner classic, Blue Moon. "Once upon a time/before I took up smiling/I hated the moonlight." It all has a very luxurious and dreamy quality. It's the kind of song you'd hear in a classy restaurant or lounge -- or maybe just an Olive Garden, I don't know. 😅 The performers begin their show resting in the curve of one of the crescent moons right in the middle of the floor. As the classy piano music commences, the moon slowly rocks back and forth with the performers on it, with a couple of soloists pulsing off. You have to love how they use these moons for clever staging effects -- also for fun trick tosses while on the moons, while hopping off of them, so on and so forth. Again, the technique here is very clear, even if not everything is a perfect catch. How cool is that when they line up the moons diagonally in the center and have them rock back and forth in a ripple? I can't wait to see this with the complete aesthetic of the floor and costumes and flags. I love the cute vignette at the end of the two girls who are sleeping but are pushed together by the tipping of the moon. It's a clutch character moment. Really, the entire show is like a nice, warm hug before you go to bed. As for my personal scores, it's close, but I like the staging and movement (and just general completeness) of Pearland's show a little bit more than TWHS, so I'll say a 68. (No sabres in Pearland's show, which is interesting. Not a requirement, but it could enrich the vocab.) And let's look at the actual score. They got a 66.6, a little bit low, but not too far off.

The Woodlands World is already giving me goosebumps. Their show is called The Light You Cannot See. Perhaps it's about being in the throes of depression and not seeing the hope that's there, or perhaps it's about something more spiritual, like God. As of right now, it's open to interpretation, which I like. Pairs of cylinders are set upright across the floor, which itself reminds me of space, with little white dots for stars and the lambent glow of some invisible light(s) creating golden brown patches on the floor. The girls begin in a pod in the lower left corner, with a few others posed farther away atop the cylinders. A female narrator simply says, "Look," and the one girl just outside of the pod charges up and over the other girls, flinging herself stomach first, before returning to her feet on the other side and catching a rifle that is flung over the pod. Wow! What an opening! The haunting long tones commence and we get that classic Woodlands slow processional jazz walk. The pod lifts up a girl as it travels, and the outer members rotate about her quickly, looking up at her questioningly as they move across the floor. A few duets of performers break off as the pod moves, accompanied by some slightly spacey, irritated synthesizer bleeps. The pod converges around a girl on top of one of the cylinders in the center of the floor, her body pulls upward with tension, then there's the release (maybe a good moment for a solo toss catch), and the pod swirls quickly outward and apart, very cosmic-like, with a nearly full ensemble rifle ripple around perimeter of the floor as they push outward. It's like 20 rifles. Stunning! Suddenly we have a clearer, faster tempo in the music, with a relentless up and down organ/synthesizer figure. Achingly beautiful long tones in the strings creep in and crescendo over time. I do think there are parts in the middle of this opening that could use more movement, more appealing and musical staging. It's oddly still and contrary to the music during some of the rifle partnering moments. (I also don't think it helped that they had a missing rifle partner right in the middle of the floor. It seemed empty and a little unbalanced.) But then right after we get that magnificent sequence with the tutti flags and ensemble rifle 6s, followed by all those dense, fast, winding follow-the-leader phrases in both rifles and flags. These girls are just running and spinning and tossing -- at one point even passing the rifles from one hand to the other under their legs as they leap, immediately connecting it into other skills. It's so challenging and exhausting, but they're killing it. Again, everywhere you look you see quality. Overall, I don't think they're quite as far along this year performance- or uniformity-wise as they were last year at this contest, but the vocabulary in this show is much richer. I cannot wait to see this on Flo at Austin when it's done and the full aesthetic is there. I think it'll be quite affecting, but with a serious intellectual quality that prevents it from being maudlin.

Score? I'll say a 73. The staging during the middle section of the opener could be more compelling. Also, they had a few exposed drops and uniformity issues. And they got... a 72.4. Close! Their equipment score should probably be higher.

Still need to watch the others!

Klein Oak's show is lovely! It's called Fool For You. The song is Pink by LEON. It's hard to make out the overall design of the floor from this angle, but I love the contrast between that red block in the front and the wispy gray and blue line, which curves sinuously, like smoke. (Appropriately the song opens "smoking blues/sipping red/and I picture us inside my head.") The girls start out in two separate pods diagonally across the stage, and slowly trickle out along the smoky line via a series of chaines turns and calypsos. I feel like the tenderness of the music and soft quality of the singer's voice is well matched by these sabre phrases -- light, airy, expressive. The back of the stage is a really deep gray, maybe black, so when those red flags pop out they really pop. (Of course, these might not be the final silks, but the color works well.) Amazing job on the sabre catches while on your knees! Wow! The performance gets a little dicier when the rifles come out, but that girl up front nails that one handed catch on the rifle 5. Alas, the other rifles seemed to go up at various heights, with the assorted partial catches and drops that come with under- and over-rotations. As is typical with this class, I think there's ample room to connect the phrases with more movement, or at least something that looks more purposeful. But it's early, and I'm really liking what they have so far. It's around a 63 for me, very solid for a January performance. Okay, let's see what they actually got... Just around a 61, pulled down a little by one of the effect judges, too many drops for him maybe. But the scores look mostly accurate to me.

I immediately recognize Talking Heads singer David Byrne's voice in this Woodlands A song, but I'm not familiar with the song itself. It's called Glass, Concrete & Stone. I'm not going to pretend to know what the theme of the song is, but it seems breezily, quirkily existential in parts. "Skin, that covers me from head to toe/Except a couple tiny holes and openings/Where the city's blowin in and out/This is what it's all about, delightfully." The floor is pretty austere, simply a black rectangle with a light bluish gray perimeter. This might be a JV floor masquerading in a class filled with varsity floors. 😅 But the girls definitely don't perform like your typical JV guard. They all start out sitting on a tiered stack of (concrete?) blocks in the top right corner, all of their bodies slumped over. The cool cat percussion creeps in, and the girls rise alertly at the first bongo hit. I love it! The first girl steps out from the blocks and demonstrates near perfect technique on the opening rifle toss caught at flat. Another steps out for a clean traveling toss duet, then a third for a trio of one-handed catches. It builds into moments of just amazing multiples on flag, rifle, and sabre, all already quite clean, although there are some lapses, obviously. The guard is big and is wonderfully talented top to bottom. Everywhere I look, the technical foundation is evident. They end their show midway through with a really well done group rifle catch at port, which is something a guard in this class has no business doing as well as they do, but there it is. Very cool, different kind of show overall. I'm going to give it a... 67.5. It's not done, there's room for growth. And let's see what they actually got. A 66. Close enough.

Speaking of David Byrne, fun fact, he produced a color guard performance film back in 2016 called Contemporary Color. It's worth a watch. Apparently Byrne stumbled on guard and was fascinated by it, so he decided to have high school performers perform to live pop music.

Pearland is making extra good use of their moon set pieces from their marching show. How cute is this! The show is called Blue Moon. As mentioned by others, the moons are still black and yellow. I don't believe Pearland has a floor yet either -- it's totally black. But the staging and choreography appear to be mostly done. The song is the crooner classic, Blue Moon. "Once upon a time/before I took up smiling/I hated the moonlight." It all has a very luxurious and dreamy quality. It's the kind of song you'd hear in a classy restaurant or lounge -- or maybe just an Olive Garden, I don't know. 😅 The performers begin their show resting in the curve of one of the crescent moons right in the middle of the floor. As the classy piano music commences, the moon slowly rocks back and forth with the performers on it, with a couple of soloists pulsing off. You have to love how they use these moons for clever staging effects -- also for fun trick tosses while on the moons, while hopping off of them, so on and so forth. Again, the technique here is very clear, even if not everything is a perfect catch. How cool is that when they line up the moons diagonally in the center and have them rock back and forth in a ripple? I can't wait to see this with the complete aesthetic of the floor and costumes and flags. I love the cute vignette at the end of the two girls who are sleeping but are pushed together by the tipping of the moon. It's a clutch character moment. Really, the entire show is like a nice, warm hug before you go to bed. As for my personal scores, it's close, but I like the staging and movement (and just general completeness) of Pearland's show a little bit more than TWHS, so I'll say a 68. (No sabres in Pearland's show, which is interesting. Not a requirement, but it could enrich the vocab.) And let's look at the actual score. They got a 66.6, a little bit low, but not too far off.

The Woodlands World is already giving me goosebumps. Their show is called The Light You Cannot See. Perhaps it's about being in the throes of depression and not seeing the hope that's there, or perhaps it's about something more spiritual, like God. As of right now, it's open to interpretation, which I like. Pairs of cylinders are set upright across the floor, which itself reminds me of space, with little white dots for stars and the lambent glow of some invisible light(s) creating golden brown patches on the floor. The girls begin in a pod in the lower left corner, with a few others posed farther away atop the cylinders. A female narrator simply says, "Look," and the one girl just outside of the pod charges up and over the other girls, flinging herself stomach first, before returning to her feet on the other side and catching a rifle that is flung over the pod. Wow! What an opening! The haunting long tones commence and we get that classic Woodlands slow processional jazz walk. The pod lifts up a girl as it travels, and the outer members rotate about her quickly, looking up at her questioningly as they move across the floor. A few duets of performers break off as the pod moves, accompanied by some slightly spacey, irritated synthesizer bleeps. The pod converges around a girl on top of one of the cylinders in the center of the floor, her body pulls upward with tension, then there's the release (maybe a good moment for a solo toss catch), and the pod swirls quickly outward and apart, very cosmic-like, with a nearly full ensemble rifle ripple around perimeter of the floor as they push outward. It's like 20 rifles. Stunning! Suddenly we have a clearer, faster tempo in the music, with a relentless up and down organ/synthesizer figure. Achingly beautiful long tones in the strings creep in and crescendo over time. I do think there are parts in the middle of this opening that could use more movement, more appealing and musical staging. It's oddly still and contrary to the music during some of the rifle partnering moments. (I also don't think it helped that they had a missing rifle partner right in the middle of the floor. It seemed empty and a little unbalanced.) But then right after we get that magnificent sequence with the tutti flags and ensemble rifle 6s, followed by all those dense, fast, winding follow-the-leader phrases in both rifles and flags. These girls are just running and spinning and tossing -- at one point even passing the rifles from one hand to the other under their legs as they leap, immediately connecting it into other skills. It's so challenging and exhausting, but they're killing it. Again, everywhere you look you see quality. Overall, I don't think they're quite as far along this year performance- or uniformity-wise as they were last year at this contest, but the vocabulary in this show is much richer. I cannot wait to see this on Flo at Austin when it's done and the full aesthetic is there. I think it'll be quite affecting, but with a serious intellectual quality that prevents it from being maudlin.

Score? I'll say a 73. The staging during the middle section of the opener could be more compelling. Also, they had a few exposed drops and uniformity issues. And they got... a 72.4. Close! Their equipment score should probably be higher.

Still need to watch the others!

Klein Oak's show is lovely! It's called Fool For You. The song is Pink by LEON. It's hard to make out the overall design of the floor from this angle, but I love the contrast between that red block in the front and the wispy gray and blue line, which curves sinuously, like smoke. (Appropriately the song opens "smoking blues/sipping red/and I picture us inside my head.") The girls start out in two separate pods diagonally across the stage, and slowly trickle out along the smoky line via a series of chaines turns and calypsos. I feel like the tenderness of the music and soft quality of the singer's voice is well matched by these sabre phrases -- light, airy, expressive. The back of the stage is a really deep gray, maybe black, so when those red flags pop out they really pop. (Of course, these might not be the final silks, but the color works well.) Amazing job on the sabre catches while on your knees! Wow! The performance gets a little dicier when the rifles come out, but that girl up front nails that one handed catch on the rifle 5. Alas, the other rifles seemed to go up at various heights, with the assorted partial catches and drops that come with under- and over-rotations. As is typical with this class, I think there's ample room to connect the phrases with more movement, or at least something that looks more purposeful. But it's early, and I'm really liking what they have so far. It's around a 63 for me, very solid for a January performance. Okay, let's see what they actually got... Just around a 61, pulled down a little by one of the effect judges, too many drops for him maybe. But the scores look mostly accurate to me.

I immediately recognize Talking Heads singer David Byrne's voice in this Woodlands A song, but I'm not familiar with the song itself. It's called Glass, Concrete & Stone. I'm not going to pretend to know what the theme of the song is, but it seems breezily, quirkily existential in parts. "Skin, that covers me from head to toe/Except a couple tiny holes and openings/Where the city's blowin in and out/This is what it's all about, delightfully." The floor is pretty austere, simply a black rectangle with a light bluish gray perimeter. This might be a JV floor masquerading in a class filled with varsity floors. 😅 But the girls definitely don't perform like your typical JV guard. They all start out sitting on a tiered stack of (concrete?) blocks in the top right corner, all of their bodies slumped over. The cool cat percussion creeps in, and the girls rise alertly at the first bongo hit. I love it! The first girl steps out from the blocks and demonstrates near perfect technique on the opening rifle toss caught at flat. Another steps out for a clean traveling toss duet, then a third for a trio of one-handed catches. It builds into moments of just amazing multiples on flag, rifle, and sabre, all already quite clean, although there are some lapses, obviously. The guard is big and is wonderfully talented top to bottom. Everywhere I look, the technical foundation is evident. They end their show midway through with a really well done group rifle catch at port, which is something a guard in this class has no business doing as well as they do, but there it is. Very cool, different kind of show overall. I'm going to give it a... 67.5. It's not done, there's room for growth. And let's see what they actually got. A 66. Close enough.

Speaking of David Byrne, fun fact, he produced a color guard performance film back in 2016 called Contemporary Color. It's worth a watch. Apparently Byrne stumbled on guard and was fascinated by it, so he decided to have high school performers perform to live pop music.

Pearland is making extra good use of their moon set pieces from their marching show. How cute is this! The show is called Blue Moon. As mentioned by others, the moons are still black and yellow. I don't believe Pearland has a floor yet either -- it's totally black. But the staging and choreography appear to be mostly done. The song is the crooner classic, Blue Moon. "Once upon a time/before I took up smiling/I hated the moonlight." It all has a very luxurious and dreamy quality. It's the kind of song you'd hear in a classy restaurant or lounge -- or maybe just an Olive Garden, I don't know. 😅 The performers begin their show resting in the curve of one of the crescent moons right in the middle of the floor. As the classy piano music commences, the moon slowly rocks back and forth with the performers on it, with a couple of soloists pulsing off. You have to love how they use these moons for clever staging effects -- also for fun trick tosses while on the moons, while hopping off of them, so on and so forth. Again, the technique here is very clear, even if not everything is a perfect catch. How cool is that when they line up the moons diagonally in the center and have them rock back and forth in a ripple? I can't wait to see this with the complete aesthetic of the floor and costumes and flags. I love the cute vignette at the end of the two girls who are sleeping but are pushed together by the tipping of the moon. It's a clutch character moment. Really, the entire show is like a nice, warm hug before you go to bed. As for my personal scores, it's close, but I like the staging and movement (and just general completeness) of Pearland's show a little bit more than TWHS, so I'll say a 68. (No sabres in Pearland's show, which is interesting. Not a requirement, but it could enrich the vocab.) And let's look at the actual score. They got a 66.6, a little bit low, but not too far off.

The Woodlands World is already giving me goosebumps. Their show is called The Light You Cannot See. Perhaps it's about being in the throes of depression and not seeing the hope that's there, or perhaps it's about something more spiritual, like God. As of right now, it's open to interpretation, which I like. Pairs of cylinders are set upright across the floor, which itself reminds me of space, with little white dots for stars and the lambent glow of some invisible light(s) creating golden brown patches on the floor. The girls begin in a pod in the lower left corner, with a few others posed farther away atop the cylinders. A female narrator simply says, "Look," and the one girl just outside of the pod charges up and over the other girls, flinging herself stomach first, before returning to her feet on the other side and catching a rifle that is flung over the pod. Wow! What an opening! The haunting long tones commence and we get that classic Woodlands slow processional jazz walk. The pod lifts up a girl as it travels, and the outer members rotate about her quickly, looking up at her questioningly as they move across the floor. A few duets of performers break off as the pod moves, accompanied by some slightly spacey, irritated synthesizer bleeps. The pod converges around a girl on top of one of the cylinders in the center of the floor, her body pulls upward with tension, then there's the release (maybe a good moment for a solo toss catch), and the pod swirls quickly outward and apart, very cosmic-like, with a nearly full ensemble rifle ripple around perimeter of the floor as they push outward. It's like 20 rifles. Stunning! Suddenly we have a clearer, faster tempo in the music, with a relentless up and down organ/synthesizer figure. Achingly beautiful long tones in the strings creep in and crescendo over time. I do think there are parts in the middle of this opening that could use more movement, more appealing and musical staging. It's oddly still and contrary to the music during some of the rifle partnering moments. (I also don't think it helped that they had a missing rifle partner right in the middle of the floor. It seemed empty and a little unbalanced.) But then right after we get that magnificent sequence with the tutti flags and ensemble rifle 6s, followed by all those dense, fast, winding follow-the-leader phrases in both rifles and flags. These girls are just running and spinning and tossing -- at one point even passing the rifles from one hand to the other under their legs as they leap, immediately connecting it into other skills. It's so challenging and exhausting, but they're killing it. Again, everywhere you look you see quality. Overall, I don't think they're quite as far along this year performance- or uniformity-wise as they were last year at this contest, but the vocabulary in this show is much richer. I cannot wait to see this on Flo at Austin when it's done and the full aesthetic is there. I think it'll be quite affecting, but with a serious intellectual quality that prevents it from being maudlin.

Score? I'll say a 73. The staging during the middle section of the opener could be more compelling. Also, they had a few exposed drops and uniformity issues. And they got... a 72.4. Close! Their equipment score should probably be higher.

Still need to watch the others!

Klein Oak's show is lovely! It's called Fool For You. The song is Pink by LEON. It's hard to make out the overall design of the floor from this angle, but I love the contrast between that red block in the front and the wispy gray and blue line, which curves sinuously, like smoke. (Appropriately the song opens "smoking blues/sipping red/and I picture us inside my head.") The girls start out in two separate pods diagonally across the stage, and slowly trickle out along the smoky line via a series of chaines turns and calypsos. I feel like the tenderness of the music and soft quality of the singer's voice is well matched by these sabre phrases -- light, airy, expressive. The back of the stage is a really deep gray, maybe black, so when those red flags pop out they really pop. (Of course, these might not be the final silks, but the color works well.) Amazing job on the sabre catches while on your knees! Wow! The performance gets a little dicier when the rifles come out, but that girl up front nails that one handed catch on the rifle 5. Alas, the other rifles seemed to go up at various heights, with the assorted partial catches and drops that come with under- and over-rotations. As is typical with this class, I think there's ample room to connect the phrases with more movement, or at least something that looks more purposeful. But it's early, and I'm really liking what they have so far. It's around a 63 for me, very solid for a January performance. Okay, let's see what they actually got... Just around a 61, pulled down a little by one of the effect judges, too many drops for him maybe. But the scores look mostly accurate to me.

I immediately recognize Talking Heads singer David Byrne's voice in this Woodlands A song, but I'm not familiar with the song itself. It's called Glass, Concrete & Stone. I'm not going to pretend to know what the theme of the song is, but it seems breezily, quirkily existential in parts. "Skin, that covers me from head to toe/Except a couple tiny holes and openings/Where the city's blowin in and out/This is what it's all about, delightfully." The floor is pretty austere, simply a black rectangle with a light bluish gray perimeter. This might be a JV floor masquerading in a class filled with varsity floors. 😅 But the girls definitely don't perform like your typical JV guard. They all start out sitting on a tiered stack of (concrete?) blocks in the top right corner, all of their bodies slumped over. The cool cat percussion creeps in, and the girls rise alertly at the first bongo hit. I love it! The first girl steps out from the blocks and demonstrates near perfect technique on the opening rifle toss caught at flat. Another steps out for a clean traveling toss duet, then a third for a trio of one-handed catches. It builds into moments of just amazing multiples on flag, rifle, and sabre, all already quite clean, although there are some lapses, obviously. The guard is big and is wonderfully talented top to bottom. Everywhere I look, the technical foundation is evident. They end their show midway through with a really well done group rifle catch at port, which is something a guard in this class has no business doing as well as they do, but there it is. Very cool, different kind of show overall. I'm going to give it a... 67.5. It's not done, there's room for growth. And let's see what they actually got. A 66. Close enough.

Speaking of David Byrne, fun fact, he produced a color guard performance film back in 2016 called Contemporary Color. It's worth a watch. Apparently Byrne stumbled on guard and was fascinated by it, so he decided to have high school performers perform to live pop music.

Pearland is making extra good use of their moon set pieces from their marching show. How cute is this! The show is called Blue Moon. As mentioned by others, the moons are still black and yellow. I don't believe Pearland has a floor yet either -- it's totally black. But the staging and choreography appear to be mostly done. The song is the crooner classic, Blue Moon. "Once upon a time/before I took up smiling/I hated the moonlight." It all has a very luxurious and dreamy quality. It's the kind of song you'd hear in a classy restaurant or lounge -- or maybe just an Olive Garden, I don't know. 😅 The performers begin their show resting in the curve of one of the crescent moons right in the middle of the floor. As the classy piano music commences, the moon slowly rocks back and forth with the performers on it, with a couple of soloists pulsing off. You have to love how they use these moons for clever staging effects -- also for fun trick tosses while on the moons, while hopping off of them, so on and so forth. Again, the technique here is very clear, even if not everything is a perfect catch. How cool is that when they line up the moons diagonally in the center and have them rock back and forth in a ripple? I can't wait to see this with the complete aesthetic of the floor and costumes and flags. I love the cute vignette at the end of the two girls who are sleeping but are pushed together by the tipping of the moon. It's a clutch character moment. Really, the entire show is like a nice, warm hug before you go to bed. As for my personal scores, it's close, but I like the staging and movement (and just general completeness) of Pearland's show a little bit more than TWHS, so I'll say a 68. (No sabres in Pearland's show, which is interesting. Not a requirement, but it could enrich the vocab.) And let's look at the actual score. They got a 66.6, a little bit low, but not too far off.

The Woodlands World is already giving me goosebumps. Their show is called The Light You Cannot See. Perhaps it's about being in the throes of depression and not seeing the hope that's there, or perhaps it's about something more spiritual, like God. As of right now, it's open to interpretation, which I like. Pairs of cylinders are set upright across the floor, which itself reminds me of space, with little white dots for stars and the lambent glow of some invisible light(s) creating golden brown patches on the floor. The girls begin in a pod in the lower left corner, with a few others posed farther away atop the cylinders. A female narrator simply says, "Look," and the one girl just outside of the pod charges up and over the other girls, flinging herself stomach first, before returning to her feet on the other side and catching a rifle that is flung over the pod. Wow! What an opening! The haunting long tones commence and we get that classic Woodlands slow processional jazz walk. The pod lifts up a girl as it travels, and the outer members rotate about her quickly, looking up at her questioningly as they move across the floor. A few duets of performers break off as the pod moves, accompanied by some slightly spacey, irritated synthesizer bleeps. The pod converges around a girl on top of one of the cylinders in the center of the floor, her body pulls upward with tension, then there's the release (maybe a good moment for a solo toss catch), and the pod swirls quickly outward and apart, very cosmic-like, with a nearly full ensemble rifle ripple around perimeter of the floor as they push outward. It's like 20 rifles. Stunning! Suddenly we have a clearer, faster tempo in the music, with a relentless up and down organ/synthesizer figure. Achingly beautiful long tones in the strings creep in and crescendo over time. I do think there are parts in the middle of this opening that could use more movement, more appealing and musical staging. It's oddly still and contrary to the music during some of the rifle partnering moments. (I also don't think it helped that they had a missing rifle partner right in the middle of the floor. It seemed empty and a little unbalanced.) But then right after we get that magnificent sequence with the tutti flags and ensemble rifle 6s, followed by all those dense, fast, winding follow-the-leader phrases in both rifles and flags. These girls are just running and spinning and tossing -- at one point even passing the rifles from one hand to the other under their legs as they leap, immediately connecting it into other skills. It's so challenging and exhausting, but they're killing it. Again, everywhere you look you see quality. Overall, I don't think they're quite as far along this year performance- or uniformity-wise as they were last year at this contest, but the vocabulary in this show is much richer. I cannot wait to see this on Flo at Austin when it's done and the full aesthetic is there. I think it'll be quite affecting, but with a serious intellectual quality that prevents it from being maudlin.

Score? I'll say a 73. The staging during the middle section of the opener could be more compelling. Also, they had a few exposed drops and uniformity issues. And they got... a 72.4. Close! Their equipment score should probably be higher.

Still need to watch the others!

Klein Oak's show is lovely! It's called Fool For You. The song is Pink by LEON. It's hard to make out the overall design of the floor from this angle, but I love the contrast between that red block in the front and the wispy gray and blue line, which curves sinuously, like smoke. (Appropriately the song opens "smoking blues/sipping red/and I picture us inside my head.") The girls start out in two separate pods diagonally across the stage, and slowly trickle out along the smoky line via a series of chaines turns and calypsos. I feel like the tenderness of the music and soft quality of the singer's voice is well matched by these sabre phrases -- light, airy, expressive. The back of the stage is a really deep gray, maybe black, so when those red flags pop out they really pop. (Of course, these might not be the final silks, but the color works well.) Amazing job on the sabre catches while on your knees! Wow! The performance gets a little dicier when the rifles come out, but that girl up front nails that one handed catch on the rifle 5. Alas, the other rifles seemed to go up at various heights, with the assorted partial catches and drops that come with under- and over-rotations. As is typical with this class, I think there's ample room to connect the phrases with more movement, or at least something that looks more purposeful. But it's early, and I'm really liking what they have so far. It's around a 63 for me, very solid for a January performance. Okay, let's see what they actually got... Just around a 61, pulled down a little by one of the effect judges, too many drops for him maybe. But the scores look mostly accurate to me.

I immediately recognize Talking Heads singer David Byrne's voice in this Woodlands A song, but I'm not familiar with the song itself. It's called Glass, Concrete & Stone. I'm not going to pretend to know what the theme of the song is, but it seems breezily, quirkily existential in parts. "Skin, that covers me from head to toe/Except a couple tiny holes and openings/Where the city's blowin in and out/This is what it's all about, delightfully." The floor is pretty austere, simply a black rectangle with a light bluish gray perimeter. This might be a JV floor masquerading in a class filled with varsity floors. 😅 But the girls definitely don't perform like your typical JV guard. They all start out sitting on a tiered stack of (concrete?) blocks in the top right corner, all of their bodies slumped over. The cool cat percussion creeps in, and the girls rise alertly at the first bongo hit. I love it! The first girl steps out from the blocks and demonstrates near perfect technique on the opening rifle toss caught at flat. Another steps out for a clean traveling toss duet, then a third for a trio of one-handed catches. It builds into moments of just amazing multiples on flag, rifle, and sabre, all already quite clean, although there are some lapses, obviously. The guard is big and is wonderfully talented top to bottom. Everywhere I look, the technical foundation is evident. They end their show midway through with a really well done group rifle catch at port, which is something a guard in this class has no business doing as well as they do, but there it is. Very cool, different kind of show overall. I'm going to give it a... 67.5. It's not done, there's room for growth. And let's see what they actually got. A 66. Close enough.

Speaking of David Byrne, fun fact, he produced a color guard performance film back in 2016 called Contemporary Color. It's worth a watch. Apparently Byrne stumbled on guard and was fascinated by it, so he decided to have high school performers perform to live pop music.

Pearland is making extra good use of their moon set pieces from their marching show. How cute is this! The show is called Blue Moon. As mentioned by others, the moons are still black and yellow. I don't believe Pearland has a floor yet either -- it's totally black. But the staging and choreography appear to be mostly done. The song is the crooner classic, Blue Moon. "Once upon a time/before I took up smiling/I hated the moonlight." It all has a very luxurious and dreamy quality. It's the kind of song you'd hear in a classy restaurant or lounge -- or maybe just an Olive Garden, I don't know. 😅 The performers begin their show resting in the curve of one of the crescent moons right in the middle of the floor. As the classy piano music commences, the moon slowly rocks back and forth with the performers on it, with a couple of soloists pulsing off. You have to love how they use these moons for clever staging effects -- also for fun trick tosses while on the moons, while hopping off of them, so on and so forth. Again, the technique here is very clear, even if not everything is a perfect catch. How cool is that when they line up the moons diagonally in the center and have them rock back and forth in a ripple? I can't wait to see this with the complete aesthetic of the floor and costumes and flags. I love the cute vignette at the end of the two girls who are sleeping but are pushed together by the tipping of the moon. It's a clutch character moment. Really, the entire show is like a nice, warm hug before you go to bed. As for my personal scores, it's close, but I like the staging and movement (and just general completeness) of Pearland's show a little bit more than TWHS, so I'll say a 68. (No sabres in Pearland's show, which is interesting. Not a requirement, but it could enrich the vocab.) And let's look at the actual score. They got a 66.6, a little bit low, but not too far off.

The Woodlands World is already giving me goosebumps. Their show is called The Light You Cannot See. Perhaps it's about being in the throes of depression and not seeing the hope that's there, or perhaps it's about something more spiritual, like God. As of right now, it's open to interpretation, which I like. Pairs of cylinders are set upright across the floor, which itself reminds me of space, with little white dots for stars and the lambent glow of some invisible light(s) creating golden brown patches on the floor. The girls begin in a pod in the lower left corner, with a few others posed farther away atop the cylinders. A female narrator simply says, "Look," and the one girl just outside of the pod charges up and over the other girls, flinging herself stomach first, before returning to her feet on the other side and catching a rifle that is flung over the pod. Wow! What an opening! The haunting long tones commence and we get that classic Woodlands slow processional jazz walk. The pod lifts up a girl as it travels, and the outer members rotate about her quickly, looking up at her questioningly as they move across the floor. A few duets of performers break off as the pod moves, accompanied by some slightly spacey, irritated synthesizer bleeps. The pod converges around a girl on top of one of the cylinders in the center of the floor, her body pulls upward with tension, then there's the release (maybe a good moment for a solo toss catch), and the pod swirls quickly outward and apart, very cosmic-like, with a nearly full ensemble rifle ripple around perimeter of the floor as they push outward. It's like 20 rifles. Stunning! Suddenly we have a clearer, faster tempo in the music, with a relentless up and down organ/synthesizer figure. Achingly beautiful long tones in the strings creep in and crescendo over time. I do think there are parts in the middle of this opening that could use more movement, more appealing and musical staging. It's oddly still and contrary to the music during some of the rifle partnering moments. (I also don't think it helped that they had a missing rifle partner right in the middle of the floor. It seemed empty and a little unbalanced.) But then right after we get that magnificent sequence with the tutti flags and ensemble rifle 6s, followed by all those dense, fast, winding follow-the-leader phrases in both rifles and flags. These girls are just running and spinning and tossing -- at one point even passing the rifles from one hand to the other under their legs as they leap, immediately connecting it into other skills. It's so challenging and exhausting, but they're killing it. Again, everywhere you look you see quality. Overall, I don't think they're quite as far along this year performance- or uniformity-wise as they were last year at this contest, but the vocabulary in this show is much richer. I cannot wait to see this on Flo at Austin when it's done and the full aesthetic is there. I think it'll be quite affecting, but with a serious intellectual quality that prevents it from being maudlin.

Score? I'll say a 73. The staging during the middle section of the opener could be more compelling. Also, they had a few exposed drops and uniformity issues. And they got... a 72.4. Close! Their equipment score should probably be higher.

Still need to watch the others!

You can definitely tell I copied and pasted that block of text by the weird formatting shift. Sorry! 😅

You can definitely tell I copied and pasted that block of text by the weird formatting shift. Sorry! 😅

Klein Oak's show is lovely! It's called Fool For You. The song is Pink by LEON. It's hard to make out the overall design of the floor from this angle, but I love the contrast between that red block in the front and the wispy gray and blue line, which curves sinuously, like smoke. (Appropriately the song opens "smoking blues/sipping red/and I picture us inside my head.") The girls start out in two separate pods diagonally across the stage, and slowly trickle out along the smoky line via a series of chaines turns and calypsos. I feel like the tenderness of the music and soft quality of the singer's voice is well matched by these sabre phrases -- light, airy, expressive. The back of the stage is a really deep gray, maybe black, so when those red flags pop out they really pop. (Of course, these might not be the final silks, but the color works well.) Amazing job on the sabre catches while on your knees! Wow! The performance gets a little dicier when the rifles come out, but that girl up front nails that one handed catch on the rifle 5. Alas, the other rifles seemed to go up at various heights, with the assorted partial catches and drops that come with under- and over-rotations. As is typical with this class, I think there's ample room to connect the phrases with more movement, or at least something that looks more purposeful. But it's early, and I'm really liking what they have so far. It's around a 63 for me, very solid for a January performance. Okay, let's see what they actually got... Just around a 61, pulled down a little by one of the effect judges, too many drops for him maybe. But the scores look mostly accurate to me.

I immediately recognize Talking Heads singer David Byrne's voice in this Woodlands A song, but I'm not familiar with the song itself. It's called Glass, Concrete & Stone. I'm not going to pretend to know what the theme of the song is, but it seems breezily, quirkily existential in parts. "Skin, that covers me from head to toe/Except a couple tiny holes and openings/Where the city's blowin in and out/This is what it's all about, delightfully." The floor is pretty austere, simply a black rectangle with a light bluish gray perimeter. This might be a JV floor masquerading in a class filled with varsity floors. 😅 But the girls definitely don't perform like your typical JV guard. They all start out sitting on a tiered stack of (concrete?) blocks in the top right corner, all of their bodies slumped over. The cool cat percussion creeps in, and the girls rise alertly at the first bongo hit. I love it! The first girl steps out from the blocks and demonstrates near perfect technique on the opening rifle toss caught at flat. Another steps out for a clean traveling toss duet, then a third for a trio of one-handed catches. It builds into moments of just amazing multiples on flag, rifle, and sabre, all already quite clean, although there are some lapses, obviously. The guard is big and is wonderfully talented top to bottom. Everywhere I look, the technical foundation is evident. They end their show midway through with a really well done group rifle catch at port, which is something a guard in this class has no business doing as well as they do, but there it is. Very cool, different kind of show overall. I'm going to give it a... 67.5. It's not done, there's room for growth. And let's see what they actually got. A 66. Close enough.

Speaking of David Byrne, fun fact, he produced a color guard performance film back in 2016 called Contemporary Color. It's worth a watch. Apparently Byrne stumbled on guard and was fascinated by it, so he decided to have high school performers perform to live pop music.

Pearland is making extra good use of their moon set pieces from their marching show. How cute is this! The show is called Blue Moon. As mentioned by others, the moons are still black and yellow. I don't believe Pearland has a floor yet either -- it's totally black. But the staging and choreography appear to be mostly done. The song is the crooner classic, Blue Moon. "Once upon a time/before I took up smiling/I hated the moonlight." It all has a very luxurious and dreamy quality. It's the kind of song you'd hear in a classy restaurant or lounge -- or maybe just an Olive Garden, I don't know. 😅 The performers begin their show resting in the curve of one of the crescent moons right in the middle of the floor. As the classy piano music commences, the moon slowly rocks back and forth with the performers on it, with a couple of soloists pulsing off. You have to love how they use these moons for clever staging effects -- also for fun trick tosses while on the moons, while hopping off of them, so on and so forth. Again, the technique here is very clear, even if not everything is a perfect catch. How cool is that when they line up the moons diagonally in the center and have them rock back and forth in a ripple? I can't wait to see this with the complete aesthetic of the floor and costumes and flags. I love the cute vignette at the end of the two girls who are sleeping but are pushed together by the tipping of the moon. It's a clutch character moment. Really, the entire show is like a nice, warm hug before you go to bed. As for my personal scores, it's close, but I like the staging and movement (and just general completeness) of Pearland's show a little bit more than TWHS, so I'll say a 68. (No sabres in Pearland's show, which is interesting. Not a requirement, but it could enrich the vocab.) And let's look at the actual score. They got a 66.6, a little bit low, but not too far off.

The Woodlands World is already giving me goosebumps. Their show is called The Light You Cannot See. Perhaps it's about being in the throes of depression and not seeing the hope that's there, or perhaps it's about something more spiritual, like God. As of right now, it's open to interpretation, which I like. Pairs of cylinders are set upright across the floor, which itself reminds me of space, with little white dots for stars and the lambent glow of some invisible light(s) creating golden brown patches on the floor. The girls begin in a pod in the lower left corner, with a few others posed farther away atop the cylinders. A female narrator simply says, "Look," and the one girl just outside of the pod charges up and over the other girls, flinging herself stomach first, before returning to her feet on the other side and catching a rifle that is flung over the pod. Wow! What an opening! The haunting long tones commence and we get that classic Woodlands slow processional jazz walk. The pod lifts up a girl as it travels, and the outer members rotate about her quickly, looking up at her questioningly as they move across the floor. A few duets of performers break off as the pod moves, accompanied by some slightly spacey, irritated synthesizer bleeps. The pod converges around a girl on top of one of the cylinders in the center of the floor, her body pulls upward with tension, then there's the release (maybe a good moment for a solo toss catch), and the pod swirls quickly outward and apart, very cosmic-like, with a nearly full ensemble rifle ripple around perimeter of the floor as they push outward. It's like 20 rifles. Stunning! Suddenly we have a clearer, faster tempo in the music, with a relentless up and down organ/synthesizer figure. Achingly beautiful long tones in the strings creep in and crescendo over time. I do think there are parts in the middle of this opening that could use more movement, more appealing and musical staging. It's oddly still and contrary to the music during some of the rifle partnering moments. (I also don't think it helped that they had a missing rifle partner right in the middle of the floor. It seemed empty and a little unbalanced.) But then right after we get that magnificent sequence with the tutti flags and ensemble rifle 6s, followed by all those dense, fast, winding follow-the-leader phrases in both rifles and flags. These girls are just running and spinning and tossing -- at one point even passing the rifles from one hand to the other under their legs as they leap, immediately connecting it into other skills. It's so challenging and exhausting, but they're killing it. Again, everywhere you look you see quality. Overall, I don't think they're quite as far along this year performance- or uniformity-wise as they were last year at this contest, but the vocabulary in this show is much richer. I cannot wait to see this on Flo at Austin when it's done and the full aesthetic is there. I think it'll be quite affecting, but with a serious intellectual quality that prevents it from being maudlin.

Score? I'll say a 73. The staging during the middle section of the opener could be more compelling. Also, they had a few exposed drops and uniformity issues. And they got... a 72.4. Close! Their equipment score should probably be higher.

Still need to watch the others!

Klein Oak's show is lovely! It's called Fool For You. The song is Pink by LEON. It's hard to make out the overall design of the floor from this angle, but I love the contrast between that red block in the front and the wispy gray and blue line, which curves sinuously, like smoke. (Appropriately the song opens "smoking blues/sipping red/and I picture us inside my head.") The girls start out in two separate pods diagonally across the stage, and slowly trickle out along the smoky line via a series of chaines turns and calypsos. I feel like the tenderness of the music and soft quality of the singer's voice is well matched by these sabre phrases -- light, airy, expressive. The back of the stage is a really deep gray, maybe black, so when those red flags pop out they really pop. (Of course, these might not be the final silks, but the color works well.) Amazing job on the sabre catches while on your knees! Wow! The performance gets a little dicier when the rifles come out, but that girl up front nails that one handed catch on the rifle 5. Alas, the other rifles seemed to go up at various heights, with the assorted partial catches and drops that come with under- and over-rotations. As is typical with this class, I think there's ample room to connect the phrases with more movement, or at least something that looks more purposeful. But it's early, and I'm really liking what they have so far. It's around a 63 for me, very solid for a January performance. Okay, let's see what they actually got... Just around a 61, pulled down a little by one of the effect judges, too many drops for him maybe. But the scores look mostly accurate to me.

I immediately recognize Talking Heads singer David Byrne's voice in this Woodlands A song, but I'm not familiar with the song itself. It's called Glass, Concrete & Stone. I'm not going to pretend to know what the theme of the song is, but it seems breezily, quirkily existential in parts. "Skin, that covers me from head to toe/Except a couple tiny holes and openings/Where the city's blowin in and out/This is what it's all about, delightfully." The floor is pretty austere, simply a black rectangle with a light bluish gray perimeter. This might be a JV floor masquerading in a class filled with varsity floors. 😅 But the girls definitely don't perform like your typical JV guard. They all start out sitting on a tiered stack of (concrete?) blocks in the top right corner, all of their bodies slumped over. The cool cat percussion creeps in, and the girls rise alertly at the first bongo hit. I love it! The first girl steps out from the blocks and demonstrates near perfect technique on the opening rifle toss caught at flat. Another steps out for a clean traveling toss duet, then a third for a trio of one-handed catches. It builds into moments of just amazing multiples on flag, rifle, and sabre, all already quite clean, although there are some lapses, obviously. The guard is big and is wonderfully talented top to bottom. Everywhere I look, the technical foundation is evident. They end their show midway through with a really well done group rifle catch at port, which is something a guard in this class has no business doing as well as they do, but there it is. Very cool, different kind of show overall. I'm going to give it a... 67.5. It's not done, there's room for growth. And let's see what they actually got. A 66. Close enough.

Speaking of David Byrne, fun fact, he produced a color guard performance film back in 2016 called Contemporary Color. It's worth a watch. Apparently Byrne stumbled on guard and was fascinated by it, so he decided to have high school performers perform to live pop music.

Pearland is making extra good use of their moon set pieces from their marching show. How cute is this! The show is called Blue Moon. As mentioned by others, the moons are still black and yellow. I don't believe Pearland has a floor yet either -- it's totally black. But the staging and choreography appear to be mostly done. The song is the crooner classic, Blue Moon. "Once upon a time/before I took up smiling/I hated the moonlight." It all has a very luxurious and dreamy quality. It's the kind of song you'd hear in a classy restaurant or lounge -- or maybe just an Olive Garden, I don't know. 😅 The performers begin their show resting in the curve of one of the crescent moons right in the middle of the floor. As the classy piano music commences, the moon slowly rocks back and forth with the performers on it, with a couple of soloists pulsing off. You have to love how they use these moons for clever staging effects -- also for fun trick tosses while on the moons, while hopping off of them, so on and so forth. Again, the technique here is very clear, even if not everything is a perfect catch. How cool is that when they line up the moons diagonally in the center and have them rock back and forth in a ripple? I can't wait to see this with the complete aesthetic of the floor and costumes and flags. I love the cute vignette at the end of the two girls who are sleeping but are pushed together by the tipping of the moon. It's a clutch character moment. Really, the entire show is like a nice, warm hug before you go to bed. As for my personal scores, it's close, but I like the staging and movement (and just general completeness) of Pearland's show a little bit more than TWHS, so I'll say a 68. (No sabres in Pearland's show, which is interesting. Not a requirement, but it could enrich the vocab.) And let's look at the actual score. They got a 66.6, a little bit low, but not too far off.

The Woodlands World is already giving me goosebumps. Their show is called The Light You Cannot See. Perhaps it's about being in the throes of depression and not seeing the hope that's there, or perhaps it's about something more spiritual, like God. As of right now, it's open to interpretation, which I like. Pairs of cylinders are set upright across the floor, which itself reminds me of space, with little white dots for stars and the lambent glow of some invisible light(s) creating golden brown patches on the floor. The girls begin in a pod in the lower left corner, with a few others posed farther away atop the cylinders. A female narrator simply says, "Look," and the one girl just outside of the pod charges up and over the other girls, flinging herself stomach first, before returning to her feet on the other side and catching a rifle that is flung over the pod. Wow! What an opening! The haunting long tones commence and we get that classic Woodlands slow processional jazz walk. The pod lifts up a girl as it travels, and the outer members rotate about her quickly, looking up at her questioningly as they move across the floor. A few duets of performers break off as the pod moves, accompanied by some slightly spacey, irritated synthesizer bleeps. The pod converges around a girl on top of one of the cylinders in the center of the floor, her body pulls upward with tension, then there's the release (maybe a good moment for a solo toss catch), and the pod swirls quickly outward and apart, very cosmic-like, with a nearly full ensemble rifle ripple around perimeter of the floor as they push outward. It's like 20 rifles. Stunning! Suddenly we have a clearer, faster tempo in the music, with a relentless up and down organ/synthesizer figure. Achingly beautiful long tones in the strings creep in and crescendo over time. I do think there are parts in the middle of this opening that could use more movement, more appealing and musical staging. It's oddly still and contrary to the music during some of the rifle partnering moments. (I also don't think it helped that they had a missing rifle partner right in the middle of the floor. It seemed empty and a little unbalanced.) But then right after we get that magnificent sequence with the tutti flags and ensemble rifle 6s, followed by all those dense, fast, winding follow-the-leader phrases in both rifles and flags. These girls are just running and spinning and tossing -- at one point even passing the rifles from one hand to the other under their legs as they leap, immediately connecting it into other skills. It's so challenging and exhausting, but they're killing it. Again, everywhere you look you see quality. Overall, I don't think they're quite as far along this year performance- or uniformity-wise as they were last year at this contest, but the vocabulary in this show is much richer. I cannot wait to see this on Flo at Austin when it's done and the full aesthetic is there. I think it'll be quite affecting, but with a serious intellectual quality that prevents it from being maudlin.

Score? I'll say a 73. The staging during the middle section of the opener could be more compelling. Also, they had a few exposed drops and uniformity issues. And they got... a 72.4. Close! Their equipment score should probably be higher.

Still need to watch the others!

Klein Oak's show is lovely! It's called Fool For You. The song is Pink by LEON. It's hard to make out the overall design of the floor from this angle, but I love the contrast between that red block in the front and the wispy gray and blue line, which curves sinuously, like smoke. (Appropriately the song opens "smoking blues/sipping red/and I picture us inside my head.") The girls start out in two separate pods diagonally across the stage, and slowly trickle out along the smoky line via a series of chaines turns and calypsos. I feel like the tenderness of the music and soft quality of the singer's voice is well matched by these sabre phrases -- light, airy, expressive. The back of the stage is a really deep gray, maybe black, so when those red flags pop out they really pop. (Of course, these might not be the final silks, but the color works well.) Amazing job on the sabre catches while on your knees! Wow! The performance gets a little dicier when the rifles come out, but that girl up front nails that one handed catch on the rifle 5. Alas, the other rifles seemed to go up at various heights, with the assorted partial catches and drops that come with under- and over-rotations. As is typical with this class, I think there's ample room to connect the phrases with more movement, or at least something that looks more purposeful. But it's early, and I'm really liking what they have so far. It's around a 63 for me, very solid for a January performance. Okay, let's see what they actually got... Just around a 61, pulled down a little by one of the effect judges, too many drops for him maybe. But the scores look mostly accurate to me.

I immediately recognize Talking Heads singer David Byrne's voice in this Woodlands A song, but I'm not familiar with the song itself. It's called Glass, Concrete & Stone. I'm not going to pretend to know what the theme of the song is, but it seems breezily, quirkily existential in parts. "Skin, that covers me from head to toe/Except a couple tiny holes and openings/Where the city's blowin in and out/This is what it's all about, delightfully." The floor is pretty austere, simply a black rectangle with a light bluish gray perimeter. This might be a JV floor masquerading in a class filled with varsity floors. 😅 But the girls definitely don't perform like your typical JV guard. They all start out sitting on a tiered stack of (concrete?) blocks in the top right corner, all of their bodies slumped over. The cool cat percussion creeps in, and the girls rise alertly at the first bongo hit. I love it! The first girl steps out from the blocks and demonstrates near perfect technique on the opening rifle toss caught at flat. Another steps out for a clean traveling toss duet, then a third for a trio of one-handed catches. It builds into moments of just amazing multiples on flag, rifle, and sabre, all already quite clean, although there are some lapses, obviously. The guard is big and is wonderfully talented top to bottom. Everywhere I look, the technical foundation is evident. They end their show midway through with a really well done group rifle catch at port, which is something a guard in this class has no business doing as well as they do, but there it is. Very cool, different kind of show overall. I'm going to give it a... 67.5. It's not done, there's room for growth. And let's see what they actually got. A 66. Close enough.

Speaking of David Byrne, fun fact, he produced a color guard performance film back in 2016 called Contemporary Color. It's worth a watch. Apparently Byrne stumbled on guard and was fascinated by it, so he decided to have high school performers perform to live pop music.

Pearland is making extra good use of their moon set pieces from their marching show. How cute is this! The show is called Blue Moon. As mentioned by others, the moons are still black and yellow. I don't believe Pearland has a floor yet either -- it's totally black. But the staging and choreography appear to be mostly done. The song is the crooner classic, Blue Moon. "Once upon a time/before I took up smiling/I hated the moonlight." It all has a very luxurious and dreamy quality. It's the kind of song you'd hear in a classy restaurant or lounge -- or maybe just an Olive Garden, I don't know. 😅 The performers begin their show resting in the curve of one of the crescent moons right in the middle of the floor. As the classy piano music commences, the moon slowly rocks back and forth with the performers on it, with a couple of soloists pulsing off. You have to love how they use these moons for clever staging effects -- also for fun trick tosses while on the moons, while hopping off of them, so on and so forth. Again, the technique here is very clear, even if not everything is a perfect catch. How cool is that when they line up the moons diagonally in the center and have them rock back and forth in a ripple? I can't wait to see this with the complete aesthetic of the floor and costumes and flags. I love the cute vignette at the end of the two girls who are sleeping but are pushed together by the tipping of the moon. It's a clutch character moment. Really, the entire show is like a nice, warm hug before you go to bed. As for my personal scores, it's close, but I like the staging and movement (and just general completeness) of Pearland's show a little bit more than TWHS, so I'll say a 68. (No sabres in Pearland's show, which is interesting. Not a requirement, but it could enrich the vocab.) And let's look at the actual score. They got a 66.6, a little bit low, but not too far off.

The Woodlands World is already giving me goosebumps. Their show is called The Light You Cannot See. Perhaps it's about being in the throes of depression and not seeing the hope that's there, or perhaps it's about something more spiritual, like God. As of right now, it's open to interpretation, which I like. Pairs of cylinders are set upright across the floor, which itself reminds me of space, with little white dots for stars and the lambent glow of some invisible light(s) creating golden brown patches on the floor. The girls begin in a pod in the lower left corner, with a few others posed farther away atop the cylinders. A female narrator simply says, "Look," and the one girl just outside of the pod charges up and over the other girls, flinging herself stomach first, before returning to her feet on the other side and catching a rifle that is flung over the pod. Wow! What an opening! The haunting long tones commence and we get that classic Woodlands slow processional jazz walk. The pod lifts up a girl as it travels, and the outer members rotate about her quickly, looking up at her questioningly as they move across the floor. A few duets of performers break off as the pod moves, accompanied by some slightly spacey, irritated synthesizer bleeps. The pod converges around a girl on top of one of the cylinders in the center of the floor, her body pulls upward with tension, then there's the release (maybe a good moment for a solo toss catch), and the pod swirls quickly outward and apart, very cosmic-like, with a nearly full ensemble rifle ripple around perimeter of the floor as they push outward. It's like 20 rifles. Stunning! Suddenly we have a clearer, faster tempo in the music, with a relentless up and down organ/synthesizer figure. Achingly beautiful long tones in the strings creep in and crescendo over time. I do think there are parts in the middle of this opening that could use more movement, more appealing and musical staging. It's oddly still and contrary to the music during some of the rifle partnering moments. (I also don't think it helped that they had a missing rifle partner right in the middle of the floor. It seemed empty and a little unbalanced.) But then right after we get that magnificent sequence with the tutti flags and ensemble rifle 6s, followed by all those dense, fast, winding follow-the-leader phrases in both rifles and flags. These girls are just running and spinning and tossing -- at one point even passing the rifles from one hand to the other under their legs as they leap, immediately connecting it into other skills. It's so challenging and exhausting, but they're killing it. Again, everywhere you look you see quality. Overall, I don't think they're quite as far along this year performance- or uniformity-wise as they were last year at this contest, but the vocabulary in this show is much richer. I cannot wait to see this on Flo at Austin when it's done and the full aesthetic is there. I think it'll be quite affecting, but with a serious intellectual quality that prevents it from being maudlin.

Score? I'll say a 73. The staging during the middle section of the opener could be more compelling. Also, they had a few exposed drops and uniformity issues. And they got... a 72.4. Close! Their equipment score should probably be higher.

Still need to watch the others!

You can definitely tell I copied and pasted that block of text by the weird formatting shift. Sorry! 😅

Okay, I messed. I think the MEPA Franklin is a different Franklin from the A finalist last year. Like an Ohio versus Tennessee guard or something. The one from last year should be Open class now.
If anybody has access to the drive, can you resend the link to me? Thanks! Still haven't seen much of anything! ❤️

Okay, I messed. I think the MEPA Franklin is a different Franklin from the A finalist last year. Like an Ohio versus Tennessee guard or something. The one from last year should be Open class now.
If anybody has access to the drive, can you resend the link to me? Thanks! Still haven't seen much of anything! ❤️

I'm going through some of the recaps from around the country.
What's up with all the penalties at TCGC Turner? 20(!) guards got penalties, some of them costing a guard first place. That seems unusually high to me, at least looking at Dripping Springs (only 4 penalties) and last year's results. Just something that caught my eye, especially moving into regional A and beyond.
Probably the most interesting direct comparison with a mostly WGI panel from this weekend: West Broward edges out Stoneman Douglas, who edges out Flanagan. All within a point of each other, centered around a 68. Very strong scores. I'm especially happy to see Flanagan so close to the others after not doing so great post-pandemic. Meanwhile, last year's Open class champion (and 2022's A class champion), Somerset Academy, was in 4th, 3 points back with a 64.4. That's a very respectable score for a first outing in world class.
Tarpon "in the lead" with a 73.5 at FFCC with a 100% WGI panel. TWHS behind them with a 72.4. (Both of these are pre-penalty scores, by the way. 😅) Surprised to see TWHS doing slightly worse than they did last year, but obviously it's hard to compare with different panels. The one WGI judge did give them a 76 in movement, which is a giant number. Really, we won't know anything until WGI starts up. Looking forward to finally seeing both of these guards.
MEPA had an interesting SW result, with Miamisburg at a 66.6 and Bellbrook right behind them with a 65.8. They're strong scores, but it does seem a little lower than usual for Miamisburg, who got 6th last year at Worlds and 4th the year before. Again, it's hard to know, especially at this very early stage with incomplete shows.
Also at MEPA, Franklin gets a 73 in A class. Giant number. Loved their show last year, so this is exciting!

Do we really need to be assigning penalties these harsh at what is literally the first contest?

This group is just something else!  I can’t get over how they continue to excel every season after being moved up a class each of the last two years!  That’s a special group right there. 
 
I heard there were a lot of penalties but that’s a little ridiculous.  I would love to know the tea on that. 😁
 
Also, thank you for sharing your thoughts on the results from around the country!  

I think it's absolutely stunning! Probably will be my favorite show from them yet. I can't believe how advanced they are! It would make me feel so very insecure if I were teaching a high school guard. 🤯

I'm going through some of the recaps from around the country.
What's up with all the penalties at TCGC Turner? 20(!) guards got penalties, some of them costing a guard first place. That seems unusually high to me, at least looking at Dripping Springs (only 4 penalties) and last year's results. Just something that caught my eye, especially moving into regional A and beyond.
Probably the most interesting direct comparison with a mostly WGI panel from this weekend: West Broward edges out Stoneman Douglas, who edges out Flanagan. All within a point of each other, centered around a 68. Very strong scores. I'm especially happy to see Flanagan so close to the others after not doing so great post-pandemic. Meanwhile, last year's Open class champion (and 2022's A class champion), Somerset Academy, was in 4th, 3 points back with a 64.4. That's a very respectable score for a first outing in world class.
Tarpon "in the lead" with a 73.5 at FFCC with a 100% WGI panel. TWHS behind them with a 72.4. (Both of these are pre-penalty scores, by the way. 😅) Surprised to see TWHS doing slightly worse than they did last year, but obviously it's hard to compare with different panels. The one WGI judge did give them a 76 in movement, which is a giant number. Really, we won't know anything until WGI starts up. Looking forward to finally seeing both of these guards.
MEPA had an interesting SW result, with Miamisburg at a 66.6 and Bellbrook right behind them with a 65.8. They're strong scores, but it does seem a little lower than usual for Miamisburg, who got 6th last year at Worlds and 4th the year before. Again, it's hard to know, especially at this very early stage with incomplete shows.
Also at MEPA, Franklin gets a 73 in A class. Giant number. Loved their show last year, so this is exciting!

I think it's absolutely stunning! Probably will be my favorite show from them yet. I can't believe how advanced they are! It would make me feel so very insecure if I were teaching a high school guard. 🤯

There is a video online of Palm Desert Charter MS. After watching it a couple times, I can say they are still proving why they are in Open Class. Smaller group this year but I think that's better to then feature more moments. One member has several feature moments, but my favorite is when he does a toss and then a double spin around, very impressive. The flag work at the end is messy but still captivating. I noticed a lot more one-handed catches and the tosses themselves are higher up in the air than usual. (I don't know proper colorguard words lol). I can't wait to see the product fully complete and clean and with the addition of costumes. I believe they will do great this year!

Those top 3 National A teams are neck and neck!  Also, very nice to see how well Ann Richards is doing in AA!  
 
 

Here are the results from the TCGC contest at DSHS.

Cadet Novice:
Round Rock Cadet Guard 71.480 (1)
Westlake Cadets 53.500 (2)
Henry Middle School Gold 41.360 (3)

Cadet Regional A:
Henry Middle School Black 41.080 (1)

Novice:
Southside High School Colorguard 74.700 (1)
Austin HS 65.720 (2)
Waco HS 55.640 (3)
Nixon-Smiley High School 45.360 (4)

Scholastic JV Regional A:
Westlake JV 69.080 (1)
Ann Richards School for Young Women Leaders JV 67.040 (2)
Hutto HS JV 64.040 (3)
Hays High School JV 62.840 (4)
Dripping Springs HS JV 62.540 (5)
Hendrickson HS JV 60.160 (6)
Smithson Valley JV 57.340 (7)
Stony Point HS JV 56.080 (8)
Cedar Park HS JV 53.600 (9)
San Angelo Central JV Winterguard 51.040 (10)

Scholastic Regional A (2 rounds):
Red Round:
Hutto HS 74.320 (1)
Pflugerville HS 73.720 (2) 
Liberal Arts and Science Academy 64.120 (3) 
Akins HS 59.420 (4)
Manor HS Winterguard 55.180 (5) 
Axtell Winter Guard 54.940 (6) 
Shoemaker HS 54.820 (7)
Tivy HS Winterguard 49.900 (8)

Blue Round:
Robert Vela High School 79.860 (1)
Manor New Tech Winterguard 72.740 (2) 
San Angelo Central Varsity Winterguard 65.500 (3) 
Palmview HS Performance Ensemble 62.860 (4) 
Lampasas High School 62.780 (5) 
East View HS 62.180 (6)
Navarro Winterguard 58.060 (7) 
McCallum HS 55.840 (8)

Scholastic AA:
Ann Richards School for Young Women Leaders Varsity 65.600 (1)
Copperas Cove HS 65.520 (2)
Belton HS 62.150 (3)
Elgin HS 60.120 (4)
Stony Point High School Color Guard 59.510 (5)
Jarrell HS 56.520 (6)
Harker Heights HS 56.500 (7)

Scholastic A:
John B. Connally HS 66.620 (1)
Cedar Ridge HS A 59.620 (2)
James Earl Rudder High School 53.030 (3)

Scholastic National A:
Dripping Springs HS 69.760 (1)
Hays HS Varsity 69.580 (2)
Cedar Park HS Varsity 69.360 (3)
Rouse HS 67.450 (4)
Hendrickson HS 65.670 (5)
Louis D. Brandeis HS 62.890 (6)
Leander HS 62.250 (7)
McNeil HS 62.170 (8)
Vista Ridge HS 59.220 (9)
Westwood High School 59.200 (10)
Veterans Memorial Winter Guard (San Antonio) 58.260 (11)

Independent A:
Origins A 72.770 (1)

Scholastic Open:
James Bowie HS 67.200 (1)
Cedar Ridge HS 56.900 (2)

Independent Open:
Origins Open 66.800 (1)

Independent World:
Origins 72.400 (1)
Invictus 69.600 (2)
 

been so verrry very busy, but got national a class thru world from Turner HS uploaded to the drive.
twhs A: Glass, Concrete, and Stone. whatever that means lmao. quirky midtempo song, but dramatically also kinda inert, like where are the builds!! undeniable skills, some great ensemble moments. only about half a show, aesthetically also kinda bland right now, like a lotta black and gray, no costumes or flags tho.
Pearland: Blue Moon. they cut up the black and yellow moons from their marching show, maybe they'll paint them blue later lol. they sit in the moons, rock back and forth in them, move them around, so on so forth. really cute and elegant show, more of a traditional guard soundtrack. classy stuff. no costumes, but seemed like a full show. great skills.
twhs world: The Light We Cannot See. wondered what the relation to the novel All the Light We Cannot See was, but well... all the parallels i cannot see lol. verrry much a prepandemic twhs/code black style show, like arthouse, minimalist chamber music, has a strange poetry to it. floor looks liiike... i dunno... really dirty dishwater? LOL. it's the little white lights poking thru, reminds me of soap suds.
no costumes or new flags yet. have some cylinders they stand on, roll around, whatever. person to person timing/uniformity issues, even at the start w/ the various duets across the floor, but it's done to mostly tempoless long tones so yeah. show is hard af, super tricky spinning and tossing sequences, very dynamic, never seem to do the same thing twice either. mvmnt is minimalist but still expressive, maybe could use even more motion to connect some of the events, like kinda has a weird stillness and emptiness after the line of double turn tosses w/ the illusion at the end w/ the one hand inverted catch. dramatically it's all like one long subtle build which i don't think works as well when you only have half the show done lol. like there wasn't a payoff yet. could see it being really goosebumpy when it's done tho. super lyrical flag writing w/ the gorgeous recycled sheer flags. they prob won't place lower than 4th at worlds again, too early to tell the ceiling.
obvi none of the shows were like esp clean, wouldn't have expected that anyway. lotsa first show jitters methinks. several half catches and drops from all the guards i saw.
judging was aight. mostly agreed. rankings at least were fine. only 1 wgi judge makes it kinda hard to compare. boooo!