The Crossmen are currently hard at work getting their 2022 production of “A Möbius Trip” off the ground at Kansas Wesleyan University and their Visual Designer, Tim Fairbanks (of Rhythm X fame), recently dropped a really fascinating piece of the conceptual puzzle they’ve put together.
The show is designed to be able to start and end at any movement.
Let me repeat. The show is designed to be able to start and end at ANY movement.
So from my perspective, here’s the challenges the Crossmen design team are facing. All of the performers end and begin in the exact same place. Not the same general form. The same place. On top of that, the designers will have to create each movement so it will have to have the highs that audience expects from the opener and closer, moments to show off the extreme technique that have come to be expected from drum corps shows as of late, as well as the ebb and flow of what would traditionally be considered a ballad movement.
Similar concepts have been thrown around for a few decades, with multiple corps trying their hand at it, and eventually for one reason or another, deciding to pursue a more traditional show structure. Most recently, the Blue Knights 2013 show, “NoBeginningNoEnd'', was intended to be able to form a complete circle, before it was abandoned to give a more definitive and climactic finish to the show.
Where Crossmen have gone above and beyond is not only that they’re experimenting with the structure of a traditional Drum Corps show, but also in the comments of the post above, Tim mentioned that they’re potentially going to give the audience a voice in where they start and finish that night, via social media. Audience participation in this way is something that is not unknown, however is rarely done.
There have been shows for years that have had audience involvement for years, with James Logan’s winter guard show from 2019, “No Borders; No Boundaries”, where at the end the guard goes up into the audience, inviting them down to the floor for a dance party at the end, being one of my personal favorite examples of this done right.
Tarpon Springs brought a new twist on traditional audience participation back in 2018 when they brought their show “RP1” to BOA Grand Nationals, as the parents in the stands handed out character cards that each corresponded to one of the three main characters on the field. A QR code on each would bring you to a website where you could vote on the ending prior to the show, and then you would wait to see which character would prevail that performance.
This past April, Stoneman Douglas took it to the next level with their Guard production of “The Game”, loosely based off of the popular Netflix show Squid Game. In it, they featured multiple video screens with QR codes and a voiceover inviting you to scan the code and vote on the website at the correct moment of the show. This decided not only which player would win at the end, but also the team as a whole, with the guard unsure of which team won until it was announced in real time.
The Crossmen’s production won’t quite bring all of the same challenges, however don’t underestimate the difficulty of not having a set beginning or an end. That being said, this could be an interesting structure for shows moving forward, even from just a rehearsal perspective. If you didn’t already need to know your show back to front, this takes it to a whole new level. Not having the certainty of where you’re beginning and ending from night to night, possibly changing that from run through to run through. These members will have the challenge few before have had to deal with, but if they can pull it off, this show will be an absolute trip at the end of the season.
Saturday Night Lights is currently GEM’s Managing Editor. He has been involved in the Pageantry Arts for over a decade, as a performer at the highest level, an instructor, and a fan. You can find him on Twitter at @SatNightLites. He currently lives in Florida with his partner and their two dogs.