You need to know something before watching Colts’ 2019 production.
According to Dante Alighieri’s, “Inferno,” the lowest level of hell is a dichotomy of the common stereotype of fire and brimstone. It’s cold, forged by ice which includes a throne upon which Satan sits.
Colts wanted to explore that in 2019 — the levels of hell and the swirling, spiraling, spinning feeling as one falls into the ice. The Iowa corps’ show, “When Hell Freezes Over,” is about that journey and then eventually breaking the ice and ascending back up.
That’s a deep, complex idea that seemingly would take hours upon hours of CGI work to pull off. How do you show everything change? How do you represent things going from hot to cold?
Colts tied for 14th place at the DCI Southeastern Championship, July 27 in Atlanta.
Colts program coordinator Don Click had to work with that. After all, there are not many places you can go and hide on a football field. But Click and his design team found a way to bring that magic act to the field.
Using a massive swatch of fabric that the color guard pulls over the members standing on circular props, there’s time to change everything. Things are frozen. The red on the color guard costumes has turned to blue. The pictures of fire lining the front sideline transform to snow and ice.
“The flyover is the representation of hell actually freezing over. We’ve gotten down to that bottom depth. There’s no more fire, it’s all ice,” Click said. “The flyover enables us to change that set because we can hide underneath it.”
The show begins to take the shape of this new ice environment. Yes, the setting is different, but Colts also represent that with their music. When the fabric flies over and the fire has turned to ice, the music transitions to twinkles and crystal sounds.
Earlier in the show, when some color guard members are standing high among props and oozing “lava,” the sounds are darker. It’s fire and brimstone and destruction. It’s the hell we all have in our mind.
The ice is so foreign, what many consider to be the opposite of hell. In the show, it symbolizes the bottom, the depth of hell.
Colts perform at the DCI Southeastern Championship, July 27 in Atlanta.
There, Click separates the people in the snowy, icy place into two groups: Those who want to stay and those who want to break free.
“The color guard members are almost like Satan’s minions and they’re trying to coerce them to come with them and stay into hell and go deep into hell,” Click said. “Whereas the horn line, they’re the centers and they want out and they continue into that spiral until they can break free from that ice.”
Colts have just a handful of opportunities left to perform their unique 2019 production, including Friday in Allentown and Sunday in Edinboro, Pennsylvania before heading to the DCI World Championships in Indianapolis.