Spotlight of the Week: 2018 Guardians

In 2018, Guardians went to church.

The Texas-based corps told a story of downfall, prayer and redemption. But it didn’t play hymns. It didn’t play “Amazing Grace.” It didn’t play (much) classical music.

Guardians’ soundtrack was the kind you’d hear on the radio.

2018 was the second year in a row that the Open Class corps took a modern approach to its music choices in design. The year prior, the corps had utilized a wide scope of Kanye West titles, for “My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy.”

“When we saw that the kids really bought into (2017’s) product, to us, that’s the most important thing about what we do,” Guardians director Johnathan Doerr said. “We want to make sure that they love what they’re doing and what they’re performing, that they feel that they look good, that they feel like they sound good, and that’s all that really matters to us at the end of the day.”

“Obviously, the audience seems to really enjoy it,” he added. “So, that’s a really big plus.”

According to director Doerr, the pivot to a “fresh” repertoire was a big-picture decision. In just its sixth competitive season — and its third as a participant at DCI World Championship events in Indiana — Guardians had yet to fully develop an identity.

Guardians had a blank canvas. Why not paint something brand-new?

“We wanted to take (2017 and 2018) and kind of mold it into that identity,” Doerr said in 2018. “We kind of wanted to redefine those ideas this year, and identify Guardians just a little more, while progressing our competitive nature.”

With a foundational identity in place, the corps’ 2018 production “Damned” took shape. And with the music of Kendrick Lamar, Kesha, Frank Ocean, and more — and a sprinkling of Gustav Mahler — a journey story from damnation to salvation came to life.

“(The performers) know the music that’s happening, it’s not an obscure piece of music that they have to listen to many, many recordings of,” Doerr said. “It’s something they can buy into that they listen to every single day and that their friends are listening to. It’s something they can show their friends and be super proud of.”

 2018 Guardians | “Damned”
29rd place, 71.200 | 7th place, 71.875 (Open Class)

Guardians took the football field surrounded by an array of tall, white pillars, each smattered in various colors of graffiti artwork.

The corps’ uniform was comparable to its look in years past, with a twist. Guardians wore a black baseball cap — a staple of previous years’ costuming, form-fitting black pants with green and gray striping down the leg, and a tight, hooded top that featured colorful stained-glass imagery.

Color guard members’ costumes included shades of dark red, gray and gold, and featured various tattered and torn fabrics.

At the show’s outset, battery percussion and color guard performers were scattered throughout the field, while the corps’ horn line formed a small, tiled block just to the right of the 50-yard line, seeming to almost be in rows of pews at church and playing through a hymn-like chorale. This soft music was countered by staccato string sound effects from the front ensemble’s synthesizers, creating a near-dissonant opening soundscape.

As brass chords built, the corps’ full compliment gradually took to center stage, leading into a strong opening statement of Gustav Mahler’s second symphony, a piece popularly used in drum corps circles by the likes of 2010 Carolina Crown, 2006 Phantom Regiment and more.

While Guardians’ arrangement of Mahler’s work grew more dissonant and chaotic, corps members matched the mood, breaking apart from a centered, solidified block form and scattering throughout the front half of the field, before ultimately re-unifying into an impactful company front on the opening passage’s final impacts.

With this moment, a tone had been set — the corps’ “main characters,” as represented in the overall tone of the design and performance characteristics of the members, had devolved from a more structured, “faithful” place to an air of “sin” or “damnation,” as it were.

 

As such, arguably the show’s true main characters — or, more accurately, its storytellers — were introduced.

Guardians made a relatively uncharted design decision in 2018, utilizing a group of six individually-amplified vocalists; prior to 2018, only a small handful of corps — mostly those of the World Class persuasion — had endeavored to field a full vocal ensemble.

Guardians’ singers were utilized in a variety of formats, with some movements featuring solo moments and others featuring full-ensemble passages.

The first of those instances came in Guardians’ second movement, which immediately took on somewhat of a brooding tone and introduced Frank Ocean’s “No Church in the Wild.” Guardians used lyrics from the song that questioned the need for structure, for authority, and for a God:

“Human beings in a mob. What’s a mob to a king? What’s a king to a God? What’s a God to a non-believer, who don’t believe in anything? Will he make it out alive? Alright, alright – no church in the wild.”

Sung by a solo vocalist, those lyrics laid the groundwork for a high-energy second movement that predominantly featured Guardians’ battery percussion section — a group that took an impressive fourth in its caption at the DCI Open Class World Championship Finals — volleying back and forth with intricate passages of brass music.

 

As the high-intensity second movement carried on, it further and further devolved as corps members scattered to the back and outer edges of the field and transitioned into the show’s first of two ballad movements, featuring Kanye West’s “Ultralight Beam.”

Lyrics utilized from the 2016 song — vocalized in a duet accompanied by the corps’ front ensemble — expressed a longing for deeper faith, fulfillment, and peace. To embody the words presented, one solo color guard member, dressed in a white gown, seemed to serve as an inspiring leader while dancing amidst a sea of down-trodden fellow color guard performers.

This entire third movement solely featured the vocal ensemble and front ensemble, as brass and battery percussion members performed back-field choreography and reset the corps’ column props into a long arc across the back of the field.

As West’s ballad faded, pulsing electronic effects helped darken the mood once again, as scattered brass and percussion performers re-entered the front-and-center performance area with a mashup of Kendrick Lamar’s “DAMN” and Mahler’s second symphony.

 

In this fourth movement, members seemed to seek their fulfillment in a darker place, and music took on a more sardonic tone. The corps’ front ensemble played the repetitive piano motif from Lamar’s popular song, while brass features perfectly parlayed Mahler’s melodies side by side.

“We use music that is pretty fresh, and it’s something that, sometimes, the judges might not be familiar with,” Doerr said. “But we try to use it in a way that gets the point across without requiring the knowledge of that type of music.”

As tempos built in the fourth movement, the corps’ drum line took over once again, contributing heavily to the moment’s chaotic tone and characterization. With one final punch of Kendrick Lamar’s motif to round out this fourth movement, several featured performers along the front sideline punctuated the moment by throwing their headgear to the ground in an expression of defiance.

The corps’ final movement, though, sought to find inner peace amidst a feeling of confused anger brought about by the previous passages.

 

Kesha’s “Praying,” presented by soloists and combinations within Guardians’ vocal ensemble, provided the perfect soundtrack for this moment, as lyrics like “no more monsters, I can breathe again…” and an overall prayerful air expressed an overall feeling of freedom from that which caused the characters’ turmoil in previous movements.

Ultimately, Guardians’ vocalists entered the spotlight one final time, as one soprano’s impeccably high note near the end of a long and gradual crescendo signaled the full re-entry of Guardians’ corps proper, whose resonant choruses of “Praying” were perfectly complimented by a sea of large, bright-yellow flags.

“Praying” built and transitioned into a fast-paced, triumphant finish, featuring original music by corps composers that carried the feeling of an up-tempo, gospel-like hymnal, reconnecting to the show’s opening moments and tying a fitting bow on the corps’ journey to redemption and reconciliation.

A Late Push

Much of Guardians’ early season was isolated to head-to-head matchups with Southwind and Louisiana Stars.

The three were closely-contested in mid-July; they met five times, with Guardians topping the charts at three of those events. All five events, though, saw the trio of corps never separated by more than two total points. Southwind and Louisiana Stars, as well as River City Rhythm, would serve as Guardians’ closest competition come season’s end.

The Texas corps’ most intriguing competitive storylines didn’t truly unfold until Open Class World Championship events took place in Michigan City, Indiana. In the Prelims round of competition, Guardians landed in ninth place — which already would have been an all-time high Open Class placement, as compared to the corps’ 11th- and 10th-place finishes in two previous appearances.

In Prelims, though, Guardians landed in a razor-thin strata of corps, scoring just 0.475 ahead of Southwind, 0.325 behind River City Rhythm, and 0.800 behind Louisiana Stars.

But the Texas corps made the most of its second competitive opportunity in Michigan City, and in its Finals performance the following day, leapfrogged both River City Rhythm and Louisiana Stars into an impressive seventh place — up three placements from the corps’ 2017 Open Class finish.

Guardians parlayed Open Class World Championship success into an all-time high placement and score at the DCI World Championships in Indianapolis, taking 29th place with a tally of 71.200 — this, too, marked a drastic improvement, as the corps’ previous highs were 32nd place in 2016, and a score of 67.838 in 2017.