Share the Show

Music has been selected and purchased. Drill has been written. Choreography has been inserted. Summer band is completed and you managed to survive the heat for another year. Uniforms are checked out. School has begun, and the regular routine has settled in. Football season has started. You have a couple of halftime performances with at least some of your show in your back pocket now. But in your head, you know competitions are coming and you want your group to be ready.

Being ready for competitions in itself is a big challenge. Learning music, learning drill, learning choreography, learning body movement. All of that is an undertaking. But then you also have all the logistics associated with a contest: schedules, transportation, food, uniforms, hair, makeup, props, emergency repairs, parent organizations, loading, unloading, setting up, breaking down, managing students, communication, and more. All of that can steal your time and energy. The main point of a contest (or any performance) can easily get lost in the shuffle. What needs to be done so your band has a solid, enjoyable, memorable experience? It comes down to creating the proper focus. And what is that focus?

The show itself.

More than likely, there was a time when you revealed the show to your community. It probably wasn’t during marching season. Perhaps at the end of the previous school year, or right before summer rehearsals began. Students were asking all the time. Parents were dropping hints. And when they finally found out, it was instant excitement and energy. Everyone was hyped for the upcoming marching season. Things started with a bang. Everyone was back together after summer break, proud seniors, excited rookies. But sooner or later, the grind sets in and everyone starts to feel the burden of everything listed above. The excitement disappears. What happened? Where did it go? How do you get that excitement back? Here is something that might help: Share the show you fell in love with.

One of your first goals should be enjoying the process. As we learn more about the show, we fall in love with it. Learning it is where it all starts, and where the majority of the season is spent. It should be enjoyable to put the show on the field. How students carry themselves in class makes a huge difference in how rehearsals go. Work is work, but it can and should be enjoyable. When done consistently, students begin to realize that the process is just as rewarding as a performance or an award. Perfecting the show should be just as fun as learning the show. The time spent polishing, tweaking, repeating, and improving helps instill skills and life lessons that we want young people to take into adulthood. As students learn more about the show, they embrace it, and the show begins to take on an identity and a life of its own. That’s when they fall in love with it.

Then there are performances. It doesn’t matter if it's a Friday night football game or a Saturday contest. Even though the audiences are different, it is still a performance. And this is where the next level of excitement enters, though it comes with a trade-off. Someone is watching, someone is evaluating, someone is judging. Pressure enters the mix. Scores are given. Placements are earned. Individuals, or even the majority of the group, might get nervous. They may wonder why they can perform freely at home, but freeze or play tentatively at a contest venue. When this happens, the true performance stops. People don't like being nervous and want it to go away. But students need to understand and accept that nervousness is normal and okay. Really, it’s simply extra energy the body creates to deal with the moment. But all too often, all the attention is placed on trying to make the nervousness go away, and performance suffers as a result.

While there are numerous reasons to be nervous, the solution remains simple. The focus has shifted away from what students are supposed to be doing to how they are doing. Instead of watching for tempo, alignment, and spacing, or listening for balance, phrasing, and intonation, students focus on missing a step-off or cracking an attack, and they react to it. Because the nervousness gets all the attention, more mistakes happen. Once the focus shifts, the performance is compromised. Instead, when performing, the focus should always be on the task at hand. Evaluation can come afterward. This mindset won't make nervousness vanish, but it gives students the tools to handle it.

Which brings the process to the best part: sharing the love of the show. It’s not just a performance, it’s sharing something special with an audience. Think of it like bookends. All that time spent improving fundamentals, memorizing music, learning drill, refining movement, and repeating it endlessly leads to the opportunity to do something special. The window for this is relatively short compared to the rest of the season, so make sure to take advantage of these moments. Let those performances at the end of the year be memorable, not just for the performers, but for everyone in the stands.

The excitement of the final performance should match the excitement of when the show was first announced. One of your final goals should be for the audience to love the show as much as the band does. Share the show you fell in love with. The more students share their enjoyment, the better the performance will be. The bonus? They'll realize they made fewer mistakes, too, because their focus was where it belonged.

There will still be scores. There will still be placements. Those are good and worthy goals. But long after the trophies are put away, the love of performing the show remains. And that’s the proper focus.

Learn the show. Fall in love with the show. Share the show.