SAN ANTONIO — A day after their corps lit up the Alamodome in competition, instructional and creative representatives across Drum Corps International’s World Class corps remained in San Antonio to collaborate at the fifth-annual DCI Midseason Instructors Summit.
Led by members of DCI’s Rules and Systems Task Force, the hundreds in attendance divulged their opinions on a number of competitive topics in a town hall-like format.
Members of DCI’s instructional community have long been the key stakeholder in the competitive side of the drum corps activity. Through ongoing discussions and by way of DCI’s biennial rules congress, the instructional community from the corps themselves dictate how their corps are judged on an annual basis.
In this way, the DCI judging system is continually refined and tweaked with the instructional community leading the charge on what they see as the best way to go about those changes.
“[DCI] has always been based on how the instructors wanted the activity to evolve,” said DCI Open Class judge administrator John Turner who also serves as the Rules and Systems Task Force chair. “They have come up with the rules system as it stands today. One of the key things that needs to happen on a regular basis is they need to have a group conversation about current issues.”
Before splitting off into visual- and music-focused groups, the collective engaged in an open discussion that served as a follow up to DCI’s annual winter business meetings in January during which a number of adjudication changes were implemented like the position of percussion judges on the field during performances.
Dave MacKinnon, the Bluecoats’ brass caption supervisor who serves as a member of the Rules and Systems Task Force, was one of several task force members who answered questions on these types of topics, and more, while passing along valuable information to the community.
“This venue and this opportunity to meet is even more beneficial in a way than meeting at the January [rules] congress because we have more drum corps representatives from the staffs,” said MacKinnon. “Since the corps give their drum corps the day off, the staffs have the chance to decompress, meet, and talk specifically about some of their concerns in the midst of the competition.”
“It gets very passionate,” Turner said of Sunday’s discussions. “All the hurt comes out and you see all the things that are important to [the instructional community], the things that they’re really struggling with and don’t understand. There’s an opportunity for information to be shared, and that’s why the task force members are important to lead that conversation.”
Turner was right. There was plenty of passionate discourse on Sunday. But it was all in search of the same goal — advancing the drum corps activity.
“The challenge is to make sure we can receive their information, and steer it toward what we can do or what we can ask from the judges that’ll allow the corps to move forward and improve from this point on,” MacKinnon said.
