“What the heck is Ensemble Analysis anyway?” Many people (Guard Instructors) ask me this question and it baffles me. It seems so obvious to me. How can people not get it?
Apparently, I’m in the minority here.
So, I’m going to try to explain it over the next several months along with thoughts about how to make your color guards better.
In a nutshell, Ensemble Analysis (or Visual Ensemble, or Visual Composition in marching band) is the evaluation of the visual design of the program. It’s not about entertainment or emotion. We leave that to those silly GE people. As the name states it’s an analysis of the design based on elements and principles of design.
If you took a design class at your local community college (which isn’t a bad idea) you’d learn about the building blocks of design: Space, Line, Shape/Form, Direction, Color, Value and Texture, and the Principles (rules for using the elements) of design: Unity, Emphasis, Balance, Proportion/Scale, Movement, Repetition/Rhythm/Pattern, Contrast and Variety/Harmony. Some lists differ slightly, but generally, this is what you get. (To read more about this, click this link to the “Design Basics” pdf.) These words can be used to describe every design ever created. For fun, find something you think is well designed and see which concepts are predominant. Which ones attract your eye the most?
In our activity, we layer visual design, which is often static, with time, physical motion and music, so we don’t completely fit into the standard list of terms above. To accommodate, we’ve made up some unique terms like “horizontal orchestration” (which I’ll explain in a later article) to make it more confusing.
Like many things, when you really boil it all down, design is a pretty simple concept.
I’m going to give you the (REALLY) simple truth about what design is: It’s finding the RELATIONSHIP between different components of a composition and managing those relationships to create a unified whole.
It’s that simple.
It doesn’t matter what you’re designing. You start with an idea or a vision for your living room or your color guard show or an outfit. Then you look at different combinations of stuff and decide if you like the way they work together or not. “Is the painting over the couch too small?” (SCALE). “Does the color of the flags stand out enough against the band uniforms?” (CONTRAST). “Dark colors are slimming.” (VALUE). As you start looking at all the possible combinations it can be overwhelming. Knowing the simple concept at the center of it all can help you make good choices.
So the objective of the EA judge is to interpret what your idea is, value the merit of that idea, and tell you how successful you were in realizing your idea on the floor or field. That’s composition or the WHAT. We’ll talk about the HOW another time.
So, now that you know all there is to know about design, you’re an expert (sort of). Everyone has some innate sense of design. Some are more sophisticated than others. The good news is that you can always learn more. Get a book, take a class, or just start paying attention to things you see. The key is in developing your observation skills. For this, you have to go past just liking something or not liking it, but understanding the reason why. You’ve got to look under the hood (so to speak) to see what makes a particular design work or not.
And this, my friends, is what Ensemble Analysis is all about.
Until next time, Happy Designing!