Marching Band: Dressing a Form

Video Transcript

"Hi, my name is Matt Goms. And, the next thing that I would like to talk about in marching band and choreography is to talk about how to dress a form. Dressing a form sometimes is easy, the easiest one that I could probably think of to start with is making sure that your spacing is correct. No matter what you do, if you are teaching your students how to dress a form, the spacing is one of the number one important things. The form can be anything that you want, no one's going to know what your drill looks like, no judge, or no audience member is going to know what your drill looks like on paper. So, even if the form is off, the only thing they're going to notice is spacing. If you've got two people on either side of you, and you're standing too close to one of them, they're going to notice that there's a big hole, and a gap in between them. So, you want to make sure that you're in between, not too close to one side, and not too close to the other. You're going to want to be directly in the middle, and make sure the space is even on both sides because that's what most people pick up right off the bat. The next thing is when you have a straight line, if I've got a row of people in front of me, you're going to want to make sure that the center of your nose, and your sternum are lined up with the spine of the person in back. If you're off just slightly, and you move to the side just a little bit, your sternum is not lined up with their spine, or your nose is not lined up with their spine, and you're just off just a little bit, you've now set a diagonal so every person in the row behind you going back, is going to be off just a little, and instead of now being a straight line down the thing, you've got a diagonal that's going more on an angle, and it changes the whole look of the form. So, covering down is what we call it, and you want to make sure that you cover down. That you're covering down on their spine, and you've got, you can draw an imaginary line straight to your sternum and chest, to their spine."