Musicality is a term heard frequently in the world of dance, (which is where I first heard it, courtesy of Lil C on So You Think You Can Dance), but is almost nonexistent in the world of Demo Teams. Simply put, it refers to a performer’s ability to interpret music through motion. And when added to the principles from last week’s lesson in Staging, it creates another layer of depth in your performance.

In the more traditional approach to Demo Teams, music is an afterthought, if it’s included at all. Think back to the majority of demos you’ve seen. (I say “majority,” because there are a few enlightened souls out there who get it right, and I want to give them their due credit.) How many of them either didn’t have music, or had it playing in the background like white noise at the mall? My guess would be nearly every one of them.

A lot of schools believe that simply playing a track in the background is enough to add drama and interest to their performance of drab, traditional techniques. It’s not. All that does is create competing elements vying for your audience’s attention. Remember how I said that people only pay attention to one form of information at a time? Well, this approach requires them to choose between either the visuals or the audio. Not both.

Music should never be something you add after-the-fact. It should be the first thing you decide on, with the rest of your demo being built around it. It should be so tightly woven into your performance that the whole thing collapses without it, like that Jenga block you didn’t realize was holding everything up until everyone’s screaming at you for knocking the darn thing over. Musicality ensures this, creating a seamless performance where all the elements compliment each other, instead of duking it out for the spotlight.

Some people are born with an innate sense of Musicality. Everyone else has to develop it. All it requires is an ability to listen for, and recognize, the layers in music. Luckily, this is a skill that can be learned, even by those claiming to be tone-deaf. (If you’re actually tone-deaf, then you’re probably out of luck and should just stick to flailing around like you’re Elaine from Seinfeld. At least you’ll get humor points then.)

I define a “layer” as a distinct part of the music, such as drums, vocals, or mid-range instruments, i.e. violins/piano/guitar. And all music has them. Some styles have fewer layers, yes, but they’re still there. Whether it be Dubstep or an Instrumental Movie Score, every song contains something you can work with. (Unless you manage to find a song consisting of one super long, drawn-out note, in which case, I would be wrong. And you would have very questionable taste in music.)

Since this is one of those concepts that really works best with an example, let’s pause for a moment and try it out. Find a piece of music, any piece of music, (yes, even Gangnam Style will do), and listen to it with your eyes closed. Listen to the whole song and really pay attention to the different layers, the nuances, and the way they all work together to play with your emotions. Which instruments are highlighted where? And if your song has lyrics, which words stand out the most? (“Eeeeeeeh, sexy lady!”) Most people have a tendency to naturally resonate with a particular layer of music. For some, it’s the lyrics or vocals. For others, it’s the beat. Few actually listen to all the layers. Did you hear more this time, actively listening, than you have before?

Now that you have all this information about the song, what do you do with it? You interpret it into choreography. There are several ways to do this, of course. (You didn’t expect it to be simple, did you?) Below are a few of the ways I’ve used Musicality. Again, these are all my own terms and they don’t exist anywhere else. They’re just there to give you something easy to remember.

Visual Mimicry:

This is the most basic form of Musicality. Whether you go on to use the other tools or not, you will use this one. (Or I will fly to your studio and throw my shoe at you. No one likes a stiletto to the back of the head, and I have really good aim. 😉 ) Each musical layer has a distinct sound quality that can be interpreted into motion. The idea is that you match choreography with that specific sound type, using only techniques that look like the visual equivalent. Did I lose you? It’s not really as hard as it seems. Let’s use the three layers I identified above for examples.

• Drums/Bass:

Typically, this layer is rhythmical, staccato, fast and dramatic. So you want to choose techniques that also possess those qualities. I gravitated toward fisted techniques– punches, blocks, etc.– because they’re easy to match to faster pacing, and still look good choppy. They’re also powerful and aggressive, creating a visual echo of the bass-line. You can use kicks, but it’s harder to find students capable of keeping the pace with kicks. So those are better reserved for especially large beats, which are also perfect for showcasing jumping kicks or acrobatics.

• Mid-Range Instruments:

This encompasses everything from violins to guitars. But even though it’s kind of a catch-all layer, it still exhibits certain standard characteristics, namely that it’s generally more lyrical and melodic than the bass line. So I tended to pair sweeping, flowy techniques with it. Things like open-handed techniques and spinning kicks tend to fit nicely, as they are more fluid, with long extensions and a circular nature. But since this layer varies in speed and attitude, you’ll have to adjust accordingly.

• Vocals:

This is the most difficult layer because it requires actual interpretation of words, not just capturing the “feel” of an instrument. The trick is to catch those words that clearly stand out among the rest, or that have an obvious pairing. Words like “down,” “jump,” “break” etc. are obvious cues that you can easily incorporate into choreography simply by doing what they say. But not every song contains such convenient markers. So you’ll have to decide which words are most important. And it may not even be a single word. You can choose phrases, focusing on the emotional impact and interpreting that into your movements. You can also ignore the words completely and instead match the vocal patterns in the melody. The best approach is a combination, where you primarily follow the melody line, and only highlight a few key, specific words.

This is the technique you’d use if you’re simply showcasing traditional things you do everyday, like forms. Normally, Musicality works best when you start with the song and then choreograph to it, creating something new that’s connected solely to that song. But you don’t always want to do that. If you’re doing a smaller, local demo with a longer performance, you don’t want to spend forever creating several different skits. So instead, you’ll put together some throw-away segments– forms set to music, some kind of self-defense thing, hand and kick combinations, all those unimpressive moments that have no story, but can at least be interesting if they contain Musicality and Staging. Which means that you’ll have to work backwards– finding music that fits established choreography.

The key to that is dissecting each form for it’s overall style. Some forms are more fluid, with open-hand techniques dominating and a slower pace. Others are fast flurries of fisted techniques. Depending on which you want to showcase, you’ll need to find a song that matches. Here’s the kicker though– in order to do this well, you will likely need to modify the rhythm of the form to fit the music. (I can hear the traditionalists freaking out already.) Ideally, you would find a perfect song that just magically fits the form like a glove. But that usually isn’t the case. So don’t be afraid to tweak the form, inserting pauses where there aren’t really supposed to be any, or speeding up sections that normally should be slow. Remember, this is a performance, and the music is what will make the form stand out. Entertainment trumps traditionalism in this setting. Sorry, traditionalists.

Depth & Emphasis:

This is a more advanced technique that combines Musicality and Staging for a richer effect. Remember, Staging is largely about keeping everyone on the floor at the same time and directing the audience’s eyes subtly. While Musicality is about making the audience “see” the music. The idea, here, is to take everything from the previous section and combine it with Staging techniques for a multidimensional performance.

For example, say you have a song like Evanescence’s “Bring Me to Life.” It starts off with the haunting vocals and piano, then builds into the guitars and the chorus. Using what I said above, you’ve choreographed to each of the different layers, and now have to figure out how to emphasize the different parts of the music. Sometimes you’ll want to follow her voice, sometimes the guitar riff, sometimes the piano. By using Staging, you can fade the choreography for each layer in and out of the background, creating a visual filter on the music kind of similar to the way a surround-sound system can shift focus from speaker to speaker. What this does is create an overall feeling of depth, because everyone’s constantly moving, while still emphasizing specific parts of the song. With the end result that the audience becomes much more emotionally invested in the whole shebang. And all without realizing they’re being manipulated! (Mwahahaha! Sorry, too evil?)

Musical Storytelling:

This is the Grand Poobah, the ultimate goal of Musicality, and kind of belongs more in next week’s section, Storytelling for Demo Teams 101. But I’ll very quickly introduce it now. It involves finding a message within a song and then creating a story based around that. From a technical standpoint, you do this by very carefully choreographing the demo to jump through the different layers of music, meaning you’ll need to have people hitting all sorts of different cues to emphasize various story-points. No more of this lovely division between layers or Staging techniques. When you get to this level, everyone has to do everything, and the story becomes the most important element.  Like a giant puzzle, you have to figure out how best to convey emotional impact, humor, suspense, or all the other things that define storytelling and keep an audience riveted. It combines everything we’ve covered so far into one giant mish-mash of creativity to create something brand new, emotionally charged, and inextricably linked to the music. After next week, you’ll probably never look at music the same way. And if music wasn’t your muse originally, it soon will be.

Until then, get to practicing Musicality. Remember, stiletto throwing-star. Don’t make me use it. 😉

As November looms ever closer, and with it, the annual training clinic celebrating the World Tang Soo Do Association’s birthday, I’ve started thinking about, (and stressing over), my presentation. For the past two years, I’ve been invited to present my techniques for Demo Teams. This year is the final, and hardest, segment– Storytelling. How do you teach something that really is intangible? In an effort to try and figure that out, and avoid the massive panic attack brewing in my stomach, I’ve decided to throw myself into Demo Team mode. And I’m going to bring you all with me.

For the next three weeks, we’ll cover the three basic elements that will take your performances from blah and generic, to awe-inspiring productions of awesomeness. It will be the perfect refresher course for anyone planning on attending the clinic, and for everyone else, it will be a crash-course in the finer details of Demo Teams.

Ready? Let’s get to it!

Staging

Technically, Staging is a term borrowed from Theatre. It refers to the intentional use of performance elements to control an audience’s focus. Think of it like “composition” in art– the artist intentionally lays out an image to direct the viewer’s eye to the important parts. Staging does the same thing with a demo. I dubbed it, “The Invisible Spotlight Effect,” because, when done correctly, it’s like shining a spotlight on whatever it is you’re trying to emphasize.

Why is this effect necessary? Let’s look at the alternative. Think about all the martial arts demos you’ve ever seen, or even participated in. You probably had a team of 10-20 people, all dressed in the traditional uniform for your style. For the majority of the demo, everyone stood around at the back or off to the side. Maybe they were orderly and standing at attention; maybe they were clumped like a bunch of bystanders gawking at a train-wreck. But the point is, they were standing. Meaning that, at any given point, you had maybe a handful of performers actually doing anything. Those performers would rotate with each segment, new ones would come out and do their highlighted specialty, and the previous ones joined the useless bunch at the back. Sound about right?

When you have the majority of your team standing around, you’re wasting its potential. What you create is a disjointed spectacle that does very little to hold an audience’s attention. Any audience is comprised of this: the parents and friends of the performers, who will be riveted to the action for the duration that their loved one is front and center; random people mildly interested in what’s going on, but that spend most of the performance posting snarky comments on Facebook and watching their phone’s screen; and maybe a few people interested in checking out the hot guy or girl who’s now chilling at the back fixing their uniform. Heck, even the rest of your team probably isn’t paying attention to the stage once they’re not on it! People have short attention spans and wandering eyes that increase when they get bored. This “traditional” demo style plays right into that and provides your audience with far too many distractions, ruining the chances of them remembering anything except the student off-stage who fixed a wedgie.

This is why you need Staging. It allows you to highlight the cool stuff while still keeping everyone on the floor doing something. It’s more entertaining for your audience, giving them more to look at and keeping their interest piqued; it’s more entertaining for your team, preventing anyone from having to stand around picking their nose; and it’s just more entertaining, period. Why wouldn’t you want to use it?

There are tons of ways to implement Staging, but the following are some of the more common. The terminology is completely my own, so forgive the cheese-ball names. It wasn’t until I had to start explaining it that I realized I needed some way to reference each technique. So these are only official terms in that they’ll give you an easy way to remember them. Don’t Google them. You won’t get anything. Or at least, anything helpful for Demo Teams.

Frame of Reference:

Generally speaking, a demo is choreographed so that it’s best viewed from the front. This is especially applicable if you are competing, as the judges will almost always be at the front, in the direct center of the stage. Often, a demo is performed in a community center, a school gymnasium, or random parking lot. Rarely will there be an actual “stage.” So you need some sort of guide defining the dimensions of the performance, a “Frame of Reference.”

Using this technique, you essentially create a camera effect that simulates the way people watch movies or TV. It’s a comfort zone that keeps all the pertinent information easily accessible and helps ensure your audience keeps their wandering eyeballs where you want them.

The best example I can give is this: from wherever you’re sitting, look up. Without turning your head even a little from left to right, how much of the room can you see? (If your office is like mine and your desk is stuffed into a corner, then you’re probably staring at a beautifully blank wall, so turn your chair around and try it again. ;)) This is your Frame of Reference.

Ideally, you don’t want the people with the prime seats having to work to see the action. If, sitting dead center, you can’t see the entire performance without turning your head, then you might want to condense it so that it stays within your Frame of Reference.

Levels:

One of the most difficult things to accomplish is  spotlighting a single person or technique without stopping the motion and while having all members on the floor. Levels is best way to do it. Not only does it create visual interest, but it uses height differences to emphasize a particular element.

It’s human nature to predominantly watch whatever is at eye level or higher. You can take advantage of that instinct simply by placing whatever you want to spotlight in the optimum range and dropping everything else below it.

For example, say you have a student with a really spectacular kick that you want to show off. At the same time you have them perform that kick, have all the other team members drop to the ground with a leg sweep, roll or something of the like. Instantly, you’ve spotlighted the kid with the wowing kick. Every eye in the audience will go immediately to him. But more importantly, you haven’t stopped the overall motion, resulting in a seamless, fluid presentation that’s sure to keep your audience enthralled.

Freeze-Frame:

Sometimes you want the added emphasis that having only a single person moving can bring. So if Levels isn’t quite providing enough focus, then your next choice is Freeze-Frame. Just like it sounds, the idea is that you have everyone except those you wish to highlight literally freeze for the duration of the spectacular technique. With no other motion to look at, the audience will have no choice but to watch the stunt you spotlighted.

Well, in theory. They may also choose that moment to glance around at the rest of the audience, or check their phone notifications. Which is why this is a technique best used in moderation and only for very short time periods.

Passing the Torch:

We’ve all seen the Olympic Torch passed from runner to runner before finally arriving at the designated location for that year. This technique is based on the same idea. Essentially, you use a prop to capture and direct the audience’s eye.

Let’s face it, we human beings are fascinated by stuff. Like Mockingbirds and tin foil, we just can’t help it. The second there’s a prop in play all eyes in the audience will be locked on it, no matter how inane and silly it may be. So again, you can use basic human nature to your advantage.

The simplest example is if you have the action split into two groups. You’ve set it up so that the spotlight is on the left of the stage with Group A, but you want to move it onto Group B on the complete opposite side of the stage. Have someone from Group A take the prop and walk it, (ok, not literally walk, some kind of cool combination of choreography), across the stage to Group B. Like dogs eying your burger at the dinner table, the audience’s attention will follow that prop, effectively transferring the spotlight from Group A to Group B– passing the torch.

Ripples:

Similar to Passing the Torch, Ripples move the audience’s eye across the stage when you have no props to do it for you. The idea is that you use a single piece of choreography, repeated with slightly varied timing, all the way across the stage. Like dominoes falling, each student moves just after the one before them does. They require ridiculous coordination and focus on the part of the students and should be used only if there really is no other alternative.

By far the worst, most horribly frustrating technique in the Demo Team arsenal, Ripples will single-handedly be responsible for making you bald. Especially if you have a large team. Suddenly that awesome team of 20-some-odd individuals you so proudly recruited will feel like an army of sleeping sloths. They don’t sound scary, but good god!

Probably the best example of a ripple I’ve ever seen was from Lord of the Dance. If you haven’t seen it, check out the link. And if you aren’t impressed, then go ahead, try and do better. You’ll very quickly change your mind.

Musical Emphasis:

Musical Emphasis employs the assistance of music to create emphasis on something. Reliant on the principles of Musicality, (which we will be covering later), it ties one moment of choreography to something noteworthy in the music. Humans are extremely attuned to music, whether we’re consciously paying attention to it or not. It affects us, and we naturally glean emotional content from it. Composers of film/TV/video game scores are well aware of this fact, and use it to enhance the visuals of their project. You can apply it to Demo Teams just as easily.

The trick is to select something that will be subtly noticeable by the audience. How can something be subtle and noticeable? Well, we only really pay attention to one form of information at a time. We might know there’s music in the background, but 90% of our focus is on the visuals. By marrying a dramatic point in the music to a dramatic point in the action, you instantly magnify the effect of both. Suddenly, all the information assaulting the audience’s attention meshes together into one message, heightening the overall impact. The best example would be utilizing a large drum beat/bass drop to emphasize a spectacular jump spinning kick or acrobatic display. There are other examples, but we’ll cover them next week in the Musicality section.

Organized Chaos:

There should never be complete chaos in your demo. Nothing loses an audience faster than segments that aren’t well-rehearsed and are just made up on-the-spot. I don’t care who you are, no one relays confidence and proficiency when they’re winging it. And if it doesn’t look polished, your audience won’t care. You’ll just be another freak spazzing out in a weird location and they’ll go back to texting people about the weirdo they’re quickly walking away from.

But sometimes you want that feeling of chaos to increase the tension in a battle scene. For that, I created something called Organized Chaos. Simply put, it’s a highly choreographed segment that gives the feel of a spontaneous sparring match.

At it’s best, this technique uses a combination of all the others, so even though everyone’s moving in seemingly random situations, there are still subtle hints at what the audience should be watching. But even at it’s most basic, a burst of Organized Chaos will wake up any audience member who might be thinking they’re feeling a little bored. Like a shot of adrenaline to the attention span, nothing instantly requires more focus than a flurry of activity you have to decipher.

Synchronization:

The exact opposite of Organized Chaos is Synchronization. Everyone knows what it means to be synchronized, but few know how to really apply this for maximum effectiveness. It’s great if you can create a demo that is synchronized completely from start to finish. It’s really hard to do, so kudos, you’ve racked up massive technical points.

But it’s emotionally flat.

Synchronization creates an androgynous effect, meaning that it wipes away all sense of individuality or personality from your team. Sometimes that’s what you want. For example, it’s the perfect tool to allow people to fade into the background when they aren’t in the spotlight. But most of the time, you’ll have a story that requires characters, and characters have what? Personality! So save the whole-team synchronization for dramatic moments, like the demo’s finale. Having all 20-some-odd students suddenly sync up in a beautiful and flawless section of choreography will really drive home that part of the demo. Like the crescendo of triumphant music at the end of a movie, it’s a subtle cue to the audience that the performance is coming to an end.

Formations:

A formation is a pattern the student’s perform in and is what everyone immediately thinks of when they learn about Staging. It’s like Staging for Dummies because it’s so easy to implement, so don’t expect any applause for technical effort. But it can still be quite effective if done right. Depending on how you lay out the formation, you can use it to point to something or someone important. Think of the apex of a triangle, everything would be directing the audience’s eye to the top. Or a circle– everyone watches whatever’s in the middle.

There are countless formations out there, each with their own use and impact on your staging. The thing to remember is that they are often strongest when paired with something else. Formations can rarely stand on their own. They’re a guideline for the choreography, and create visual interest, but that’s about it. To convey your story, you’ll need a lot more than just Formations. And if Formations are all you’re interested in, then why did you bother to read this massive wall of text?

I know I just handed you an awful lot of information. So before we move on to next week’s topic, Musicality, I’ll leave you with a more visual example of everything I’ve covered. Below is a video of Dragon Heart Tang Soo Do’s winning demo from the 2009 Region One Championship. The reason I’m using it is for one simple fact– it wasn’t filmed by someone from Dragon Heart. What you see is a video taken by someone in the audience who’s seeing it for the first time. So you really get to see the staging elements at work. For the most part, she watched exactly what I intended her to. Obviously, you can’t control anyone’s focus 100%, but she paid attention to the majority of the important stuff. As you watch it, see how many of the techniques I’ve listed you can spot. There are definitely quite a few. But not every demo requires the use of every technique. So don’t be afraid to stray from the list or invent your own techniques as needed. Enjoy!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kyVy94K3thU