Creston clinic gets bands in tune

For the third year in a row, Creston High School hosted a field show exhibition in conjunction with Southwest Iowa Hot Air Balloon Days. This year, the Creston Marching Band Contest invited two other schools, Underwood and Harlan.

Creston Band Director Michael Peters said the goal of this exhibition is to provide experience and feedback to the bands without a trophy on the line.

“I wanted to make something more educational, purely educational, where a band can come in, even if they don’t have their whole show ready, and have some clinicians come down and talk to them,” Peters said. “There are other places that do this, but there’s not a lot for smaller schools, like 3A, 2A, 1A. For small schools that want to get out there and perform on a nice turf field and a bigger arena so they can get used to it, it’s just a really nice event.”

Bands are given about half an hour each, during which they perform their piece and then go through various notes and suggestions from the clinicians in real time.

Due to weather, two of the three events have had to move into the high school gym, limiting the performance options for the schools.

“Last year we were able to go outside, which was great. This year what we did was, it’s called a stand-still performance,” Peters said. “The kids make room so the colorguard can at least do their routines and get judged, and they can still do what we call visuals, which are the body motions. It becomes more of a musical performance than a marching band performance.”

Though not able to do their full motions, the bands were still judged on a number of items. Last weekend, only four judges were present, with each person looking at different aspects of the performance. Points of focus included music, marching, percussion and colorguard. In regular competitions, an extra music and marching judge are added.

“The two marching, one is looking at how are you moving as a group. That’s called general affect, and quite honestly, that’s judging me more than judging the kids, because I designed the show,” Peters said. “Then there is marching execution, and that’s the person that’s down on the field, and they’re looking at, OK, how is the individual doing.”

Music is judged in a similar vein, with individual judges for percussion and colorguard. Peters explained having this early feedback is nice as schools continue into the competition season.

“It’s one of those things that makes it a lot easier. This week, I didn’t like how the show ended, and neither did the judges, so I changed the whole ending. Now we have time to do it because we had that clinic,” Peters said.

This year’s show is “Phoenix Rising,” with the band sporting colorful costumes and gear to match the theme.

“They’re really liking it. It’s a harder show this year, a lot of moving, a lot of visuals,” Peters said. “The guard are the phoenix birds, and they have one that turns to ash in the middle and one that becomes the firebird at the end. It’s more than a lot of groups do, but it’s the way that modern marching band is going.”

Peters said the goal is to bring more schools to the exhibition, something that’s been a struggle due to the low number of local field shows.

“The problem is, not a lot of the local groups, not everyone does field shows anymore,” Peters said. “They just do pep band for football games, so what we’re trying to do is attract some people from farther away.”

Despite not performing field shows, many local bands still came out to perform during the Southwest Iowa Hot Air Balloon Days parade. Participants included Harlan, Lenox, Southwest Valley, Adair-Casey Guthrie Center and East Union, along with Creston’s high school and middle school marching bands.

Though the parade wasn’t a competition, performances were scored, with Creston High School scoring the highest of the bands.

Creston’s marching band will be performing again this Saturday in Urbandale at 6:50 p.m. More information can be found on their Facebook page, Creston Panthers Band.