Colorguard Honors Its Roots with Mulan Performance at Team Evaluations

By Emily Ku

On January 25, both the CCA high school and middle school Colorguard teams performed their program, Dashuhua and Metamorphosis de la Amistad, at James Logan High School for the team’s Evaluations. The Evaluations mark the first competition of the year and where a panel of judges evaluates a team’s performance placing them into divisions to compete throughout the year.

“For the first time in CCA history, we have a dedicated Middle School team! Our 5th and 6th graders performed their show,” head coach Amber Ennis said. “While they have much to work on, they were complimented on their show design, smiles, and energy.”

The high school team has been hard at work, practicing movements, learning choreography, and polishing their routine since practice started in September. They decided on music from the Disney movie, Mulan, as inspiration for their program. It represents the culture of many on the team and contains specific parts that are specially choreographed to follow the storyline of Mulan. The routine begins with a fan dance, which symbolizes the beauty and honor Mulan was supposed to bring to her family. As the routine and story progress, Mulan fails to bring honor to her family and falls short of the other dancers. She later becomes a warrior, whose transformation is represented by a saber solo. She joins the military with rifles, spinning and tossing them along the way. The routine ends with a creatively choreographed flag part. The colorguard program follows Mulan throughout these points, to the musical pieces Reflection and I’ll Make a Man Out of You from the movie Mulan.

In Colorguard, there are three main divisions – AAA, AA, and A – which increase in skill level, respectively. Throughout the performance, judges provide live feedback into a microphone that is sent to the school to work on improvement. Each judge is an expert at judging specific, different aspects of a routine, including General Effect, Design Analysis, Equipment, and Movement. The judge, or judges, for General Effect assess the overall effectiveness of the intellectual, aesthetic, and emotional effects, and how the ideas are brought to life. Second, the Design Analysis judges evaluate the choreography, the overall “blueprint,” and how the routine fits together. Equipment judges tend to analyze the timing, technique, and achievement of the skills of individuals and the collective team. Lastly, the Movement judge focuses on the dancing portion, and unity of the performers. Evaluations are important for placing schools’ teams into the right division, so they may compete with other schools of similar level, and it helps make the competitions more fair. CCA placed in the same division as last year—AA. Overall, the judges enjoyed the performance, but did not understand the overall storyline of it, so the Rams will head back to practice to work on creating a more apparent throughline in the performance.

“We did really well,” Senior Alyssa Cheng said,” Our technique and overall skills need to be polished, but considering that more than half of the team is new, we did a lot better than expected.”