Marching to the coolest beat
The Documentary Podcast
BBC
4.3 • 2.7K Ratings
🗓️ 29 June 2019
⏱️ 51 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
An unlikely pageant takes place every year in the American Rust Belt town of Dayton Ohio. Three hundred teams of high school and college students have made it to the finals of a national competition known as the Colour Guard. In a giant sports arena, they throw, spin, and twirl flags, sabers and wooden rifles. It requires risk, skill, attentive teamwork, dramatic storylines and soundtracks. The subjects of performances this year ranged from the death of a pet to tornados to women in rock music history to bullying. Each group has about seven minutes to impress the judges. The competitors have practised for six months. Many travel across America in buses. Most come from small towns and the activity is not well funded by schools. Yet these young people insist that this is the high point of their lives.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Death in Ice Valley is returning. |
| 0:04.0 | We've been trying to find answers to an unsolved mystery. |
| 0:07.0 | And now we're back with an update on the case. |
| 0:10.0 | We'll be here to tell you more about it at the mannequins. |
| 0:30.0 | So it was a little trick on the eye and at the very end they had this huge tarp that they pulled from the front side line to the back side and that covered the whole floor and by the time it |
| 0:40.1 | Finished all the real humans were gone and it was just mannequins there holding flags and it left the |
| 0:46.4 | crowd stunned and when I saw it I really got chills. |
| 0:49.4 | In a very unique subculture, an activity called the Color Guard, Michael Gaines is often called the geometric |
| 0:59.5 | guru. |
| 1:00.5 | That's because he's so skilled at orchestrating routines of high schoolers who do pirouettes while hurling |
| 1:06.4 | sabers and catching them on one foot or doing the splits. I'm Judith Kampfner and you're listening to Marching to the Coolest Beat from the BBC |
| 1:16.7 | World Service, a documentary about an activity that is both a sport and an art form where |
| 1:22.3 | young people express a story or deliver a message to a vast range of music. |
| 1:28.4 | I'll explore how I discovered this under the radar American folk culture that comes more from small towns than major cities. |
| 1:36.1 | But Bines communities provides access to the arts when it no longer exists in many schools |
| 1:41.7 | and where the stage is a basketball stadium. The color guard adventure began for me with the music of singer-songwriter St Vincent, aka Annie Clark. |
| 2:08.0 | I heard she was playing at a state-of-the-art arena in Brooklyn, New York that I was eager to visit. She was going to be on |
| 2:14.2 | stage with a color guard team and the composer and multimedia artist David Byrne |
| 2:19.2 | was going to be performing along with musician friends he'd commissioned. |
| 2:23.0 | I went with my mates because we like the music. |
| 2:26.0 | We didn't have the faintest clue about color guards. |
| 2:30.0 | Do you have changed or above the public... The publicity promised this might be the coolest event of the season. |
... |
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