The Battalion unveils Knights Templar-themed 2026 show In Search Of

The Battalion’s 2026 reveal gave its percussion book a clear assignment: turn a Knights Templar treasure hunt into a story the audience can feel in the pit, the battery and the staging. Unveiled June 17 by Drum Corps International, In Search Of is built as an act-based production around dead ends, hidden treasures and the idea that knowledge can become both power and doom.

That is the kind of arc Open Class corps use to separate a show from a stack of effect moments, and The Battalion has leaned into that approach before. Brian Ellis said the corps has long favored historical and mythic material, following 2024’s Dead Reckoning: The Folly of the Spanish Armada and 2025’s Foretold the Ravens. This time, the story centers on the Knights Templar, the 12th-century military order founded to protect Christian pilgrims in the Holy Land, with the visual world built around a symbolic temple structure and color guard used to represent Sophia, a choice that ties the pageantry directly to the musical line.

For percussion readers, the opening pages matter most. The show begins with Samuel Barber’s First Essay for Orchestra, which Ellis described as functioning like opening credits, dark, mysterious and immediately atmospheric. That kind of intro does more than set mood. It gives Mitchell Barnard’s percussion arranging a chance to establish suspense before the form even starts to breathe, and it makes Robbie Halpner’s sound design part of the storytelling rather than just reinforcement. When the production moves into Leonard Bernstein’s On the Waterfront, the score opens up into rising motion and sharper contrast, the sort of shift that can let a battery move from undercurrent to impact without breaking the narrative.

The competitive context is just as strong. The Battalion, based in Salt Lake City, Utah, was founded in 2014 and launched its first competitive tour in 2016. It made its DCI World Championships debut in 2022, then broke through in 2024 by earning DCI’s Most Improved Open Class Corps and reaching the World Championship Semifinals for the first time. The corps placed fourth at the 2024 Open Class World Championship Finals with a score of 79.188, then climbed to third in 2025 with 79.750, behind Spartans and Gold.

Now the runway matters. The Battalion starts its 2026 tour June 29 in Kennewick, Washington, with stops in Seattle, Portland, Boise, Provo, Salt Lake City, St. Louis, Syracuse, Sheffield, Huntington, Marion and Allendale before Open Class Prelims and Finals on August 3-4 at Welcome Stadium in Dayton, Ohio. Gold and The Battalion will not meet until July 22 in Evansville, Indiana, which leaves plenty of time for this design to settle into a competitive identity. If the book lands, the percussion will not just support the search. It will make the search feel dangerous from the first Barber entrance to the final collapse.