pennsicdance: Floor

[L.J. Sparvero]

At 10:50 PM 8/16/2003, Annikki Weston wrote:
>-Complaints and unhappiness about moving some of the general evening
>dancing to there from the barn (one person of this opinion felt that maybe
>officially scheduling this sort of thing from the start -- part of the
>week in the barn, part of the week in the tent -- might be an effective
>compromise)

It actually *was* officially scheduled that way, but the dancers almost 
unanimously wanted to dance in the dance tent in the evening "as many 
evenings as possible". Early in the war this meant some scrambling to get 
the word out in as many vectors as possible where dance was on a particular 
evening (i.e. posters outside the barn, posters inside the barn, A&S table, 
info point, dance tent).

I think this was due to the fact that this was the first year we had a huge 
tent (thanks to Pennsic services!) and thus had something like a 50% bigger 
floor (extra special thanks to Adele and those who helped out at the last 
minute to build the extra panels). A bigger floor meant that it was easier 
to do evening dance with many couples on the floor at once. Overall, the 
experiment was a success, and it should be possible to run evening dance in 
the tent for much of the first week.

Here are a collection of some of the plusses and minuses that this 
experiment found:

+ Much softer floor for doing high-energy dances -- we can thank Filip and 
Adele for taking the phrase "THIS-floor-hates-us" and 
"THIS-is-a-ROT-ten-floor" out of the Pennsic vocabulary ;-) That is to say, 
even doing some of the evening dance on the floor instead of the barn 
greatly saves wear and tear on the dancers. This meant that some people who 
otherwise wouldn't have done evening dance at all ended up doing it.

+ Much better acoustics/much less ambient noise than in the barn. It was 
quite draining to call dance in the barn, much moreso than in the tent. How 
did the musicians feel? My throat hurts in the barn. Possibly due to the 
burger fryers right around the corner, smoking areas, and proximity to the bog.

+ Much closer from the tent to waterbearer's point to refill the coolers to 
get water for the populace/musicians. Many thanks to the people who took 
the time to lug those heavy things from the barn all the way to get them 
filled.

- Floor was sloped noticiably towards the south end. Might need to level 
the ground under the floor next year.

- Tent is not as central as the barn (by about 200 yards). Of course, to 
the people on the Serengetti, it was 200 yards more central. But for the 
people camped in the western areas (the new zones as of Pennsic 30, don't 
know what they're called) it was getting  harder to make it. Having the 
bath house and coopers store adjacent is a big plus for the barn. Although 
the bath house facilities upstairs were offline for much of Pennsic.

- Barn is a noisy zone at all hours, but the tent has a noise cutoff. This 
means that if the dancers want to do after hours dance, that they have to 
walk to the barn. I'd think that if people have the energy to do Trenchmore 
for 15 minutes or dance until 2am would have the energy to walk the extra 
200 yards. I really think that on some nights the dancing went so well that 
people got their fill in before midnight, and didn't need to stick around.

- Not as many seats / places for stuff as the barn has. This year we had 50 
chairs (right, Greg?). It's been suggested to make some sort of cubby shelf 
for people to keep their stuff in the tent. Maybe request people bring milk 
crates to make a shelf? I don't know where the bandshell budget stands, 
this would have to depend on how much money and manpower we have next year. 
During the English Revel (2nd Thursday), the tent seemed to be a maximum 
capacity, with a full floor and nowhere to sit. There was room for more 
chairs. Maybe some folks could do what the fencers do and carry their own 
folding chairs to the tent? (there are some very light models out there, 
trust me)

- More isolation from the general populace. Although this cut down on 
noise, I imagine we lost a few random passers-by who might have wanted to 
try dancing. Having dance in the barn at some point during war would solve 
this.


So in summary, neither location is better, but both can be used to their 
best ability. My notes on dance aren't sorted out yet, so I'm going to post 
over the next few days.

-Lyev