pennsicdance: Devil's Advocate (Floor and Tent)

[Alex Clark]

At 12:00 PM 8/22/2003 -0400, Maugorn wrote:
>And get evening dancing back in the barn, the social centre of Pennsic,
>where it truly belongs.   Sure, courts have grown as Pennsic has
>grown, but "royal" pomp & circumstance don't and shouldn't own Pennsic,
>because Pennsic has grown too.
>
>    Political realities being what they are, this will be an
>uphill battle.

You are developing quite a talent for understatement. :-/

>   BUT, social realities being what they are,
>what I've seen happen in other groups and what I may
>have seen early signs of here might not bode well for
>the future.

Ummmm. . . .

In this case, we seem to be caught between a rock and a hard place. What to 
do? If we really want to do something about court scheduling, either the 
dancers have to take over running Pennsic (but then who'd have time to 
dance?), or else the dancers have to start winning those Fall crown 
tournaments. Or else we could get ourselves onto the BoD, and make new 
rules cutting back on the number of different awards that a kingdom can 
give, which might result in less total court business--but then they'd just 
spend more time fussing over each award. Or else they'd overthrow the BoD.

But seriously, the root of the problem seems to be this: most of the 
documented dances are courtly dances, but SCA courts are not (usually) 
suitable venues for dancing. So when the courts take over the Barn, period 
dancing is left out. This lends momentum to any movement to get evening 
dancing into the tent, and on some days it leaves no other practical option.

But the tent, for all its advantages, is not in a central location. The 
heaviest pedestrian traffic seems to run through the main food court, past 
the Barn, and around the block with the Troll & playground. This is all at 
least a half minute's walk from the tent. Better locations for the tent are 
currently occupied by the Troll, the Cock & Bull, and the Merchant Office. 
We aren't going to get any of those locations.

I don't have the solution to all these problems. I'm just trying to work on 
developing the questions, and maybe the answers will come later. But, just 
to look ahead to one hypothetical too-good-to-be-true future scenario, 
suppose that the Barn ends up being mainly for dancing, and we could move 
the floor in there. Should we? I think not. In the tent, that floor is 
broken up by tent poles, it rests on sloping ground, and all around the 
edge is dirt. This makes it easy to keep in mind that the floor has an 
edge. In the Barn, the floor would terminate in a wide-open level space 
(unless the floor is greatly expanded), and when it got crowded people 
would lose track of the edge. Pretty soon someone would stumble over that 
edge and fall onto that infamously hard (and hateful) concrete floor. The 
same thing has happened where there were a few steps in a wide-open space 
outside an auditorium. It looked safe enough until the crowds walked 
through, and then people started to have accidents.

Now I've got some questions for those who were there for most or all of 
Pennsic. How much of the time was the Barn unavailable for evening dancing? 
And how did things go when the dancing started at the tent, and moved to 
the Barn later?

Henry of Maldon/Alex Clark