Certain thoughts keep coming up....

[femkes_follies]

So I pose a question:

If you could design a Kingdom-wide A&S competition from the ground up, what would it be like?

Comments

[landverhuizer.livejournal.com]

Wow, that is so hard considering the concept of A&S competitions fitting in better with modern day affairs... 4H, present day county fairs and so on.

If I was all omnipotent, I'd strike down A&S competitions from the SCA all together and replace them with other opportunities to showcase people's talents, both in and outside of the SCA environment. Thing is, we don't need competitions to showcase or to learn.


I can't get my brain to cooperate with the idea of building one ground on up, but i can draw a few points to mind...

---I'd like to attack how we deal with judging to start. First mistake is the assumption that because someone is a laurel, that they are automatically an expert (or that only laurels have qualifications to judge) and secondly... that we put the onus on a judge to be an expert in order to mark an entry. I suppose these are to remove the need for the entrant to provide sufficient research and probably to reduce judging time.
Documentation: no suggestion for a minimum but a suggestion for limit. documentation can come in many forms as well as the ability of the competitor to show understanding of the topic. Sending papers in ahead of time should be encouraged.
Yes to Laurels, just "NO" to entering the same item year after year. If I'm going to enter, I will be measuring myself up against others... I am not asking for a levelled playing field here... there is more than just taking home a prize, as with any competition.
Yes to children, I won't arrest anyone from having an age category but all ages should at least be able to compete against each other.
Broaden the categories... people who are doing Elizabethan may not want to compete against someone doing Norse, but how competitive is it when only one or two people, or nobody, competes in your category? + many of these things are uniquely difficult and spectacular in their own way to make them worthy of competition within the broader spectrum.
Submissions... not being able to attend with finished product, while not always in the best interest of the competitor, should be allowable and given every fair chance (at least based on what is present... badly written documentation may be a downfall without the person there to fill in the blanks).

well, all I could think of, mind just went blank...
poof

[florentinescot.livejournal.com]

put a *maximum* on documentation. I think it's indimidating as hell for new folks to see a damn 3" notebook of documentation with comments by the judges for "insufficient documentation." And I know that it's a common Undergraduate Flaw -- when you don't know what to say, you say Absolutely EVERYTHING that you can find to say.

Don't penalize folks for making an exact reproduction -- but, more importantly, don't penalize them if it's not! I've seen both. So what if this gown isn't an exact copy of one in a portrait -- look at all the paintings that Bronzino did that year -- see you got elements of all of them!

My baronial madrigal group got dinged one year because they didn't have a copy of the original piece of music. Puh-leeze!

As an embroidery geek -- I'm frustrated when I see folks get penalized for using cotton embroidery floss (because the silk is so blasted expensive). Hello?

I do know that Mistress Serena just re-did the A&S rules for Meridies. Want me to send you a link? Basically, it's a 2-part event now. The Formal Competition and a Faire. (If you enter an item in the Faire, you can't later enter it in the Formal Competition, though. We've got a rule that something can only be entered at Kingdom Level *once* -- I might change that. You can't enter it again if you win -- or if you get above a certain score ....)

[landverhuizer.livejournal.com]

Speaking as someone who has judged on various occasions, nobody really wishes to read 20 pages of documentation either... I find it nearly impossible to give needed x-amount of pages worth of documentation proper attention under a time constraint. I would love to see reasonable sized maximums!

I think substituting ingredients or other items is quite fine, so long as the competitor is able to demonstrate knowledge of the proper items. For example, I won't lead on anything people are going to touch... I'm not about to use abortifacients in food and yes, cost is going to matter into things as well! However, I will point out what should have been used, what I used and the differences/compromises between them.