[Ansteorra] events for non-fighters (was bards, brewers, and cooks )

[willowdewisp at juno.com]

  Lady Elizabeth Seale
Your advice sounds good but it doesn't work all the time. I felt that there was a need to a non-threatening A&S competition at Steppes Warlord. I was informed that since the Steppes Artisan only wanted a heavy documentation A&S I could not hold my competition. I have offered to sponsor a bardic competition and shows only to have it shot down by the Autocrat in the Steppes When I wanted to have a Middle Eastern dance competition at this last Elfsea Defender I was told by a member of the populace that Elfsea didn't want that kind of activity
I do believe that the first step is to go through the Autocrat but if that fails you can always sponsor classes in your own campsite. Get in touch with a teacher you want to learn from and get them to teach a class. Often autocrats and officers think you are asking them to organize the activity. If you have it set up all ready they often just rubber stamp it. While I do not teach the classes you want. I want to take them  if you want one of my classes I would be willing to come to your campsite. 
Most jobs take up many hours just getting the paperwork done. A normal person who has a 40 hour a week job have about 15 hours a week to put all their fun things in- art work, fighting training or working on an office. Officers should not be expected to organized all activities. Also officer should realize they do not have the time to micro manage all activities and need to let things run without them. In the old days we viewed officers as the communication officers and the people who made sure we didn't break rules and kept the schedules. The creation and running of the activities was something the populace was suppose to do.
 Starting about 12 years ago the kingdom moved from that paradigm to one were the officers were the leaders and had the job of supervising everything. As I mentioned the officers do not have the time to do that so there has been a trend to simplified everything and to make activities more controllable. There has been a trend to non persona activities and things like highly structure contest and courts. Persona activities tended to take to many people, to much planning and often go in uncontrolled directions.NOn-structure A&S, such as my Bread Tasting at Lammus Day tended to be chaotic and not fit in clear cut time slots.Of Course Courts are the bureaucratic dream activity everyone in a control situation and you know what they are doing. 
I think this policy is hurting our kingdom. I believe that the populace does not feel that they have real impute. I am afraid that the authoritative nature of the SCA is stressed. Authoritative structure have been showed in research to decrease creativity' and cause people to take less and less on themselves. There is a tenancy for people in a high level authoritative system to wait to be told before they do anything and require the leaders to watch everything all the time. 
Early Ansteorra had programs and ideas set up to counter these problems, but our Crowns and officers have dropped them off. When we stressed the right and duty of the populace to create activities we had more fun things going on and I believe more fun.
Willow de Wisp

 

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