Eurofurence Community > General Discussion

Enter the Arena - Time for change?

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Faolan:
Hello everyone,

There has been a discussion recently among the dancerfurs about concrete ideas for the future of Enter the Arena, in the hopes of making it an even better show. The purpose of this topic is to highlight these ideas and the reasons behind them, so you, as the person reading this, can add your own input to it, by replying to this message. I will now continue to talk about the ideas.


1. Changing of the Guard:

For years now, we've had a lovely panel of judges that rate the dancers' performances in the way that they see fit. We've had a few different systems for this as well, as you may know. The main topic we've discussed  is the changing of judges. We've had the same 4 judges for 2 years in a row now, and they did an outstanding job. Unfortunately, not everyone sees it that way.

Judging is one of the hardest things to do in a competition, and also one of the most unrewarding things. You have to pay attention to many different moves in a dance, the way the dancer hypes the crowd and vice versa, the way the stage is used, and so on. We all do this, right? However, only the judges have to award points for each aspect, and they have only have 1.5 up to 2 minutes to do it in. It's all fine when a judge happens to agree with the audiences favourites, but as soon as this isn't the case, hell breaks lose. Judges are accused of not knowing anything about dance, playing favourites, only picking the most beautiful fursuits, and so on. That doesn't really seem fair, does it?

In order to relieve some of the responsibility of our beloved judges, we would like to suggest to relieve 2 of them of their duties, and have them replaced by last year's 1st and 2nd-place, or one of the other dancers should either of those two be unavailable for any reason. A suggestion would be the changing of North and Pinky. North has valiantly served as a judge for many years now, and perhaps he'd like a break. Knowing him, he might actually have other projects he'd like to work on or places he'd like to be. Pinky most definitely deserves a break, because she never ever really sits still at a con. Perhaps it would be nice if she could just sit back and relax, without having to worry about judging. This way, we would still have 1 member on team sausage and 1 member on team taco left to explain all there is about judging to the two new judges.

We think it is important for the dancers to understand what it's like to be a part of the jury panel, and to actually judge someone's performance. This will create a whole new level of understanding, which will hopefully result in less negative feelings and remarks. A change of face may be very refreshing for the audience as well, and if the dancers put on a great act as judges as well, we'll definitely have a great show.

Another reason for us suggesting the top 2 dancers of the previous year, is that it would create room for other dancers to reach those much-desired top 3 places.

Other cons already have this system implemented in their competitions, and it works quite well. However, these are only suggestions.


2. Showcase Judges:

Another way to make sure the people see that our judges can actually dance, is by having 1 or more of them performing a showcase at the beginning of the show. What better way to introduce a dance competition judge? The crowd would already be awake after the showcase, so this task no longer falls on the first contestant, hopefully taking away some of the nerves.


3. Preliminaries:

If we follow the number of dancers in the past 3 years, we can easily see that our happy little group of dancers is quickly growing bigger and bigger. Aside from this being awesome, of course, this could cause problems for Enter the Arena the way it is now. We were pretty much at our max last year, and if more join this year, the chances of preliminaries being held, is pretty much unavoidable. However, this would ensure that the average level of the dancers would go up, and it may provide time for the next item.


4. Battles:

An all-time audience favourite! EF19 was the last time battles were held; we had twelve dancers back then. However, due to the large increase in dancers that joined EF20 and 21, there was not enough time to do battles anymore. If we have prelimaries to such an extend that we'd bring the amount of dancers back to around 12, battles would be a possibility again. However, this is probably a bit too extensive.


I would like to invite you to respond to these suggestions and ideas. A reasoning behind the things you say would be nice, and I would like you to stay respectful.

- Faolan

FreesTyler:
I do agree to pretty much all of this. Change might be scary, but many good things can come with it. Enter the Arena has become a more popular event and each year there seem to be new and amazing dancers joining in on the fun. To change around on a few things might make the competition more exciting for those that have already come before, maybe even for the dancers, and might also tempt new people to join the show!

On the topic of adding the previous winners as judges I think this might be a fun idea. Faolan has already stated many points about this, so I don't feel like I need to mention them again. Taking two of the dancers out from the comp to judge doesn't necessarily mean to take them out of the performance list as the showcases is indeed a thing. The judges can help hype up the crowd for the competitors.
Not sure what more to say atm since Fao put everything out there so nicely.

CleanerWolf:
With nearly everybody having a smartphone nowadays would it be possible to setup a small website with a voting system, so that the audience could vote for their favorite dancer? This doesn't have to replace the judges completely, but it could be taken into account for the end result.

Personally I think that voting is not so important anyways, the dance competition should be about fun in the first place, from what I've seen in the previous years, all dancers performed great, it's always exciting to see how much passion they put into it and that is what should be kept.

nihil:
Yes. Knowing your jury knows what they are talking about is important to me. Something can look good from the outside but maybe others have put way more thought and technique into it? The "connection with the crowd" is important but when you are completely new you wouldn't get as much cheering as for somebody who's popular and well-known. It's so different wether you know if it's about making a huge show (pretty suit, jokes, pop music, crowd hyping) or showing your techniques (dance quality speaks for itself), there could be more clarification on that.


I personally think preliminaries are a great idea! I personally have no equipment ready to make videos of myself dancing to send and get in so doing that at Eurofurence seems very nice.
Although this means studying and preparing a dance and the music beforehand without knowing if you'll get in could be frustrating and possibly more work on the spot for the DJ to make sure he has the music ready before the contest. But I personally prefer to do a prelim and find out if I'm good enough rather than finding out by completely being terrible in front of a lot of people. We all want to try and deliver quality I think!

I absolutely adore the idea of bringing back the battles.
 Speaking of which it would be still amazing if there could be a floorwars like American conventions have. Some people are better at freestyling rather than preparing an entertaining show. I also know people who would love to join a contest but don't have a fursuit or can't dance in their fursuits so making a fursuit and nonsuit division would include the whole "dancer community". But this is an idea not very much attached to Enter the Arena.

Something that would make Enter the Arena better in a way (to me) is to give information way beforehand. Information about the rules and how it all works. I want to join but there is no information online at this point.

Long post, possibly sounding annoyed. To make sure you don't get a bitter flavour after reading this: I am super glad effort is being invested in this event! I was thrilled about reading this and I can't wait to either join the contest or watch the contest from a seat again!

Cheetah:

--- Quote from: CleanerWolf on 15.04.2016, 22:09:11 ---With nearly everybody having a smartphone nowadays would it be possible to setup a small website with a voting system, so that the audience could vote for their favorite dancer? This doesn't have to replace the judges completely, but it could be taken into account for the end result.

--- End quote ---

Well, that means the one with the sexiest butt will always win, even if he doesn't move, and girls would have 0% chance to ever win :)

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