Bardic vs Chaos (was the filk ettiquette thread)

I've been seeing alot of dislike for the chaos circle format. I'd like to know what prompts the dislike. It seems to me, from what I've seen that there's a place for it. In smaller circles, where it takes less than (by arbitary choice) 2 or 3 hours to complete a circuit. I'm all for bardic or it's variants. However, when 5 hours is insufficient to complete a circuit there is a large problem. I now speak from my personal opinion and experience. I am not a performer of the quality or recognition such as Steve or Cecelia, in a five hour circle I may get a chance to lead or perform twice and one of those is my turn and the other is usually because someone new notices that I play the harp and wants to hear it. This is VERY frustrating. In chaos, I may get 3 or 4 chances in the same time period. While I recognize that it's very important to get total newbies involved and encourage them their chance to lead etc... (or face a punative stop listening to Shriners sing pop), it is also important to get the journeyman filkers chances to lead/perform or they'll never get better. The problem is to accomadate the needs of each of these groups (listeners, newbies, journeymen, and major performers). A good chaos leader can manage this... however if no one is paying attention to it I can see that chaos disolves into ego wars. However I feel that a good balance can be gained in a chaos circle so that the people that aren't well known can get a chance to show their stuff when otherwise they might only get one shot in a night.

Note: Tania and I run our house filks on strict bardic with occasional interruptions for pun wars. But we manage to keep it under the 2 hour limit, but then we have never had more than 20 or so. Where I saw the problem was with a bardic circle with at least 60 people and frequently more.

Well, that's my rant... perhaps not as coherent as I would like, but what do you people think?

Thanks for reading,
Douglas Received on 05/10/96