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If they are going to do dance skits as a category, perhaps having a different set of awards and judging would be needed, since we already have it for the Costumes and the Skits. That said, I realize it's harder for the judges to have 3 different criteria in mind when judging, but don't they do that several hours earlier in the day before it's shown to the public anyway?
And if it does become too chaotic to have the dances during the normal contest, it could be theoretically separated into two different contests at two different times. I'd really feel bad if they were banned based on this year's or past years, because almost always there are dance skits, there's usually at least one or two that people don't mind as much.
We added the dance skit category because people wanted us to score dance skits differently from regular skits. We 20 skit entries - 9 dance skits and 11 regular skits.
We judged 37 costumes from NOON to 4 PM; 22 were walkons, the rest were people who later entered skits.
Skits are never judged during the tech rehearsal because we don't do the complete skit at that time and the judges are not present. So the skits are always judged during the cosplay contest. The judges -
who were our 3 Guests of Honor - were instructed that the criteria for assessing regular skits was on the acting, writing, lip synch with recording and other acting-related criteria while the dance skits were to be assessed based upon choreography, synchronization, and other dancing related criteria. After each act, we quickly discussed what we saw and wrote the average score on the judging sheets.
The three Guests of Honor were told that they could make up whatever awards they wanted to and that the only "requirement" was that they pick a "Best in Show" as the top prize. The information they had for each entry was skit type ( dance/regular), entrant skill level (novice, Journeyman, master) and group member badge types (child, minor or adult). They deliberated and came up with the final list of prizes. I believe they felt it was more important to maintain the differentiation between beginner, intermediate and expert entries than it was to differentiate between whether the entrants danced or acted (besides, they'd already used differing criteria when scoring them initially).
We have no control over the quality or quantity of entries. If we'd made dance entries a separate event, then we would have had only 11 skits and someone would likely have complained that there were too many walkons (22) and not enough skits. I advertise cosplay as much as possible trying to encourage more skit entries. I've set up "appointment times" for tech rehearsal and costume judging so that in general most entrants will be hanging out no more than a half hour waiting for their turn (most other conventions, by the way, will NOT let the entrants leave until everyone has done the tech rehearsal and costume judging). If you can find a way to recruit 30 groups to perform regular skits, then all those entries would nudge out the dance skits you don't wish to see.
