[Organizers] Variety

Back in March, BIDA [1] went to twice a month, adding 1st Sundays in addition to 3rds. These are pretty much all contras, but we also do occasional special events in different styles. I've heard from various dancers, though, who want more special events. We'd like to do more, too. Practically, with the way we currently organize them, we're just not going to be able to have them more frequently because the overhead of a stand-alone event is too much. So, we're considering keeping our 3rd Sundays as a monthly contra dance series and making 1st Sundays be a "special events series". This would be things like techno-contra (Spark in the Dark), english, ceilidh, old time squares, scottish, swing, unusual formation contraish dances, family dance, international, kerry/irish, lots of different styles. Many of these would probably have some contras mixed in, and we had an english-contra dance we had a while ago that went well, but the more forms you want to mix in an evening the fewer bands and callers are up for it. We also might do these in partnership with other organizations, looking for a larger audience and trying to help dancers of both groups find other dance styles they might enjoy. Have other groups tried things like this? Would a pattern like "3rd Sundays are contras, 1st Sundays anything goes" be too much for people to remember? [2] Would it hurt our community, because people who have come to expect one thing from BIDA (contras) would come to 1st Sundays expecting that and be disappointed? Jeff Kaufman Boston MA [1] http://bidadance.org [2] I suspect anything more complex than "every Sunday" means people mostly rely on announcements. [*] I posted an earlier version of this on my blog: http://www.jefftk.com/news/2012-08-21.html