Re: [Organizers] Lower attendance this year?

In Concord MA Scout House Thursday Nights weekly, a lot of what were the younger "hot" dancers have gone over to various couples styles, such as West Coast Swing, and blues at Boston dance night clubs. Someone asked about performers. It seems to me that _any_ always-scheduled band, or "house" band, or house caller gets boring for both the dancers and the performers themselves. It also seems to me that folks come for the band's excitement as much or more than for the dancing. If the band is excited doing the tunes, the dancers are excited and have a really good time. Parenthetical: Music volume, and excitement. One night I was organizer and sound engineer. Kind of a ho hum dance. At break, the band asked me to turn up the volume. I did, and it was towards the top of my preference. But the dancers... Much higher energy, flourishes. Looking intently at each other. Ear to ear grins. _Totally_ different dance. My experience. YMMV My impression is that the top tier national touring bands and callers bring in good crowds. Every region has their favorites, which most organizers can name. Blase dancers combined with market saturation? It is also worth taking a census of your region. In Massachusetts, we have two major regions of high dance activity. First is eastern Mass, including Boston metro and Concord. In western Mass, there is "the Valley", which is the Pioneer Valley of the Connecticut River. Will Loving of the Amherst Dance started holding a Challenging Dance on forth Fridays, along with his regular 3 or 4 Wednesday dances in Downtown Amherst. Lisa Greenleaf runs a First Friday Challenging dance at Scout House in Concord MA. When Will started up his Valley Challenging dance, there was a lot of discussion about the contra community benefits and hazards of putting on challenging dances. I did a survey of both regions and found that eastern Mass had 19 contra dances a month, while western Mass had 17. Each region has only a single Challenging dance per month. Saturation? https://www.jefftk.com/p/contra-heatmap and http://www.trycontra.com/ were useful resources in this survey. If possible, compare your regional dances now with how many there were 10-20 years ago. It is pretty telling when regions with few dances suffer the same declines as the hyper-dance regions. That points more to fashion and fad and fading popularity. Mac Sloan Thursday Night Dance Committee, at the Concord Scout House On 12/6/16 8:17, Marie-Michèle Fournier via Organizers wrote: