Hi All,

Following up from my email just now, I had a question about family/community dances.

What timing do you find works best for your early evening family/community dances? And what age groups do you get?

Here's my back story:

Ottawa Contra Dance's afternoon family dances have been running for 8yrs.  They occur from 330-5pm and there is a potluck right after.  Despite trying to recruit school-aged children to those dances, we've mostly been getting children in the 0-7 age range.  

We want to have school-aged children attending our events and so we have JUST have started an early evening community dance (630-730pm) with potluck at 5:15 (advanced contra dance finishes at 5pm; contra beginner cont lesson for the evening dance starts at 730pm ... it's a tight but good fit). People who attend the community dance can stay for the contra beginner lesson and first two contra dances as part of their community dance entry.  (We also have a little corner with a rug for kids to hang out in if parents want to contra dance but kids not up for it... although kids totally welcome during the contra dances 8-11pm).  We've only had three community dances so far and we've had a few school-aged families at each.  However, we want to get a lot more out and we do want families with young children also enjoying this dance.  (We may or may not phase out our family dances in the future depending on how things evolve.)

I'm wondering if we should tweak our timing next year in order to try to engage more families.

What if we started the dance at 6pm??? I worry that families wouldn't come as that's supper time.  But leaving it much later starts getting into bedtime.

??? ???

With thanks!

Emily in Ottawa