[Organizers] Lower attendance this year?

[Lenore Frigo via Organizers]

I just wanted to throw in data from our contra series. It's been an
interesting conversation to follow because here in Redding (far northern
California) we have a new (1.5 years) and small monthly contra series. So I
can't speak to any long term pattern, but we've been watching our numbers
carefully as we've worked to get the series going.

After settling down from a surge of attendance at our first dances in early
Spring 2015 (which were highly publicized, and a lot of one-time new
dancers showed up) we've had regular attendance at 30-40 dancers, which is
not a lot, but we're not in a large city nor in an area with longstanding
historical ties to contra. That number is also just fine in terms of having
enough people to dance and just manage to pay the bills.

Last spring our attendance was bit low, and then low again in
August/September (after the summer break) and we were starting to lose
money. We were so concerned that we made plans to change to a smaller and
considerably less expensive venue starting in February 2017. Of course,
that caused us to see a spike in attendance in October and November, and we
now regret our plans to move to the smaller venue. So we're kind of in a
pickle, as the venue  needs to be reserved/announced well in advance, so we
can't just go back to the larger venue if our numbers go up next month. I
guess if we have TOO MANY dancers for the smaller venue, that will be a
good problem to have; though I'm concerned that we may alienate or
otherwise lose dancers if we switch to a too-small venue (and dancing is
less comfortable, or if even people have to be turned away) and then switch
back to the original larger venue.

​Meanwhile our small but mighty weekly folk dance group has NOT seen any
drop in numbers...to answer the question posed about different types of
dance.​

​Thank you all for interesting conversation and discussion as always,
-Lenore Frigo​
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