1. Do any of you have specific cancellation policies?
2. Under what circumstances would you cancel a dance? How do you go about
deciding whether or not to cancel?
3. What happens if you cancel a dance? (Do you still pay the
band/caller/sound provider the guarantee, if you have one?)
4. How do you get out the word to dancers?
I'd love to hear what others think about this topic, which recently came up in
an exchange with Rich Dempsey, an organizer who attended the Puttin' On the
Dance conference in November. (puttinonthedance.org) I've put our dance's
experience below.
Chrissy Fowler
belfastflyingshoes.org
Belfast Maine
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For the Belfast Flying Shoes Dance in Maine, we send a detailed information
letter to performers when we book them and again when we confirm the upcoming
dance, but we don't have
anything in there about our dance cancellation policy, which we've done only
once,
although we should have done twice. Once, a caller was traveling from a
long distance, and he canceled with me filling in for him, but the band
was local so they went ahead, and it was fine weather-wise.
We have evolved our committee policy re. weather cancellations - from leaning
toward "let's hold the dance no matter what" to leaning toward "let's not
encourage anyone to engage in risky behavior by driving in this weather,
including us." The dance that we held in spite of treacherous roads was a key
element in bringing us to this new place. (Yes, it was a bonding experience
for the few who ventured out, but it was a huge money loss for the dance and
was downright dangerous for the folks who did it, including us. Also, we
hadn't thought to consider that the hall might not be open, which it wasn't -
requiring another dangerous drive for one of the Legion members to open it up.)
Our stated
(spoken by phone) policy is that we do not expect performers to make any
drives
that they personally feel are risky. If the perfomers can't make it but we
choose to have the dance
anyway, we can come up with local performers who can get themselves to
the hall. We haven't yet had a situation where we wanted to cancel but the
performers wanted to come anyway. All of these decisions get made over the
phone, and when the weather forecast is threatening, we check in with the
relevant parties ahead of time. (committee, band/caller/sound, etc.)
It's not clearly articulated in advance what exactly happens if we
cancel. We haven't paid anything to performers who didn't have to come to the
dance, and performers haven't said anything about that being a problem. Once,
when I was
organizing a dance elsewhere, we had to cancel at the last minute because the
hall was being used as an emergency shelter for folks who'd lost power
in an ice storm. That band wanted some remuneration, even though it was
beyond our control and we couldn't find an alternate space on such late
notice, and what we negotiated was that we'd hire them again very soon.
We get out the word via our networks (website, email list, Facebook, personal
connections, phonecalls, DEFFA website) and via local radio stations (MPBN,
WERU)
