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Two aspects to having an inclusive
dance, one is for the dancers who come to feel welcomed,
which is what you are focusing on at the moment, but there's also how do you present your dance such that different groups of people feel welcome to come at all. Re dancers who come feeling welcome, there's all the usual mechanisms noted already, but, in addition, you can have better dancers in your community be "dance angels" who are on the look out for new dancers or dancers side lined and invite them to dance. This is a program that several dance organizations use, as brought up in our SE region organizers weekend retreats over the past two years. These dance angels often have special buttons denoting them as such, i.e. its usually an explicit program. - I'd also mention the Jonesborough dance's program of getting contact information for all new dancers and having people follow up with a phone call. That's a special touch that makes new dancers feel like they have value. I'm not ready to go that far at our dance, but we do try to have a designated "host" who welcomes dancers as they arrive. We require the caller to take this role on at the start of the lesson, but in addition we have another person to ensure new dancers don't feel lost when they walk into the dance hall. ______________________________ Re making different demographics feel comfortable, the obvious answer which is also the hardest to fix answer is to have a full spectrum of demographics attending your dance. Then when a new dancer does come in they have a sense that they are welcome because their demographic is present. But that is a chicken-and-egg thing. Social time on the weekend is precious time, and many dancers want to dance in a social group where their age/social/? cohort is represented. One of my flippant targets for younger dancers (age distribution) is "a third under thirty". Or, I check the stats from the door and look for 25% of the dancers be paying as students. - Another insight that came out of our last regional organizers weekend retreat is that if social media (facebook, official web page, youtubes) of your dance show old white folks then young and non-white folks will likely avoid (for example). Yes, another chicken-and-egg thing. But something to be conscious of. Aging of our community is something I'm acutely aware/concerned about. I encountered square dancing in the late 1960s in the mid-west when the age range was 40s to 60s. Some 20 years ago you could square dance every night of the week in the north Atlanta metro area, though it was rare to find a square dancer in those groups who was younger than 50 and most were well into their 60s. My understanding is that most of those square dances have died out. The one in my small city, Gainesville, did. ________________________ Heitzso http://atgaga.com
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