Dancing in Florida has been complicated by politics. It is illegal in Florida for a business, even an unincorporated association or nonprofit, to require a vaccine, $5000 fine per occurrence, each denied attendee is an occurrence.
Now: In Orlando, Florida, given our dancers’ behavior outside of the dance (barely a mask in view since sometime in late 2021), the number of anti-vaxxers who attend our public dances, and state law, we have encouraged, but not required, masks and vaxes since our founding dances in early 2022. We have two dance series, one on campus at UCF and one public. I'm told that the students are about 90% vaccinated, though we're not allowed to ask. The number comes from looking up samples of our students in FloridaShots, which isn't perfect, because the early FEMA vaccination centers did not register their shots. However, those shots are now long in the past. I also don't know how old the 90% number is. Typically, we get around 20 dancers for the public dance and similar for most of the campus dances, though the campus numbers have fallen as the semester winds down. Two students wear a mask at the on-campus dances. The same two attend the public dances and mask there. There's typically about one other mask at the public dance. We do get a fair number of senior citizens and they almost never mask. At both series, everyone signs the same short, plain-English, three-point waiver. The first point is assuming the risks, including explicitly death from disease. We have occasionally taken stronger measures, but they were not well received: We held two open contras in summer 2022. We strongly encouraged masking at the June 2022 dance (attendance of 35). Around 10 more attendees chose to sit out and not dance rather than mask. It was the first public dance in the region since the start of the pandemic, so they turned it into a social event to see their friends. It was also the first gender-free event in the region, so some may have chosen not to dance for that reason. We required masks and asked unvaccinated dancers not to come to our July 2022 dance, due to a spike starting. Attendance dropped to 21 and there were complaints, both from attendees and non-attendees. Since then, there have always been a few masks, but not many, see above. All of this is consistent with what I see at swing and salsa, both of which attract 50-100+ dancers in the same or similar spaces, are mask-optional, and have almost no masks. I know that when we insisted on masks and asked unvaccinated dancers to stay away, some just went to swing. It always strikes me just how different the different regions of the US are on masks and such, and that it carries over to dancing. A friend who lives in Ithaca, NY, said that she had just gone to the grocery store maskless for the first time, and was really nervous about it. She has no particular risks. I've barely seen a mask at a Florida grocery in like a year and a half. It's remarkable how deeply our perception of safety depends on what others around us are doing, and how much that depends on community willingness to sacrifice for others they don't know. That characteristic is one of the defining elements of the liberal-conservative spectrum, and political actors have exploited it mercilessly, on both sides. Given that the majority of dances are in the relatively liberal Northeast (check out https://www.trycontra.com/heatmap-points.html), and tend to be liberal even compared to those communities, it is perhaps not surprising that the majority sentiment on this list the last time the question was asked was to keep masking, even though that is not the majority approach in the dancing US today, considering all types of dances. I would set mask policy by 1) what the medical community recommends locally and 2) what the dance's target audience wants. As the Flurry organizers learned, every policy, including no policy, will cause some people to come and others to stay away. Deciding means knowing your goals and the feelings of those you're trying to please, which may vary by category. New dancers coming in on their own may look statistically like the population, while existing ones and maybe their friends may favor masks more, for reasons such as Julian states, for example. Any, yes, people say one thing but actually do another! In our case, we have so few regulars (maybe 10?) that it's more important to bring in new dancers than keep every single existing dancer. If you have 100 regular dancers who say they strongly favor masks, it may be more important to keep those than to get new ones, especially new ones with a different mask tolerance than your existing dancers. Also, each change will shake some dancers loose, so be consistent, or at least predictable. Some dances are experimenting with different rules in separate series, alternating rules on alternating nights, and masked/mask-optional lines. I'd be interested to hear how dancers are responding to those. Final thought, more an observation than a value judgment: At Flurry, the leftmost line or two in the main hall has historically had particularly high energy, and some people seek it out. This year, the Flurry organizers promised a masked line, so the caller declared the leftmost line to be a masked line. I don't think the intention was to blow up the super-high-energy line, and I was going to say something, but I decided to see what would happen. I was already dancing masked. I was surprised that most of the super-high-energy dancers just put on masks and kept dancing in the left lines. There were a few others who came over to dance masked, but not as many as I would have expected, given all the intense discussions over policy before the festival. There were plenty of masks elsewhere in the room, but also plenty not masked. Given the concerns people said they had, I'm surprised that more didn't dance masked on the left, or that there wasn't a call for another masked line that wasn't going quite as far with the extra spins and high-speed swings. When I asked people to dance and suggested the left lines, only one person in the whole weekend didn't pull out a mask and join that line. I suppose it's possible that the shortfall of attendees was people staying away due to safety concerns, leaving the attendees less mask-insistent as a group. There are other ways to interpret it, too, such as people insisting on one thing in surveys but then doing what the crowd did in the moment. --jh-- Joe Harrington Orlando, Florida contraknights.org —jh— On Fri, Apr 7, 2023 at 10:04 AM Julian Blechner via Organizers < organizers@lists.sharedweight.net> wrote: > All of my immune-compromised friends are still masking and still not able > to enjoy the things so many people are taking for granted. > Hospitalizations and deaths for covid are still well above what they were > a year ago. > Reported cases are down, but positive test % is still very high - > indicating a high number of cases out there that we don't see. This means > vaccines are working to keep cases more mild, but that covid is still > rampant out there. > > Contra continues to be an epidemiologist's nightmare activity, even worse > that casual hospital contact: > heavy breathing, mingling with dozens of other people at close quarters, > being face-to-face with them. > > What I'd like to see is more organizers set policies that are connected to > hospitalizations and deaths, setting standards based on numbers and > sticking to them. > > Julian Blechner > speaking for myself > committee member, Downtown Amherst Contra > + caller > > On Fri, Apr 7, 2023 at 9:52 AM Brooke Friendly via Organizers < > organizers@lists.sharedweight.net> wrote: > >> Mask mandates for medical facilities were lifted in Oregon in March. >> Brooke Friendly >> >> On Fri, Apr 7, 2023 at 6:35 AM Lisa Sieverts via Organizers < >> organizers@lists.sharedweight.net> wrote: >> >>> Hello fellow organizers, >>> >>> I have been a big proponent of our dance mask mandates and feel we have >>> prevented quite a bit of COVID spread by requiring good facemasks. >>> >>> However, our local hospital has announced that after 3 years of a mask >>> mandate for everyone entering their building (it’s both a hospital and a >>> medical center), they are lifting the mandate on April 10 for anyone >>> asymptomatic and who hasn’t had a recent COVID contact. >>> >>> Our board will be discussing this soon but I am very curious about what >>> other organizers think. Is it time? And what should be our criteria for >>> lifting our mandates? >>> >>> Best, >>> Lisa >>> Monadnock Folklore Society >>> Nelson, NH >>> >>> Lisa Sieverts >>> 603-762-0235 >>> l...@lisasieverts.com >>> _______________________________________________ >>> Organizers mailing list -- organizers@lists.sharedweight.net >>> To unsubscribe send an email to organizers-le...@lists.sharedweight.net >>> >> _______________________________________________ >> Organizers mailing list -- organizers@lists.sharedweight.net >> To unsubscribe send an email to organizers-le...@lists.sharedweight.net >> > _______________________________________________ > Organizers mailing list -- organizers@lists.sharedweight.net > To unsubscribe send an email to organizers-le...@lists.sharedweight.net >
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