[Organizers] Re: Attracting young dancers

2023-11-10 Thread Lex Spoon via Organizers
>From a quick, non-systematic look, I'd say River Falls tends to follow the traditional gender roles: - April 15, 2023 - February 7, 2015 - August 2, 2014

[Organizers] Re: Dance Policy Decisions (e.g.: roles) Was: Attracting young dancers

2023-11-04 Thread Lex Spoon via Organizers
For an organizers' role, it seems best to follow what the dancers want, which is going to differ by the dance series. It could be the dancers you have, or the dancers you are trying to recruit, but it's very important to pay attention to what they like. That said, here are some additional reasons

[Organizers] Re: teaching new dancers, age and music genre

2023-08-08 Thread Lex Spoon via Organizers
Country Line Dance groups do exactly this, and it's very helpful. As an experienced dancer, you forget how many things a new dancer is facing thar just don't register for you any more. Cutting the number of steps in half, or more, is a great way to make it much easier on them. Lex Spoon

[Organizers] Re: Twitter hashtags

2023-05-10 Thread Lex Spoon via Organizers
TikTok is different for sure, but 30 seconds of a dance clip would probably be all it takes to get some views. Also, if you have any lessons recorded, those can make for great source material, if you can find 30-90 second snippets of them that can stand alone. What you do is show the viewer what

[Organizers] Re: Need ideas/feedback about how to get new dancers to return

2023-03-14 Thread Lex Spoon via Organizers
I found it surprisingly non-eventful to attend a dance with gender-free terms. To all the nibbling on the edge groups: try it and see what it's actually like! The best way I can explain it is it's like when someone changes their nickname, and you know the name they used to go by. It's not mentally

[Organizers] Re: Is it time to end COVID restrictions at most contra dances?

2023-01-04 Thread Lex Spoon via Organizers
It's a difficult subject but is important for all our dances. It's heartening to see such a positive discussion of such an important subject. If people can't talk about it here, then where, and if they can't talk about it anywhere, then does everyone just have to be dumb and to reinvent the wheel

[Organizers] Re: Some examples of COVID policies

2022-10-04 Thread Lex Spoon via Organizers
Increasingly Covid-19 is like car accidents, cancer, and the flu. It's an important risk that should be managed. We want to do the things that make sense, bypass the rituals that don't, and choose how far on the spectrum we want to go of risk-aversion versus having some fun. As community leaders,

[Organizers] Re: [External] Re: Electronic admission payments

2022-08-29 Thread Lex Spoon via Organizers
I happen to work in electronic payment processing, so think about it a lot. Here are a few notes about it all. Above all, it's valuable to let people pay however they want. Just like you want to be able to dance with whoever you see next in your line, you want that random person to come to your

[Organizers] Re: Dancerfly registration system

2021-04-10 Thread Lex Spoon via Organizers
Jim, if you got to the point of considering alternatives, there have been a lot of developments in the last five years. One of them is my employer Square. Nowadays the younger crowd is going to want to pay with their phone or with a credit card, and the software you do that with is also good for