By Natalie Roy on Friday, May 05, 2000 - 02:36 pm: EditSo we’ve been discussing (with various deviations) the lead to follow ratio, and the shyness of beginners in social dancing. So how do we get them up and dancing, and even to attend the social dances in the 1st place? I’ve been thinking about this on and off for a couple of months now, and in fact discussed it with Emily when I first started dancing. I started going to the social danced after my second lesson. I remember how large a proportion of my time was spent (even until very recently), propping up the wall. Here goes for a couple of wild suggestions.
1. Getting them to attend – could a teacher make a firm fixture with his students to attend a dance, so they know that there will be safety in numbers, e.g. we’ll all meet outside at X p.m.?
2. Getting them dancing once they are there:
A) Have an announced pro-am type dance where beginners go to one side of the hall, everyone else to the other and you can only dance with someone from the other side of the hall. Make the music nice and easy and not too long.
B) Taxi dancers – something that work well on the dance scene where I used to dance, was that a couple of the better leads and follows wore ‘taxi dancer’ t-shirts for about half an hour at the beginning of the dance (after the lesson). It was their job to dance with as many beginners as possible. The t-shirts were so that they were recognizable to the beginners and so the other experienced dancers would keep them free for the beginners.
C) Give beginners the choice of picking up 3 ‘dance-stickers’ when the pay entry to the dance (you could even have lead stickers saying “Y’ dancin’?”, and follow stickers saying, “Y’askin’?”, that that stick on their tops (along with their name sticker). Anyone dancing with them claims one of their stickers. People who collect 5 or more stickers in an evening (i.e. dance with 5 or more beginners in the evening), have that option of redeeming them against a dollar back on their entry fee.
D) Ask them to dance.
Maybe some generous minded souls are interested in forming a taxi rank. We would just need a couple each of leads and follows to be ‘on duty’ at each event. Although I wouldn’t class myself as an experienced dancer, maybe intermediate is adequate for a lead. Who’s up for designing the T-shirts?