Harvest Festival Hoedown 16!

DC Lambda Squares' Harvest Festival Hoedown weekend has come & gone yet again, this the 16th annual fall fly-in weekend. It was enormous fun and a great success, IMHO! For those who missed it, we had Deborah Carroll-Jones, Barry Clasper, caller_dayle) and myself as staff callers. This was our first year at the Yorktowne Hotel in York, PA, a dance space known well to those who dance regularly at John Marshall's dance weekends & workshops and the Harvest Moon Festival.



I'm personally delighted with how many of our newest Mainstream class graduates attended, and even happier with how well they danced at their square dance debut. I taught two out of the four classes which covered the Mainstream list so I had some personal & professional interest in ensuring they were ready for this dance and that they had a good time doing so. Sure, they were a little hesitant on the floor at first but all were dancing with vastly faster reaction times, greater confidence and even extra flourishes by Saturday afternoon. There is an additional workshop this coming Saturday so I hope they're bringing a list of things they'd like to revisit.

I don't have the official statistics but I know we had over 100 dancers attending the weekend. Looking at the hourly room statistics, our dancers were definitely weighted heavily to the Plus & Advanced level: the C1 and C2 blocks never had more than two squares, the Mainstream hall had to sometimes struggle for a single square if there was a Plus hall running opposite, and the Advanced hall could have as many as four squares if there was no C1 dancing to siphon off the upper level dancers.

The "intro to" sessions weren't as popular as I thought they'd be. We had only one square each for "intro to C1" and "intro to Plus," two for "intro to Advanced" and --surprisingly-- "intro to C2". Go figure. By contrast, I called to four squares for the Advanced workshop; Deborah had six for her Plus workshop while Dayle & Barry each had two squares for their Mainstream and C1 workshops respectively and a single square for the C2 workshop (which I couldn't attend 'cause it was opposite my Advanced workshop hour... bummer!).

( And now I get a little introspective... )

Harvest Festival Hoedown 16!

DC Lambda Squares' Harvest Festival Hoedown weekend has come & gone yet again, this the 16th annual fall fly-in weekend. It was enormous fun and a great success, IMHO! For those who missed it, we had Deborah Carroll-Jones, Barry Clasper, caller_dayle) and myself as staff callers. This was our first year at the Yorktowne Hotel in York, PA, a dance space known well to those who dance regularly at John Marshall's dance weekends & workshops and the Harvest Moon Festival.



I'm personally delighted with how many of our newest Mainstream class graduates attended, and even happier with how well they danced at their square dance debut. I taught two out of the four classes which covered the Mainstream list so I had some personal & professional interest in ensuring they were ready for this dance and that they had a good time doing so. Sure, they were a little hesitant on the floor at first but all were dancing with vastly faster reaction times, greater confidence and even extra flourishes by Saturday afternoon. There is an additional workshop this coming Saturday so I hope they're bringing a list of things they'd like to revisit.

I don't have the official statistics but I know we had over 100 dancers attending the weekend. Looking at the hourly room statistics, our dancers were definitely weighted heavily to the Plus & Advanced level: the C1 and C2 blocks never had more than two squares, the Mainstream hall had to sometimes struggle for a single square if there was a Plus hall running opposite, and the Advanced hall could have as many as four squares if there was no C1 dancing to siphon off the upper level dancers.

The "intro to" sessions weren't as popular as I thought they'd be. We had only one square each for "intro to C1" and "intro to Plus," two for "intro to Advanced" and --surprisingly-- "intro to C2". Go figure. By contrast, I called to four squares for the Advanced workshop; Deborah had six for her Plus workshop while Dayle & Barry each had two squares for their Mainstream and C1 workshops respectively and a single square for the C2 workshop (which I couldn't attend 'cause it was opposite my Advanced workshop hour... bummer!).

( And now I get a little introspective... )