The Gathering

[bjarvis]

This year’s “The Gathering,” a one-day mini-convention of square & round dance club leaders, callers & cuers sponsored by the North New Jersey Square Dance Assocation has come and gone. In all, it was fun.

Tim Marriner gave the keynote address at 1 PM, emphasizing what we can do for stabilizing, organizing and recruiting for our clubs. After a 15 minute break, we went into the first of two blocks of presentations.

We had our choice of five different session topics in the first block. I attended Roy & Betsy Gotta’s presentation on a brief history of square dancing, how square dance programs are sometimes misinterpreted as status symbols and methods for easing dancers from classes into regular club nights. In all, I didn’t see much I didn’t already know from CALLERLAB conventions but it was a fun refresher. kent4str attended a session on finding halls, caller vs membership run clubs, tips for hiring callers, ins & outs of BMI/ASCAP licensing and such.

In the next session block, I attended a session on approaches to business: the image of square dancing, opportunities to sell the product, ABC dancing and dancer retention. There was good material here, some of which I’m going to post later. kent4str attended the session on organizing special cub activities & fundraising, including special themed events (eg. murder mystery night), making themes work, etc..

The United Dancers of America presentation at the closing wrap-up was pretty dry but Mike Jacobs’ presentation from ARTS was lively and enthusiastic: his presentation about adopt-a-library and other promotions by a Texas club association was fascinating.

Alas, we didn’t win the 50/50 draw share-the-pot draw and we had to hit the road around 6 PM so we could get home at a decent hour.