bjarvis | Harvest Festival Hoedown: Aftermath

We survived yet another Harvest Festival Hoedown. As expected, I was completely exhausted by the time we wrapped up everything on Sunday afternoon: I fell asleep in the minivan before we left York, PA, and only woke up again when we pulled into our neighborhood.

In all, things went very well once we recovered from the initial shock of John Marshall being forced to drop out because of back problems and we were able to tag Dayle Hodge as his replacement for Friday & Saturday.

I was much too busy to look deeply into matters handled by other committee members, but for my part, I can report the following:

All sound systems worked as needed. We had spare equipment of course, but it was a relief not to need it.
We had about 90 registrants, down again this year. The large number of people registering at the door and the number of Saturday-only day-trippers tells me that people are still worried about their household finances and are unwilling or unable to commit money to an early-bird pre-registration or a hotel & meal expense for the full weekend.
Despite sending the staff callers the proposed dance schedule a long time ago, it was still a complete shock to a couple of callers. Twice we swapped callers between halls because they felt they wouldn't do a particularly good job at the dance program originally advertised; at one point, a caller realized the night before that he'd be teaching a workshop. I ensured they had the early drafts a while ago so I find their sense of surprise to be, well, surprising.
The GCA guest spots largely bombed. In part, I think it's because there was a lot of dancing programmed into the schedule so dancers had the luxury of dancing at their leisure. The scheduled blocks were Friday evening prior to regular dancing and the half-hour after lunch and dinner on Saturday: many dancers chose to take extended meals and/or naps rather than dance. At the moment, I'm not sure of the best way to reschedule those for optimal attendance but I'd rather not drop them if at all possible.
I scheduled the dancing to start relatively early on Saturday & Sunday, overlapping with the second hour of the offered breakfast. At the time, I reasoned those interested in workshops would catch the first hour of breakfast while those uninterested in workshops would sleep a little later or have a leisurely breakfast. As it turns out, I was correct in theory but I got the numbers wrong: some dancers were up for workshops, but not enough to have whole squares. Next year, the breakfast will not be included in the registration package so I'll definitely schedule the dancing for later in the morning so people can travel out of the hotel for breakfast.
Attendance dropped off dramatically on Sunday after lunch. I think next year, I'll drop the last hour, or perhaps remove an hour from the middle so we can start an hour later. We'll see.
I'm finding that helping run the event, dancing and calling on the same weekend is too demanding. The hotel dance halls can't be secured so we had to dismantle & reassemble the calling equipment each day, which in turn meant we had to stay up late until the dancing stopped and had to get up early before it started. Beyond this, I also had to tackle some caller liaison stuff and administrivia during the event, sell 50/50 tickets both evenings, make myself available to complete a square in the C1 & C2 halls on demand and still prepare myself appropriately for my own calling & teaching gigs. I like doing this, but I need food and sleep too. More task delegation will be done next year.

Next year's HFH will be a little different. We have callers ~~Bill Harrison~~ Sandie Bryant, Eric Henerlau and Doren McBroom. Breakfast will be on one's own rather than built into the registration rate. We may be dropping the country & western dance for low attendance the past several years but that decision hasn't been made yet. We also have to shuffle halls because the hotel double-booked two of the halls for a class reunion Saturday evening: they're working with us to use halls in an adjacent church but we haven't committed yet to using those spaces all of Saturday, or just the afternoon & evening.

I haven't heard yet when we're scheduling a post-mortem meeting to review what worked (or didn't) this year, or finalize our plans for next but I trust it will be relatively soon.