Crafting the atmosphere for parties

Sometimes it happens, that everybody is just having fun a party – and sometimes it just feels lame, or atmosphere doesn’t make you stay, dance and/or have fun. Organisers of dance events think through these kinds of issues a lot

Some key points:

1. proper size: just a tiny bit smaller than is comfortable for dancing
2. lighting: just a bit less than you would first think
3. music: rhythmical
4. proactive element for party (crazy or otherwise positive)

For every claim, I have some examples…

1. proper size

Quite evidently, the venue must suit the number of people in the party, that is for most of the time people have opportunity to dance if they want to. And dancing should be comfortably possible, without the risk of hitting other dancers while dancing. However, if there is all the time room for everybody to make big and beautiful swingouts, the room is clearly too big. Having been to several hundreds of parties in different countries, one thing that repeats is, that best dance parties typically happen in either places not too suitable for dancing or if they are suitable, they usually are just a bit too small. We were ourselves fighting this problem hard for several years in Hervanta: a basketball court with audienve seating provides room for dancing, and it sometimes worked for some hours in the peak time of the party – but earlier and later inteh night, with less people all you could feel was … a giant, empty room. You can do stuff with lights of course, but there are places with atmosphere and those with clearly less. The other way round: one of the parties I have got the most positive fedback from happened in pool room in our dance clubs clubhouse. We had three people playing acoustic instruments, and a clearly-too-small dancefloor, but the smallness and 70’s atmosphere of the venue, added up with the strange hallways, that were the next rooms + sauna with people going outside from via dancefloor – I think this all just made it rock.

2. In our western culture, we are pretty far from spontaneously dancing around whenever we feel so. The campfire and occasional dance without caring how we look like happens almost only in occasions, where most people enhance their creativity chemically… But a sober person dancing is not the most usual concept for our culture. If there are even potentially others watching, we are double careful not to do anything stupid and not to look bad. For that purpose, the easiest solution is not to dance at all, and many follow that line of thought. The more experienced swing dancers have usually come over this issue, and it’s ok to dance even if somebody might watch. For the majority, though, the security and protection from others while one is dancing can be the critical factor in deciding whether to dance at all. For creating the secure comfortable places we can do things with lighting: have the darker places on the floor, where it feels a bit hidden, or have the general lighting if not dark, at least not extremely bright. This has been proven several times when using lights in dance parties: especially beginning and intermediate dancers tend to gather in the less visible spots on the floor. Those spots just have to be created.

A nice example was in one party in the same clubhouse, different room. An abandoned office of soon-to-be-demolished building. We made it as nice as possible, but there was a strange wall in the middle of the room, that partially divided the room into back and the front. You could well dance in both sides, but the wall just happened to be there. Somehow magically it created some atmosphere: people seemed to enjoy dancing in that room, everybody finding their spot on the dancefloor. I think that wall had a positive effect, but we should experiment with different scenarios, to prove that thought scientifically…

I’ll come to the latter two in future posts...