Lessons learned in organising: value the time of everybody

Sounds evident, that in any co-operation everybody’s time is valuable… What’s the news? The key is to always give something to the person you are working with. If you want to do something special with a teacher, be it international superstar or national star, think it through from their perspective first. Almost everybody is interested in new intriguing ideas - that means something cool, different and in some way thought over. Almost nobody is interested in getting just open requests that pile up in the already long todo list. So for doing something new, check these two options:

One good way:

- study what is there already

- think about different solutions and your own ideas, brainstorm them with your friends

- select the plans and ideas you feel you want to make come true

- write your idea out – it makes a difference to have a plan to show, even when it’s a draft

- talk to whomever you want to co-operate with

- repeat as many times as needed and enjoy the ride

One other way:

- call a superstar teacher and ask, if they could make a big project for your scene and say that they probably know best what should be done, so it would be best if they also planned everything

You get the point, I think. From your counterpart’s perspective the former often gives something interesting, the latter usually tends to pile among other open to-do things.

The superstar and actually all the teachers are in many ways just like everybody else in the scene: they are intrigued by interesting ideas and concepts and they also want to do their share of work to make the dance scenes bigger. They already devote a huge amount of time for that goal. Still, they are quite the same as the rest of us, main differences being that for them dancing is usually work and career, and they are very skilled in dancing. Pretty much all are really professional in what they do, and you should respect their expertise – but still provide your own input. It’s always easier to improve a plan, when it has been started and thought over, and maybe somehow tailored to your local scene.

If you are organising things, and you don’t happen to be a superstar dancer, the important thing is to find what you yourself have to offer to promote the dances. You sure have something. Don’t just try to make yet another workshop, but make something that feels, sounds and even smells like something interesting, something that you love. If you don’t have any ideas on what and how to do, team up with other local dancers and you’ll figure out ideas for sure.

For an example: Dax and Alice were in Finland for 4 months in Spring 2008 as I described in the previous blog post. That project was formed pretty much in the way described above. I think together we made a quite an original program which was a product of several discussions, brainstorms and especially lots of work at home. 

Lessons learned in organising: think big

Big thanks to Marcell Bendik, who asked me excellent questions on our project with Dax and Alice in Spring 2008 to publish something in Lindy Shock camp. Those discussions made me think more on the issues related to organising events, and I’m trying to condense some lessons learned in this and some future posts. But worry not, I’ll come back to party things later, and continue the list I started.

Lesson number 1: think big

Just the fact that something seems impossible is not a reason not to carry it out. Sounds counterintuitive and risky, but that’s the attitude with which most of the big successes are formed. For example I remember clearly, when Tatu Valavuo told me in Autumn 1997, that a new dance club is found in Tampere, and it will be great. I must admit I thought something like, well it’ll be just another 20-50 people club training once or twice a week. But due to a group of enthusiastic individuals, it soon became a non-profit club with 1000+ members, 50+ teachers teaching weekly and organising the biggest events in Finland. I really value that work, and have been happy to be part of it later myself. And as I see it, that was based on the enthusiasm of the active people combined with some unwillingness to see any limitations for opportunities.

Similar logics worked with the Dax and Alice project that we carried out years later – the key is to think big and not concentrate on the constraints, but the ideas and the ways to make them come true. The project included 10 weekend workshops some with also other teachers, and plenty of weekly classes. Check the facts about the project in here http://www.swingteam.fi/dax_alice/index.html it really changed the lindy scene in Finland.

I think some of the most interesting details were:
- DA’ track, personal learning track for the most eager learners, combined with the normal lessons – including a web-based learning environment and pre-reading material etc.
- co-operation with three cities: Tampere as the main base, weekly classes and a weekend workshop in Helsinki, one weekend workshop in Oulu
- a new way to divide groups in lindy hop: group called challenge and group called social fun (not the usual skill levels, but groups based on type of motivation)
- teacher training
- DJ training

Having mentioned these, I must give credit of ideas to Dax, Alice and also our team in Finland – these are not my ideas, but our ideas.

We started drafting the Spring almost a year earlier, and in the previous summer we had pretty good plans already. I still remember working on those with Dax in Herräng, while others were training and dancing... It was always clear Dax was very interested, but often he didn’t have very much time to spend – so we discussed, and often I drafted the plans further based on the discussions. (I must say, later in Autumn and especially during Spring Dax and Alice put huge effort and time also outside classroom into the project.) As I understand it, it was the new challenge for Dax and Alice that made the project interesting and worth doing: having toured around the globe teaching the dances with new group of people every weekend – how about having the same people for 4 months? What can you achieve with them? How does the lesson number 213 for a student look like? How will our curriculum look like for a semester, not just a workshop? (yes, really, several people took more than 200 hours of lessons from Dax&Alice, some about 300)

One of the key issues in making the project come true was, that we were thinking big. A typical weekend workshop has around 10-13 lessons, a 6-day camp may have 20-30. What if we don’t just double it (like two weekends) or make it a month, but go for something real? Then it can be something REALLY big. Then working on these ideas started to produce even more ideas, and there we were… However, big doesn’t have to mean a big number of hours, money or anything - it can mean something special in some other way equally well.

An upside with big things is also, that a big project makes a big story, and people want to be parts of big stories. If a scene is running low on voluntary people for whatever they are doing normally, that doesn’t mean they would be short of voluntary people for something bigger.

The same logic of thinking big works in other walks of life too: many successful start-up companies run on exactly the same fuel, as do many other cool projects, be it at work or at a hobby. Think big - and you have a chance of doing something to remember!

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...