Festival Report

Registration for the Spring 2010 Festival will open on March 1. The Festival takes place May 14-16, the weekend after Mother’s Day weekend. We are hoping that the May date will mean warmer weather than we had last year, when the Festival took place in April.

Our line up includes Trout Fishing in America for Saturday only, Nathan Rogers and Siobhan Quinn and Michael Bowers. The dance caller is Bob Isaacs and the dance band is the Dead Sea Squirrels. Folk Project performers will be Betsy Rose and the Chicago Fire, featuring Elizabeth Lachowicz, Andy Koenig and Jim West. There will be a skit written and directed by George Otto.

We have been able to keep prices about the same as they were for the Fall 2009 festival. The Commons and Lodge double prices will go up $10 per person, but we will reduce the rate for a Lodge single. The weekend commuter ticket will now include breakfast on Saturday and Sunday, necessitating a $10 increase in the ticket. Day passes for Saturday and Sunday will remain the same price as last Fall.

In order to try to draw more dancers to the Festival, we have changed the dance schedule and are planning to sell a special dance ticket. On Saturday, there will be a 3-hour contra dance in the afternoon and a 2-hour contra dance after the Saturday night concert. We plan to sell a special dance ticket for $45 which will include the Saturday afternoon dance, dinner, the Saturday evening concert, and the evening dance.

Dancing at Festival has reached a critical juncture. At the Fall festival, there were about 15-20 people at each of the dances. This number is not really sufficient to make the dance exciting for the participants and it is not cost effective for us. The cost to us to pay for the band and caller plus food and lodging will be over $2400 for the Spring 2010 Festival. If we cannot increase the number of dancers attending, we cannot continue to subsidize dance at the Festival.

We hope our new dance ticket will bring enough dancers to the Festival to sustain our dancing program. We will be promoting this ticket heavily among the Swingin’ Tern community. But the Festival Committee can’t do it all and we don’t have the energy to keep trying to reinvent the dance. If you would like to see dancing continue at Festival, please help us promote this special ticket by encouraging your friends who dance to join us at the Spring 2010 Festival. If you have other ideas to help us promote the dance, please let us know. Unfortunately, if this special dance ticket does not bring us a substantial increase in the number of people dancing we will have to drastically reduce the dance program at Festival.