Marketing square dancing: accessibility vs. challenge

[drscott]

Pulled out of comments on an earlier discussion sparked by otterpop58:

But this also gets into the discussion about why gay square dancing is declining. As you go up levels, more and more "hardware" skills are required to do well; for example, my ex Mike will never be able to go beyond Plus because he doesn't have a good geometry engine in his head. If you assume each of the required skills is independent of the others, the result is that square dance "ability" is going to be distributed in the population in a rough bell-curve, and as you go up level the proportion of the population that can effectively dance after a reasonable amount of training effort gets smaller and smaller. I understand that Callerlab has made an effort to design the programs to recognize this, keeping calls that are too "hard" (require a skill that is normally needed at a higher level) out of the lower levels. But the most interested and best dancers tend to set the agendas and make the decisions, and in the process can neglect the interests of the broader community of prospective dancers and lower-level dancers. If we lose critical mass because peer pressure has pushed the majority of dancers to high levels, making joining them a forbiddingly high hurdle for prospective dancers ("you will be where we are after a few *years* of effort! What, did I say something wrong?"), we all lose and the activity will shrink to a tiny minority of aging zealots. ECR itself teeters on the brink of unviability, with this 'A' class (as others have) taking away some of the attractiveness of the Plus class running concurrently. We are strong enough to do it, but there aren't many areas of the country that can follow.

...which suggests an interesting CogSci project, which I'm not sure anyone has done: go through the call list to determine which low-level cognitive skills are required to do it; group the calls by skills required; consider defining the levels by cognitive skills used in each, then move anomalous calls. As an exercise it might shed some useful light.

Comments

[tdjohnsn.livejournal.com]

Being one of those people with the less than strong geometry engines (I love the term, it describes it perfectly...I can do it, just not in real time) is one of the reasons that I have forced myself into club leadership. Every time I read about compressed classes, or teaching straight through to Plus, I can't help but think of all the people who would love square dancing, but could never make it through without the drill of the suggested lesson time, and the time to solidify their skills between mainstream and Plus.

But there is another issue that being led by C dancers exacerbates, which is laid out really clearly in a big marketing study that Callerlab did a few years ago. No one has -time- to learn to square dance anymore, and if the introductory level is not a full fledged and respected place to stop learning, the few people who do learn mainstream drop out from shear lack of chances to dance and time to take more lessons.

Also, the "problem solving" form of Square dancing that so many people in club leadership love, isn't fun for everyone. But it is fun for the people with really good geometry engines (which is a lot of the problem I have with the women who co-teaches our mainstream class. She is teaching everyone to dance mainstream in preparation for them becoming Challenge dancers someday) and that turns people who just like the Wind in their Face aspect of dancing off to it. And that frustration is reinforced when C dancers get bored during a Mainstream tip and decide to hop through the whole thing, or that they aren't going to touch anyone. Why bother taking it seriously? it is just floor time on the way to C.

A reason I think it is important to keep and attract people with regular strength spatial abilities, is that we bring other things to square dancing. For instance, on the callers list a few months ago, someone posted a link to a promotional film that looked like it was made in the 60s. It sparked various arguments about production quality, and what calls were being used, and the usual battle between people who want to change women's square dance costume and those that don't. But the thing that I noticed that no one mentioned, is that square dancing can be really beautiful to watch and incredibly pleasurable to do physically, not just mentally. That gets lost when so many club leaders and callers find their pleasure in the problem solving, rather than the dancing.

So, I think your study would be interesting, and I would love to see the resulsts, but wouldn't it just increase the stigma of being a lower level dancer? There needs to be perceived value at Mainstream (by dancers -and- callers of every cognitive level) as a viable destination or the problem of low recruitment and loss of critical mass will never get better. People have too many other things they could be doing.

[dr-scott.livejournal.com]

No, not really. The point is to provide an easy path for the largest possible percentage of the population to learn a basic level for fun. Then the lovers of the complex problem-solving aspect will have a feeder group large enough to keep their activity alive, and a cognitively simpler activity to enjoy when age-related decline makes dancing C2 etc. impossible [note that many people should have their C licenses revoked with age...]

[billeyler.livejournal.com]

It has been done before, but probably not by someone of Mensa status. (that's NOT me).

Bronc Wise keyed me in to call grouping by attritional skill sets quite a few years ago, so I'm being pretty simplistic with this description:

- Circling Actions (interactive with one or more people)
- Arm Turns (interactive with one or more people)
- Solo Forward Moving (includes veering and single person body turns, but still "forward")
- Concepts (taking a prior set of the above three and adding another level to it...the "thinking persons" dancing.

There are a couple of calls that seem to fall outside these basics, but other than that you can pile most of them into the generalities.

ANY call in which you have to move forward from one call to another WITHOUT having to touch someone to execute the action is more difficult.

ANY call in which you turn more than 1/2 way is difficult, mostly because of timing issues and loss of connection with the square.

That's my nutshell analysis, most other things being equal. We could write a book on it, I'm sure. Catching and retaining people's interest is a whole 'nuther book.

[dr-scott.livejournal.com]

Maybe we can get a multi-million $ grant from All Join Hands to hire grad students to do a study. :-)

And aside from cognitive skill, there are the physically challenged -- dizziness, slow movers, etc. This is almost a separate issue. I'm thinking of the 20-40 set which we're having trouble getting right now -- the need to get sucked in with a minimal commitment, and you want a dance level that 95% of that age cohort can handle.

[billeyler.livejournal.com]

That's a growing topic nationally and becoming hugely relevant with the graying of the gays. I think in '83 when I started, the average age of the gay dancers may have been 30-35. Now it's easily 45-50.

I spoke with Pam Clasper recently (wife of caller Barry Clasper). She's now on a committee to discuss how to handle the growing percentage of active dancers who are handicapped, have early stage Alzheimer's or some other brain issues, who are morbidly obese and dancing, and all the other things that slows down the floor to make the dancing activity...not dancing. This didn't exist in square dancing 40 years ago.

[billeyler.livejournal.com]

And Rich Reel is right about another aspect of this. The music has to be enjoyable, clean sounding, and strongly phrased. Dancing without the beat and phrase in your head and body isn't REALLY dancing, and that's where it goes sour for a lot of people.