TIPS ON HOW TO

ORGANIZE

A DANCE CAMP

original 3.6.1999, rewritten 05.02.2009

Here I’ve collected some tips on how to organize a good dance camp weekender. As time goes by there might be some new ideas which I will of course add.

The date of the camp

Too often happens that camps are too close to each other or at the same time.  As the number of organisers keeps rising, this will happen more and more. Often at least some dance competition and a camp are at the same time. Of course if the organizers have plenty of funds there is no problem organizing everything at the same time.

So, when you choose the date, you must check out different dance calendars and ordinary calendars.  Some examples:
In UK go to Are you dancing?
For rest of Europe  LindyHop.ch
For USA Yehoodi

Advertising

Naturally you must start advertising the camp in good time. This means at least 3 months ahead and even earlier if it is a bigger camp. By e-mail you can spread the advertisement easily and cheap. If you want to use attachments you should think about the size of them and avoid doc-files as they can have viruses in them. HTML emails are the way to go – if you aren’t in the know IT-wise you can always go to sites that offer the service.

You’ll want to have a website for the camp with regular updates (if you don’t have a site yet you can always get a free one!) + Facebook and MySpace pages. Facebook & MySpace are excellent for spreading the news as an ‘event’ which your contacts can very easily forward to others you’ve never even heard of.

Schedule

I’ve said this over and over: 4-5 hours of teaching per day is enough! So many times you hear the students’ tired wishes of “please let’s dance to slow music next lesson”. It’s no use getting them too tired, they won’t even learn anything if they barely can lift their feet.

The lesson must last  over 60 minutes. The ideal length is 1 hour 20 minutes.  (Make the taster lessons short ones, if you decide to have any.)

A lesson goes by so quickly: When needed the lesson contains also a warm-up, which can have something to do with the theme of the lesson. After that you tell them what your theme will be and then teach it. The dancers will need short breaks to drink. Then yo let them practice and add some details and such. At least on the very last lesson of the day you have stretching, which usually is left out (how on earth can you teach dancing if you leave out taking care of your muscles???) If you can do all above in 60 minutes, you are in a real hurry.

Make sure you put breaks in the schedule. Then it is clear to everybody when the lessons start and end and everyone has time to change rooms. If your camp isn’t in one building, leave loads of time to change from one building to another.

Put the stretching session in the schedule – a great way is to have everyone stretching at the same time in one hall.

Place / Venue

There isn’t much to say about the place. Only thing is that when the camp is longer, you should think about your knees: stone floors will kill your legs.  Of course you’ll aim to have everything under one roof, think of public transport, parking…

Teachers

Each teacher (yes each, also in couples and also the female teachers) will need the following information:
- Schedule (some kind of a schedule will be needed when you ask the teacher to come and teach at the camp)
- What kind of dancers there will be (how long they have danced and what, if the teacher is likely to know some of the students a registration  list could help also)
- What should be taught (do the students have special wishes, do their teachers have wishes, what can the students already do)
- Who else will be teaching the same group and their phone number, e-mail and such
- Info letter (usually this is not mailed to teachers – I quess they would like to know if you can eat at the camp and when and…)
- What kind of equipment you have there (CD, can you plug in computers, IPods.. (AUX in), do you have speed control, head mics..)

Before the first lesson starts (in good time):
- teachers must know in which room they teach first
- in the room you must have tables for the CD-player AND for the teacher’s stuff (you can hear the music better, the CD’s, Ipods etc  will be safe and sound and in good order and so on.
- when the teachers needs: big paper to write on, markers and tape; or a blackboard

Accommodation of the teachers and such
You shouldn’t get the teachers too tired either, because the whole camp will suffer – teacher is the one that the dancers see the most.
Teachers need advance information about where they will stay. It’s self evident that always when it’s possible the teachers and the students will stay in separate rooms. How else could they plan anything new and surprising?

One extra CD-player in the teachers’ room, if they need to find more music/songs during the camp.
If your teachers are foreigners, you will naturally take much better care of them. The one thing that is almost always forgotten is translators in different times of the day – it feels extremely frustrating to just sit and not understand a word.

Information during the camp

During the camp you will need to spread info about everything: changes in the lessons, party times, dinner times – and you must introduce the teachers and staff… For this is an excellent means: a daily meeting (or what ever funny name you want to give to this meeting.) You gather up all the dancers, staff and teachers – at the same time you will have a better camp spirit when the dancers can see people from other groups too.

On a notice board you can put more permanent things, like a map of the city/village, schedules, a sign-up list for private lessons (if the organizer wants to give the dancers a possibility of private lessons).

Meals

You must ask the kitchen staff how many persons they can feed at one time and you MUST have decided beforehand a place for all those people to sit and eat. The minimum time for lunch is 30 minutes. In each camp you must figure out  if you should stagger the lunch/dinner times in order to avoid unnecessary queues. This is done by arranging the lessons to end at different times.

For some reason the other tricky part with meals is handing the food out.  Understandably you might want someone to serve the food to make sure you’ll have enough for everyone (this does slow things down) – but do make sure to arrange the line so that:

- there will be at least 2 queues
- the order of trays, plates, utensils, glasses, salads, main course, bread & butter, dessert and drinks makes sense. If people start to turn back, or queue because someone is buttering their bread you won’t start the next lesson on time.

Maintenance

Also during the camp you will need staff to take care of:

• sweeping the floors at least once a day with wet cloth (otherwise the dust will fly around and end in your lungs, yam)
• emptying the garbage
• there is enough paper to dry your hands
• toilets are tidy and clean

A dirty venue creates a bad feeling.

Evening party

It is no use giving the students many alternatives, because then they will end up in different places and you can forget about the camp spirit.  Give everyone enough time to change into evening gear and make sure your teachers are there to dance with the students.

Have a happy and smoothly running camp!

Taina