1119 Surfing Big Waves: Tango Community Building
Date: Sun, 23 Mar 2003 02:09:03 -0700
From: Tom Stermitz <Stermitz@RAGTIME.ORG>
Subject: Surfing Big Waves: Tango Community Building
New metaphor for tango community growth: Surfing Big Waves.
I figure the best you can do in teaching is retain 50% of your class
on to the next series and maintain a 50/50 gender ratio. More typical
is 10% retention, with gender ratio completely random.
I've noticed that the main factor in determining whether retention is
50% or 10% is the size of the class...an 8 person class often only
results in 1 or 2 people signing up for the next series, a 40 person
class can have 50% retention.
This is the BEST scenario; it is certainly possible to have 1%
retention in class after class no matter how big or small.
So, you hang around waiting for the big wave, paddle like mad to
catch it, scramble to your feet to keep balance. Then the wave has
its own energy, which propels you forward.
I wish I knew how to actually CREATE the big wave, but maybe my best
bet is just to be ready when it comes, find the right angle on the
slope to get moving as fast as I can, and balance so I can ride it as
far as possible.
(By the way, we don't have an actual ocean in Colorado.)
--
Tom Stermitz
https://www.tango.org/
stermitz@tango.org
303-388-2560
Date: Sun, 23 Mar 2003 07:00:32 -0600
From: Stephen Brown <Stephen.P.Brown@DAL.FRB.ORG>
Subject: Re: Surfing Big Waves: Tango Community Building
A couple of activities that seem to work well together in generating the
big waves:
1) A hit-and-run milonga that allows the dancers in the community to
dance in locations where you can gather attention from a likely audience
such as outside movie theaters that that show art films. (It doesn't have
to be a tango film showing inside.) Pass out a small flyer that tells
about a tango open house, and provides a URL for a website for that has
information about the open house and local tango events.
2) Set up a webpage for the open house in the local tango website
<https://www.tejastango.com/open_house.html>. (So that it was easy to
find, we set up access to the webpage for the open house at the very front
of our website as well as in the webpage for tango activies in Dallas.)
3) Hold a free tango open house 1-2 weekends later, ideally with as many
local instructors present as possible. If you do not have many
instructors, ask the current dancers to attend. Give a very brief
presentation about Argentine tango and the local tango community. Offer a
free lesson about 1/2 hour to 45 minutes in duration. (At the most recent
open house, our community held a two hour open house that included three
1/2 hour free lessons taught by three different couples.)
Combining these two activities in Dallas always seems to work, and it
really seems to help to be able to introduce a number of local teachers
and dancers at the open house and have them on hand to answer questions.
For the most recent hit-and-run milonga in Dallas, we danced in three
different locations--outside two different movie theaters and inside a
Starbucks. (We had permission at all three locations.) We distributed
about 300 flyers the size of a large bookmark that had been printed on
cardstock. The flyers were particularly popular in Starbucks, where many
people had been reading and/or using their laptop computers. At the
restaurant where we gathered after the milonga, all the dancers talked
about what a great time they had. For the open house that we held a few
weeks later, the attendance was about 200 people. (We had hoped for and
had space for about 50 people.)
In the weeks that followed, those who are teaching beginners had classes
bursting from the seams, and as Tom observes in Denver, the large classes
result in much higher retention rates and better learning. The new
dancers have even started attending milongas relatively quickly because
they have the excitement and comfort of each other.
I live inland now, but I am originally from the California coast.
With best regards from Texas,
Steve
Stephen Brown
Tango Argentino de Tejas
https://www.tejastango.com/
