Recruiting Success

Recruiting Success

New Zealand Beginners’ Class

Our story begins a few years ago when the Lower Hutt SCD Club committee decided we would have a serious go at attracting beginners. We found a suitable hall ‘close’ to our normal hall – on the same evening and at the same time as our club night. Our reasoning was that if they could get to the hall at that time, on that day, it was likely that they would join us at the end of the course. Our theory was that if we can get a group of dancers starting together and work with them away from the experienced dancers, they would gel as a group and they would not feel isolated when they join the main group.

Support materials

As the 10-week class progressed, we began searching for additional visual support resources. There was very little available. Most of the time, we had to direct them to You Tube videos that included the relevant formation, but often didn’t show the formation clearly – often recorded at balls or demonstrations with the following problems:

Too many sets on screen

Panning from one set to another

Poor technique in demonstrations

Repeat performance not always matching the first

However, we encouraged them to watch videos, to give them more confidence about the sequence of formations, our club website providing a link to the SCD Dictionary. They proved to be a useful learning tool for some of them. So we decided to video ourselves dancing steps and formations to help those who learn visually. We were confident that we had access to a large enough pool of dancers to allow us to produce videos that would provide good examples to help them with their ‘homework’. After an afternoon video session, we put them up on our club website. We then contacted other New Zealand teachers and dancers from outside our area to run a professional eye over our first efforts. We were stunned when they spoke of directing their own beginners to our club website along with some suggestions on improvements. Our ‘Beginner Formations and Steps’ are now starting to appear on the SCD Dictionary website. If you have beginners who could benefit from this programme, go to the website, down to SCD Miscellany and then the Instructional Videos section. An exercise that started as a means of helping our own people progress as quickly as possible may now be of use to other beginner groups throughout the world. Just for the record, that first beginners course attracted 28 dancers. Many stayed only a few weeks. We kept six and one is currently on our committee; two moved to Melbourne and are still dancing. Our recent course attracted 14 and we have kept eight. That is one complete set to add to our existing four or five weekly. Damon Collin, Lower Hutt, New Zealand