Beginners in Sydney Diana Hastie Diana Hastie is a young teacher in Sydney Branch. In this report she gives an overview of how the Sydney Branch and Sydney clubs are encouraging new dancers.
Diana Hastie (right) with friends at St Andrews How do keep your dance community thriving? You need to attract and retain new dancers. This has been a long-term issue in Scottish country dancing with an ageing population of dancers less and less able to join in. Many regions have had great success while others have struggled to get enough dancers together to hold a viable class. So, how are we managing in Sydney? We are lucky in Sydney that two of our local clubs, Epping and Scots on The Rocks, have a great track record of running beginners’ courses to attract new people to our hobby. Sydney Branch recently inherited this task from one of the clubs and has so far run two courses. Each of our beginners’ courses lasts for eight weeks and is quickly followed by an eight-week follow-on course to further teach those who choose to continue in the hope they will join a regular class. We have also started running community ceilidhs, which one of our clubs, Scots on The Rocks, has been doing for years and often got their beginners by that means. Last year’s Branch ceilidh brought one dancer to a beginners’ course, I’m hoping we can improve on that number this year. The 2018 Branch beginners’ course attracted 15 dancers and we always had at least one set. In 2019 registrations reached 24 so we regularly had two sets. This year we have six dancers who had previously done some beginners’ classes and wanted more – they are still dancing along with at least three more who were brand new to beginners this year.
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One of our local clubs, Killara, welcomes beginners to the first part of the evening and has found eight new dancers over the past couple of years who still attend the regular class. The newer dancers are encouraged to arrive early to learn the main formations for that evening. There will be some dances later on which they are asked to watch to allow the experienced dancers to try more complex formations. Another club, Caringbah, has nurtured approximately eight beginners in the past two years, mostly retired people with a background in Highland or Bush dancing, and have retained most of them by being very welcoming, inclusive and sociable. Yet another group welcomes beginners at the start of each term and after five years has produced a display team of Asian dancers which has started to attract more participants to Scottish country dancing. The main Branch class has always welcomed beginners and has had up to 20 dancers try it out over the past two years. Less than half continue, often due to injury, despite careful warm ups and cool downs. Others expected the class to be Highland or ceilidh dancing. The Epping club ran a beginners’ course again this year and taught a set of new dancers topped up by volunteers from the general class during absences. From this group, four now attend the regular class with separate tuition for part of the evening. Having sent a survey to beginners’ course attendees I received eleven responses; likely biased towards those who are keen to continue as 80% said they would continue to dance Scottish. 55% found the course advertised through a google search; online advertising works and was vital in achieving the numbers we did. Some classes report success from newspaper advertisements and articles. This certainly worked very well for our ceilidh. 33% were told about SCD by a friend; word of mouth is still a great way to encourage more dancers. 33% had done a beginners’ course previously; they wanted to spend more time as beginners, possibly daunted by the thought of attending a general class. 25% wanted a more sociable form of exercise, saying we should allow time for dancers to chat between dances or after class, having supper together afterwards works well here. The best things about the classes were deemed to be: meeting people, learning a new skill/challenging the brain, exercise, stress reduction, lively music and a fun teacher. By the time you are reading this, Sydney Branch should be in the middle of another beginners’ course which we hope to follow up with an easy-dance ball before the end of the year.
