(last updated 6/61/06)
This information is mostly for the terminally curious and those who might consider putting on their own dance. If you’re among the latter, contact us and we’ll be glad to share our experiences.
·
What,
when and where is the Bloody Stump Dance?
·
How
did you choose the hall?
·
How
did you choose the date?
If you don’t have a copy of the flier with the tear-off registration form, print this and mail it along with your check. We should be able to take email registration with payment by PayPal soon. Sorry – taking credit cards (even using a third party credit card clearing service) was too expensive, and we didn’t want to have to pass the extra couple of bucks on to you. Update: Couldn’t pull off the PayPal bit. Sorry.
We’re sort of modeling it after the Noblesville Spring Extravaganza. The folks who run that have given us some valuable insights into how they’ve managed to pull off their dance.
It will be a fairly normal square dance weekend structure, with dances Friday and Saturday night (rounds between tips – not convention style), and morning and afternoon square and round dances/workshops on Saturday. We hope to keep the dance level fairly high – not full bore DBD, but more challenging than normal plus club level. We’ll run two halls during the dances, with the second being DBD or Advanced. The square dance workshops will somehow alternate among plus, DBD and Advanced. (We don’t have enough callers to run all simultaneously comfortably.) And of course there will be vendors.
There will also be some discussions/workshops on topics dear to all of us – like how to reverse the decline of square dancing.
That said, we are trying to put some new twists and surprises in. But don’t look for callers swinging in on trapezes or nude pool parties. We may be maniacs, but we’re not crazy.
Absolutely! Rosalee and Tom Clark started out for us on rounds in 2003. Fred Piper and Ron Ashenden filled in for us in 2005. This year (2006) Angie and Bob Huckeby will provide rounds between tips at the Friday evening dance in the main hall (though not in the DBD/A hall), and Ron and June Ashenden will do round workshops in the morning and afternoon and cue rounds in the main hall dance on Saturday.
No. We arranged special rates at a couple of nearby hotels for the first couple of years, but that didn’t turn out to be worth the effort. Hotel arrangements are up to you. If we had found a hotel with suitable dance facilities and pricing, the answer would have been different.
For those nut case dancers who have just danced for two days solid and have nothing but bloody stumps where their feet used to be, and still don’t have enough sense to stop dancing, we’ll hold the Bloody Stump Dance. It may well just be to tapes, though we’re working on having a caller. First choice would obviously be one of the staff callers, but if they need their beauty sleep (i.e., are not Bloody Throat callers), we’ll look at local alternatives.
I think it’s Saturday night, probably in tents in the parking lot of the (probable) headquarters hotel, Holiday Inn. Currently expected starting time is 11:30 PM. Probably not more than an hour – even nut cases give out after while.
Sorry – looks like no Bloody Stump in 2006.
All the normal considerations – price, air conditioning, location, floor, appearance. Air conditioning knocked lots of places out of the running. Fees for the two days ranged from about $2,500 to $35,000. The latter was a really nice place, but we decided to pass on that one…
One candidate was a beautiful hotel with very attractive rates, but would have required putting a raised wooden floor over the carpet in the dance hall. (Squares maybe three feet on a side, maybe two inches thick, locked together, with aluminum ramps at the edges.) Those dance OK, but we’ve seen a couple of accidents with them, and chose not to go that way.
We were looking for 10-15,000 sq ft, to accommodate 100 squares. Depending on who you talk to, you need from 100 to 150 sq ft per square. I think the front squares at a big dance end up uncomfortably close together and take somewhat under 100 sq ft, but that’s just because lots of people want to dance up front. Since this is the first year (of hopefully many!) of this dance, we decided we could live with smaller – maybe 7,000 sq ft – and cap the dance at 60 or 70 squares. If it sold out, we’d be more confident about going bigger next year.
After the date change, the best option open to us for 2003 was
That building was scheduled to be torn down, and we found a much nicer place (with better air conditioning!) in the Hinsdale Community House. That’s our location for the 2004-2006 dances.
We live in the western suburbs of
Easy – we had a very small choice of dates when the callers were available. We were very sad when we realized the first date (Aug 8-9) conflicted with the Illini weekend. We had absolutely no desire to conflict with or compete with that long standing event. But it was about the only date we could get.
The deal breaker for that weekend was that it conflicted
with the
Fortunately, the callers dug deeper in the well and came up
with the current July 11-12 date. That’s
not perfect either – we had to negotiate with a couple of local clubs to avoid
stepping on their dances (which would have been unacceptable), and it conflicts
with a Lee Kopman Advanced weekend in
In 2006 the callers said they couldn’t make the date for 2007, and the dates they offered wouldn’t work. So that finished up MidsummerMania.
Yes. Here’s the Booster information. Drop us a line or give us a call! Update: I don’t think we got any significant boosters, ever.
There haven’t been any weekends in the
The dance is being sponsored by the Sidekicks square dance
club in Elmhurst/Villa Park,