[Tango-L] Community building

[Stephen.P.Brown@dal.frb.org]

Hi Ron:

Oops!  I should have mentioned Ron rather than Joe in my previous post 
about community building.  I was writing in response to Ron's and Sean's 
posts about community building.

Let me clarify a few points:

What Ron described is happening in many U.S. cities--the seeming 
proliferation of tango activities without a comensurate growth in 
community size, with the consequence smaller and smaller attendance at any 
given event.

Milongas are actually among the easiest of these activities to organize 
and often the first to become what some might regard as too plentiful.  In 
a city like Dallas, where the new things are always considered attractive, 
milongas in stable venues quite often take a back seat to new milongas in 
what are likely to prove unstable venues--restaurants.  Restaurants that 
have a dance floor and sound system but are lacking customers will quite 
often accomodate what promises to be a large crowd for for dinner and 
dancing.  The large turnout indicates a success to the organizer.  The 
feeling of success lasts until the restaurant goes out of business or 
finds out that tango dancers don't drink or eat very much.  (One or the 
other always happens.  No successful restaurant will continue to 
accomodate a group that eat and drinks so little.)  In the meantime, the 
established milongas in venues that have been stable (because the 
owners/organizers know what to expect from milongas) suffer from poor 
attendance and are in danger of being discontinued for lack of income.

Similar occurrences arise with workshops.  In the mid- to late 1990s, 
people in Texas would check with organizers in other Texas cities to make 
sure they weren't organizing a workshops too close together in time in the 
three cities that then had active tango communities--Austin, Dallas and 
Houston.  By 2001, however, newly emerging organizers in Dallas didn't 
even bother to consider schedules in their own city before scheduling 
workshops.  In a community that was then less than 100 active dancers, we 
saw three workshops shoehorned into a six-week period with the new 
organizer jumping into the middle of two already scheduled workshops.  A 
little bit later the same year, we saw two workshops on the same weekend, 
with the new organizer saying that if she had to consider existing events 
that she would be excluded from organizing.  Needless to say, all of these 
workshops suffered from diminished attendance.  After these scheduling 
conflicts, those of us that had long-standing records of organizing 
workshops quit doing so.  We weren't really making money on these 
workshops in the first place and didn't want to take losses for the 
inability to meet minimums.

I'm not justifying these market forces.  I'm just saying that the dynamics 
in a community change as it grows and makes a transition to market 
determined outcomes.  Unless one wants to make a living at 
tango--something that I decided didn't suit me--what remains for founding 
organizers is to accept or lament the changes for what they are or aren't. 
 I'm doing a little of both, but I'm leaning toward acceptance rather than 
lament.

With best regards,
Steve