Rocky Mountain Rainbeaus 2011 Flash Mob

The Rocky Mountain Rainbeaus produced a Flash Mob square dance at the 2011 IAGSDC Convention in Atlanta, GA.

Excerpted from an email to the IAGSDC Mailing List on Sat, Jul 9, 2011 at 7:28 AM, by Mike Sattler:

One of the hot topics at the delegate meeting as well as for square dancing in general is attracting new dancers (and younger...like younger than 50...!) A survey has been issued regarding how different clubs attract new members to their mainstream classes as well as how clubs retain members. Please have your club fill out that survey!!!!

In addition, the ARTS foundation is also dedicated to promoting square dancing (among other things) and I talked to several people about how to use social media to attract the "younger crowd" - because if we don't get "new" and "young" members - we're going to die out just the way the straight square dancers are (only 3000 people attended the Detroit straight convention - as opposed to 30,000 in the 1980s and 1990s).

One of my theories is that when a 20-30 something person hears the words "square dancing" they immediately think of "quaint, old-fashioned, uncool dancing that my great grandparents did". So, the Rocky Mountain Rainbeaus are trying a new approach - flash mob square dancing, which we did during the cocktail hour before the banquet. Unfortunately, we still have to work out how to be able to hear the sound in such a large area, but we are dancing to Lady Gaga's Born This Way.

We will be doing this during our July 31st Beer Bust at the Wrangler in Denver and then give out our business cards to our Open House, September 13th afterwards. We believe that if people see us dance and not know this is "square dancing", they may be more inclined to try it. We also did the flash mob at Pride this year and several people came up afterwards to ask "What was that?"

Karl Jaeckel told me that at one time the convention featured Exhibition Teams where clubs did choreographed dancing. I think it would be so much fun to have different clubs show off their "flash mob square dance" during convention - at no set time, but just suddenly start dancing somewhere. We also were wearing our Mountain Mix T-shirts (plug here - sign up before August 1 before the price goes up!!!!), and we designed our Pride float around those T-shirts.

We did a little line dancing in the flash mob, but the majority of the moves in the flash mob are mainstream moves. Another fun thought would be to share the choreography among other clubs and then set a time for everyone to get together and then do a "bigger" flash mob (i.e. more than our 16 folks). Not only can we then use YouTube and other social media (hopefully, we'll have a better video soon - with the sound), but you can link to it from Facebook and your home page.

Videos

Rocky Mountain Rainbeaus 2011 IAGSDC Convention Flash Mob Square