Zen and the Art of Event Planning

This may come as a shock to some of you, but I’m an arrogant jerk. Anytime I go to an event, not just a Lindy Hop event, I tend to look around, check things out, and think to myself: I can do this better. This includes my own events. However, that’s not to say that I’ve actually done better.

The interesting thing in event planning and management is that the better you do your job the less people will notice. Human nature being what it is, when people talk about how an event was run they will almost always focus on what went wrong or what was out of place. So your goal as an event planner is to avoid that.

DCLX-Secret Origins

Well, maybe not secret, but few people are around that remember very much.

The first DCLX-DC Lindy Exchange-was hatched in the back of a van coming back from ALHC 2001 somewhere on I-95. Mike Miloszewski was on a dance high and wanted an excuse to relive it again. And soon.

Holding a national dance competition seemed out of the question at the time, but Lindy exchanges were just becoming popular. Mike decided that it was time for DC to have its own.

Anatomy of a Dance Contest: The Champions’ Strictly Lindy Hop Division at ILHC 2009 pt. II

There’s been a lot of discussion about the use of pre-planned choreographed sequences in social dance contests for awhile now. (Yehoodi, Lindybloggers, and White Heat) Event directors Nina Gilkenson, Tena, and Sylvia shared those same concerns. At the same time, they didn’t want to tell the dancers how they should dance . . . even though they really wanted to.

Anatomy of a Dance Contest: The Champions’ Strictly Lindy Hop Division at ILHC 2009 pt. I

I’ve already written quite a bit about this past International Lindy Hop Championships, but to illustrate how complex any one part of an event can be I’m going to give you a peak behind the curtains of The Champions’ Strictly Lindy Hop Division at ILHC 2009. This one competition took about 20 minutes out of a four day event. Theoretically, a dance contest sounds like a deceptively simple recipe: Add one part music, several parts dancers, and it’s off to the races, right? In reality . . . not so much.

There’s a very thin, delicate and ever shifting line between managing an event and just letting it happen. There’s no secret formula for making sure everything goes right, just as there’s no way to anticipate and prepare for everything that can go wrong. There’s a lot of moving parts; not just logistical, but also creative and political. Details are plentiful, and it’s remarkably easy to be tripped up by even the smallest one.

Make good decisions, and if you’re lucky, you may be rewarded with something very special.