Well, the dance "floor" is, of course, Sproul Plaza.
1) This is my estimate based on my usual weekends, but I don't think it'll be that hard to tone down the dance-rock percent much -- I only have a few songs that meet my exacting standards (of much pre-testing) and I play them a lot -- but to fill up the extra time for the fullness of the event I'm tapping the other categories predominately so that percentage should go down to 10 or sub-10. I have added another one or two from this category from further testing special for the event though.
2) Yeah, hopefully we'll have a decent Stanford turnout -- I know we're prepping a good Cal turnout down there the next night. Waltz, though? Like, for people to waltz to? I mean, I could throw in a little Stanford eclectica, but it's sort of out of my range of normalcy, so maybe not. Plus, while there are some ballroom crossover folks, the majority are swingers to the core, so maybe not. Either way, I'm sure I'll come to fully understand it on Saturday.
Jean and Bromley are doing our Lindy lesson at the outset of the night; yeah, they're pretty awesome. Hoping for a positive review from those with cred.
The Cal scene is a little weird -- in the beginning there were the UC Ballroom Dancers, and that was all, but some years ago near the peak of revivalism some folks started Lindy on Sproul, which is the open, Saturday morning social dancing as the name suggests. It acted as sort of a counterpoint of the ballroom classes and performancing, being entirely social-oriented; there's always been a lot of mutual respect however, as LoS and UCBD fill different niches; a percentage of folks even do both.
LoS died for a few years but was revitalized in '04. Since then, the baton has been passed at least once and it's grown sort of exponentially; this semester we instituted a for-fun swing class on Thursday nights as a spinoff of Lindy on Sproul. Next semester we'll do it again, but this time people will get PE credit for it
Because of this and word of mouth, our group has increased in size dramatically in the past few months; the first night event was then about the size of a standard Sat. morning is now. The most recent night event in Feb, in the middle of the cold, gathered about 150 people over the course of the night, though it wasn't intended to be more than a slightly larger Sat. social. This time we're going all-out with performances and invitations and whatnot, so I wouldn't be surprised if we cross the 300 threshold* (There's already 133 Berkeley folks RSVPed on Facebook).
Anyway, back on topic, I guess my real question about pointers involves more of the prep work. I mean, I'm doing drafts of the playlist for given intervals (which I always end up munging as I play it) but are there any handy ideas, tips to watch out for, ways to make a playlist really cook theoretically? (if not in practice, based on on-the-spot decisions)
When/If you come out on Friday, stop by the DJ table and say 'hi'
*300 Threshold: Madness? No, this is Lindy!