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Guidelines for Performers

We are truly pleased to have such wonderful talent willing to both play and call for our dance. Our desire is to be able to have every one of you play/call at our dances. Due to the limited number of dances, this is not possible. We have therefore established a policy of booking on a first-come, first-served basis.

Out first dance with a live band was in October 2002. We are still developing our community and looking to increase the number of dancers. Accordingly, it is our policy to divide all proceeds to the performers. We have a minimum 25% guarantee to the caller, and a heartfelt thank you to all the performers who call and play for a little less than at other gigs.

In an attempt to enhance pay to performers, we ask that you note these other dances that are proximate to ours. We encourage you to book these as well: Second Saturday at both Bethlehem and Baltimore, every Sunday at Glen Echo. We also support performer sales.

We encourage communication between band and caller. We request that the caller have a varied program containing triplets, squares and contras. Levi Jackson Rag has become something of a signature dance at our hall. Our dance population has ranged from a crowd of mostly beginners to a crowd capable of doing challenging dances with no walk through. We do get late arrivals and early departures. We ask the caller to be prepared to change the program based on the dance population. We encourage the caller to make one guest slot available to developing callers. We ask developing callers to notify us if interested in one of these slots; we will pass your name along to the caller in order to coordinate the choice of dances.

To assist you in “placing” us, we are located a short half hour south of Arden, around one and one half hours from both Glenside (Philadelphia) and Lovely Lane (Baltimore), one hour forty-five minutes from Bethlehem and two hours from Glen Echo. Detailed directions can be found on our direction page.

We request that band/caller arrive at least a half hour before the scheduled dance time to set up. We are in the habit of having pizza available for performers prior to the dance. The dancers tend to grab any leftovers. Please let us know if you have any special needs.