The Dance Floor Size

It is becoming more evident that the size of the dance floor matters, but for whom? Now we come to a more exact division of the dancers. I have seen a few dance floors in my short but happy life, and I have seen big, small, wood, tile, marble, permanent, portable, dry, wet, oval, square, long, raised, moving, and I have even danced on tamped, polished dirt floors.

"The error of youth is to believe that intelligence is a substitute for experience.

The error of age is to believe that experience is a substitute for intelligence."

Everyone accepts that the rootzi tootis, must have a large dance floor. That is their game and we should all respect it. They need a Palladium. Most of us do not. Well, maybe half a Palladium but that is stretching it a bit. The Palladium has over 10000 square feet of actual dance space.

A small studio can be just fine.

The Social Dancers now appears to be further divided into two groups. The extreme social dancers and closer to the old fashion type "street dancers" and which are terrific on small intimate dance floors of 400 square feet and less, as in a Night Club. (about the size of a two car garage.) They enjoy dancing "to" the music and are very good in phrasing. They can have more fun than a barrel of monkeys and just don't need to cover a lot of ground.

"Cherokee" by Charlie Barnett

The biggest group requires a little more room for many have taken ballroom dance lessons and those have been developed from dancing in "ballrooms." And the old time ballrooms were huge, where many people wanted to have fun and socialize. There developed another large group, the ballroom dance teachers and many gave ballroom a bad reputation. For others, ballroom dancing became more exact, more disciplined, and the zest for the strictly social dancer began to ooze out of it.

Basically, your gut feeling should do you just fine as long as you trust that bigger is not always better. School cafeterias are just about the right size and they are usually around 2000 square feet. Most of the time a big dance floor is not as good as a smaller dance floor. (Assuming that dancing is important to you)

In other words, you may be better off having a packed dance floor, having everyone feel a little crowded and interacting with each other, rather than having your guests swim on a big floor. The argument that you want people to have space and not be crowded is only valid under certain circumstances.

Pub's Side Note: Catch Richard Sun's blog in the Moanalua Corridor.  Terrific write up of the Elks and dancing on a small dance floor. Could use a few more ladies there.