A dance exchange is an event weekend that draws dancers from all over the globe. These exchanges offer up to 3 dances a day normally for 3-4 days over a weekend. While social dances are the main focus of the event weekend, many exchanges offer workshops where dancers learn from more experienced dancers in a dance class setting, or they offer a chance to compete against dancers at their own level in solo or partnered competitions. For various reasons, some exchanges flourish for many years, while other call it quits and come to an end. This page hopes to show some trends in exchange attendance to better serve organizers' need to understand why their event is succeeding or failing. So far this dataset encompasses the years 2013-2015 for the states of Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, and Virginia.
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In the 5 states seen so far, there are more Lindy exchanges than Blues exchanges. In attendance ranges of a 50 person increase per range, both lindy and blues exchanges stay below 300 attendees. However, there are 3 outliers in the Lindy graph in the 850-900 range: all three are Lindy Focus the largest and longest event in the Southeast for 2013, 2014, and 2015.
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Do the extras make a difference? Most exchanges offer workshops while most do not offer competitions. It seems that the workshop weekends are generally more attended than non-workshop weekends. It also appears that adding a competition does not significantly make a difference in attendance.
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The When and How Much of the Exchange: In the final piece, we look at whether time of year on average from 2013-2015 has an effect on attendance and also whether or not the cost of the event affects attendance. The same outlier, lindy focus, throws off the attendance average for December. Other than that there are peaks of attendance around February and June and July. These can be best accounted for by college spring break and summer break schedules. Surprisingly, the second graph shows that generally as cost goes up, so does attendance. This may seem counterintuitive, but it stands to reason that higher weekend pass prices would lead to the event affording better bands, venues, instructors, etc to entice more people to attend.
