2tonearmy wrote:
breaking the ice didn't work on these kids...they were too embaressed to dance..i heard it from 20 kids. i thought it was funny...we ended up having our horn section play in the crowd and walk up and down the asles.(by the way, this place was an old theatre house w/ lots of seats. really cool looking though!) oh well can't win them all...
Since I've been involved with ska, this has been a very common problem. I've found a couple good ways to fix it. The best method is to bring your own posse that loves to dance to your band. I find that always gets things going nicely. Barring that, its usually obvious who
wants to dance -- it's usually the kids with lots of checkerboards and/or pins and whatnot. You gotta encourage THOSE kids to get things started (BTW, don't be sheepish to plan that before your set, honestly). And yeah, having members of the band jump offstage and dance themselves can work wonders.
It's
SUPER IMPORTANT to get kids dancing on the very first song, which is why you need a good danceable beat on that one (many bands don't play good dance music, which is understandably why no one dances). Because I've found the longer the set goes and no one is dancing, the more self-conscious the kids get about that. It just gets progressively harder and harder during the set to even get them started.
You also need to get the kids right
upfront from the very first song. I've been criticized a million times for literally asking kids to move upfront before I even intro a band, but WHOA, it makes a
HUGE difference in how the band and crowd interact, including the liklihood that spontaneous dancing will break out (and how much the crowd likes the band too). I've noticed that the bands typically light up when the crowd is right in front of them as well. It's never been clear to me why more bands don't realize that and ALWAYS ask the crowd to move upfront before they start playing. It seems such a big no-brainer.
Lastly, I've also noticed that bands and crowds interact much more when the band has befriended kids before the set. It creates the situation where now the kids feel, "these guys are my friends now" and that makes them very supportive of the band and much more likely to dance to them. Again, it seems so obvious, but it seems like most bands don't really get that concept, for some reason. "Hey, these guys really seem cool" makes a big, big difference in how motivated kids are before the set. I remember how Westbound Train did that at the very first Westcott show (the same one where they later played acoustic as well) and suddenly kids that were hostile to trad ska were openly supportive at the very beginning of the set.
Just some observations from someone who has been to a lot of ska shows ...