In folk dance, in event hosting, or in nearly any social situation that is being curated, there exists a tension between excellence, and welcomingness.
Toward Welcomingness
In order for a community to flourish, it needs to attract newcomers at least as fast as it loses veterans to graduations, relocations, or hip replacements. To attract newcomers into a social scene where a basic set of skills are foundational to having fun1, you not only need to get them in the door, but you have to ensure they’re enjoying themselves while they learn the foundational skills, or they won’t come back.
Tension
This requires dedication and patience from veterans. Mentoring can be rewarding and invigorating. Helping a new dancer unlock a new skill can refresh a veteran dancer’s perspective. And—to be sure—even dancing “beginner” dances is fun. But it's a different kind of experience. You are flexing your mentoring/teaching/partnering/mirroring chops, instead of your dance chops.
Many people who begin dancing for the love of object-level dancing need to pause and do some mindset shift in order to enjoy spending their evening as a mentor-and-dancer, rather than simply a dancer. Not unlike mathematicians, some wonderfully skilled dancers are impatient teachers. Depending on J. Random Community Member’s self-perception of her teaching skills, an evening with more time spent mentoring than dancing can range from satisfying to boring to anxiogenic. And if she had been counting on an evening of flow-state2 dancing to recharge herself after an exhausting week, and this happens several weeks on end—perhaps you lose a veteran dancer to burnout.
Toward Excellence
So in addition to welcoming dances with “no experience needed” in the advertisement, a community which serves its members as much as they serve it needs to host occasional events that focus on excellence.
How often should these ‘excellence’ events be held? How does the community only ‘rapture’ those who have met a baseline of skill into the ‘excellence’ events without causing hurt feelings?
A successful example I’ve seen in folk dancing are “magnet” dance weekends, which advertise to regional dancers who will pay extra and travel in for dancing to top-tier bands and callers. (These solve the ‘rapturing’ question because most brand new dancers will not bother to travel/pay for a quality boost they don’t yet perceive, and those who do come are a smaller % of the whole attendance.) A drawback is that those with irregular jobs or limited budgets may not be able to attend.
Extrapolation
This is all discussed from the point of view of dance, because it’s easy for me to talk about things with tactile handles. But I notice the same excellence-welcomingness tension in many arenas—band formation, pickup sports, dinner parties (invite everyone who’s free, or invite a curated guest list to focus discussion), and book clubs (contrast a local library’s book club that chooses books by lottery, with the Curzi approach).
With online communities, pursuit of ‘excellence only’ is easy. In meatspace, with geographic travel limits, being welcoming to increase the number of people who enjoy your niche hobby is table stakes for existence (being able to afford to rent the hall and pay the band). But enabling veterans to pursue excellence is also table stakes for happy members in the long term.
How do you thread this needle? How do you make sure your veterans consistently have the opportunity to experience flow at the object level, so that they’re fulfilled enough to have extra energy to invest in mentorship? I’m happy to hear questions and answers from other domains, in case we can cross-pollinate.
This explains the trend of many dance forms to become simpler over the years/decades/centuries, and for complex figures (executed by the group) to fade out of existence, while complex flourishes (executed by an individual/couple, during the dance but not relying on other dancers) arise to satisfy an advanced dancer’s novelty drive. Simpler dance forms are easier to teach, thus faster to teach, thus have a higher conversion rate of “new person trying dancing → new person enjoying dancing”
Powers & Enge. Waltzing: A Manual For Dancing and Living. 2013. http://www.waltzingbook.com/
ISBN-13 978-0982799543 , pages 77-79.
Csikszentmihalyi. Finding Flow: The Psychology of Engagement with Everyday Life. 1998. ISBN-13 978-0465024117. Source of the figure “Quality of Experience as a Function of Skills and Challenges.”
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