Dear North Berkshire Dance Community

The organizing committee of North Berkshire Community Dance met last Sunday and decided to return to a holding pattern regarding when we will try to restart dancing. We do not anticipate returning to scheduled indoor 2nd Saturday dances before the end of this year. We will continue to evaluate the pandemic situation, and be very much guided by the experiences of larger and more active organizations in the regional and national contra dance community as they lead the way.

Factors in this decision:

1. As organizations around the country have begun dancing again, we are seeing a lot of starting and stopping, disagreement and even acrimony about what are appropriate Covid precautions and policies, and in some unfortunate cases, records of dances becoming Covid “super-spreading” events. No doubt that people are ecstatic to be dancing again under responsible Covid policies and we would love to follow their lead, but to our thinking, we have not reached a point where we feel confident that we can organize contra dancing that is joyful and safe.
2. We decided that it is not useful to keep trying, on a month to month basis, to out-think this pandemic. Every time we think we have figured out what the pandemic is doing, it pulls a new rabbit out of its hat. We want to wait until we feel confident that when we announce the resumption of monthly 2nd Saturday dances, we will not need to be in constant Covid monitoring mode and always prepared to cancel.
3. We are a small organizing committee and we need every one of us to be enthusiastically on-board and ready to pull together when we announce our first dance. Even as we started making tentative plans to organize our first dances earlier in the summer, it was never clear that we had the internal consensus that we must have to be successful. Thankfully, we have now recognized this, and are content with this decision to let other dance organizations lead the way for us.

We will continue meeting as an organizing committee on a regular basis to monitor and discuss the situation in the broader dance community. We will be getting out to try dancing in nearby communities, ourselves, both to see how they’re doing, and to nurture our own love of and connection with social dancing. We encourage you to do the same, to the extent that you are personally comfortable. Maybe we will see some of you there!

With gratitude to all of you in our dance community!

North Berkshire Community Dance
  Pat Dunlavey – president
  Eric Buddington – treasurer
  Doone Mackay – secretary
  Kate Abbot
  Nick Adams
  John Seto