Bellydance Oz
Member
I've been in England for six months and have been doing a fair bit of touring around various towns, as we try to decide where/if we want to settle longer-term.
What strikes me is that if I wasn't already a belly dancer, I would think belly dance didn't exist anywhere in England! It's possible to find belly dance classes in English towns, but only by getting on Google or Facebook and actively searching. You won't find a single poster or flyer or postcard anywhere in any cafes or shop windows or community noticeboards. I went to some classes and one hafla by three different schools - and in each case, even the venues themselves didn't have any posters on their noticeboards about the school concerned!
I posted about this on Facebook and got three basic answers from teachers - either "I've got enough students already", or "flyers are too expensive and don't translate to new students anyway", or "Everything's on Facebook now so why bother?"
I can't help worrying that's being too complacent. OK so they have enough students now, but surely if belly dance has NO profile in the community, there's no way to attract new students and that's got to be a bad thing for the future of bd?
What strikes me is that if I wasn't already a belly dancer, I would think belly dance didn't exist anywhere in England! It's possible to find belly dance classes in English towns, but only by getting on Google or Facebook and actively searching. You won't find a single poster or flyer or postcard anywhere in any cafes or shop windows or community noticeboards. I went to some classes and one hafla by three different schools - and in each case, even the venues themselves didn't have any posters on their noticeboards about the school concerned!
I posted about this on Facebook and got three basic answers from teachers - either "I've got enough students already", or "flyers are too expensive and don't translate to new students anyway", or "Everything's on Facebook now so why bother?"
I can't help worrying that's being too complacent. OK so they have enough students now, but surely if belly dance has NO profile in the community, there's no way to attract new students and that's got to be a bad thing for the future of bd?
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