Your Wedding Dancefloor Won't Be Packed All Night. AND That's Fine.
# Let’s Talk About Dancefloor Expectations
I sometimes get the impression that couples imagine a successful wedding party as a sort of four-hour hostage situation in which every guest must remain on the dancefloor from the first song until the lights come on. Anything less than this — somebody sitting down, a group going to the bar, Auntie Sue deciding she's had quite enough dancing for the moment — can feel like evidence that something has gone terribly wrong. I understand it. You've spent months planning a party and you want everyone to enjoy it. But after watching hundreds of wedding dancefloors from the unusually revealing position of standing directly in front of them, I can reassure you that even the really brilliant ones don't work like that.
Wedding parties breathe. People dance for twenty minutes and then go outside. They get a drink. They bump into someone they haven't seen since university and spend half an hour talking to them. They investigate the evening food, put children to bed, return from putting children to bed and immediately require a drink. Sometimes a song comes on that half the room loves and the dancefloor suddenly doubles in size; sometimes you change direction and a different group replaces them. None of this is failure. In fact, one of the peculiar pleasures of DJing weddings is watching these little migrations happen throughout the evening. A dancefloor isn't a fixed population. People drift in and out of it all night.
There will probably be dips too. This seems to worry people more than it should. Perhaps everyone has been dancing hard for forty minutes and collectively decides, without holding a meeting about it, that they'd quite like a rest. Perhaps the evening food appears and suddenly a tray of hot pasties is offering competition that no DJ on earth can reasonably be expected to defeat. Perhaps it's a beautiful summer evening and people want to stand outside for a while. The temptation is to see a thinning dancefloor and immediately start firing enormous songs at it in an attempt to drag everyone back. Sometimes that's exactly the wrong thing to do. People aren't machines into which you insert Mr Brightside until dancing resumes. Occasionally the room just needs ten minutes.
The other thing worth remembering is that not everybody enjoys a wedding in the same way. Some people will dance almost continuously. Some will appear three times all evening, cause absolute havoc for two songs and disappear again. Others may barely dance at all and still tell you afterwards that it was one of the best weddings they've been to. I can create the conditions for a great dancefloor, read what's happening and make decisions that give it every chance of working, but I'm not going to wander over to your grandfather and demand that he demonstrate his commitment to the evening by dancing to Beyoncé. A packed dancefloor is wonderful, but it isn't the sole unit of measurement for whether people are having a good time.
What I look for instead is whether the party has life in it. Are people reacting to the music? Are different groups getting involved? Do people come back after disappearing for a drink? Does the room feel relaxed enough that when the right song arrives, everyone piles in without needing to be instructed? Some of the best dancefloors I've ever played to have expanded and contracted all night before ending in complete chaos. That's normal. So if you look around at 9pm and discover that thirty of your guests are outside, twelve are at the bar and your aunt is eating a slice of pizza with her shoes off, don't panic. They're probably having a lovely time.
Related Articles:
Should You Have A First Dance? The Truth About This Wedding Tradition
How Does A Wedding DJ Actually Get People Dancing?
