2023 Q&A

We love our Winter Flurry, and we know you do too! We want to keep that tradition going, even in these complicated times. But we also know that dancing indoors this winter isn’t going to feel comfortable for some of you, and that there are logistical, safety, and financial risks associated with pinning the Flurry’s revival on that alone. To be inclusive of those in our community who are more comfortable with outdoor events, and to give us the opportunity to present the full breadth and depth of Flurry programming that you’ve come to expect, we’re branching out this year to explore the full Roots and Bloom of this beautiful festival entity. Maybe one model will appeal more to you, or maybe you’ll join us for both!

Winter Roots will take place at the traditional Saratoga Hilton and City Center, over President’s Weekend, and will take us back to our early days with an emphasis on traditional New England dance forms such as contra and English country, but will also include a large variety of other dance genres, along with concerts, workshops, and jam sessions. On Sunday there will be swing programming all throughout the day. We will not be using venues outside the Hilton/City Center, but the rooms within will be fully programmed. You can view the full schedule for Winter Roots at https://www.flurryfestival.org/winter-roots-schedule/.

Spring Bloom will have the scale, variety, and color of a regular Flurry – in an entirely new setting! It will take place at the Schaghticoke Fairgrounds (about a half-hour southeast of Saratoga) the weekend of June 2-4. Most sessions will be in open-sided buildings that are large, high-ceilinged, and well-ventilated. Many will have dance flooring, just like in Saratoga. There’ll also be endless space for outdoor jams, hanging out near the music or in the campground, or dancing wherever you find yourself. The beauty of trying something new is that we get to indulge our imagination and make a Flurry that appeals to long-timers and newcomers alike.

We’ve heard your questions about why Winter Roots programming is missing or reducing some of the dance types we usually offer. The short answer is cash. Not knowing the extent to which covid conditions/requirements would cut into attendance this winter, we’ve had to budget realistically. Most of the festival overhead can’t be trimmed, but some of our usual offerings eat up a large chunk of a program budget we needed to greatly reduce this time around. So to hold on to this winter’s Flurry, we also had to let a bit go. Rest assured we’ll bring it all back for Spring Bloom. We’re believers: if we build it, you will come!

Our full Covid policy for Winter Roots can be found at https://www.flurryfestival.org/winter-covid-policy/. A very brief summary would be that we will be requiring Covid vaccination with booster and rapid testing on the day of entry, and that masking will be optional but strongly encouraged. Please read our full policy for details and nuance, and to address any questions you may have. Please note that the vaccination requirement has changed as of 1/31/23, and a dose within 2022 or 2023 is no longer required.

For those wondering about ventilation during Winter Roots, the City Center has updated its HVAC system to MERV 13 filters, which provide excellent circulation and viral filtration. Spaces affected include Room D, Meeting Rooms 1 & 2, and Rooms A/B/C. Because of its design the Hilton’s HVAC system accommodates only MERV 8 filters. Depending on weather, we may be able to have some doors open for additional ventilation. Hand sanitizer will be plentifully available, and we’ll be reminding you to wash!

We have not yet developed Covid policy for Spring Bloom. Our hope is that the level of precautions can be reduced due to the timing and nature of the festival, but it’s too soon to make any determinations.

If you’d like to view the results of our November survey on Covid policy, you’ll find them linked to on our Covid policy page.

[This situation applies only to those who had their primary vaccination/series in 2021. Please see our Covid Policy page for details.]

According to the CDC, “if you recently had COVID-19, you may consider delaying your next vaccine dose (primary dose or booster) by 3 months from when your symptoms started, or you first received a positive test if you had no symptoms. Getting COVID-19 again soon after just having had COVID-19 can happen but is not common in the weeks to months after you had it.”

We will consider a recent Covid case an acceptable substitution for a booster if:

• You have completed your primary vaccination/series
• Your symptoms or positive test occurred on or after November 10, 2022 but before February 6, 2023
• You obtain documentation of your infection through a doctor’s note or a positive PCR result, and email it to covid2023@flurryfestival.org prior to February 6, 2023

If your infection was prior to Nov. 10, 2022, or if you cannot provide the required documentation, we will require that you boost before attending the festival, and you should plan to do so at least a week prior (by February 10).

Yes, you may bring a test with you instead of purchasing one there. Just make sure it’s on the FDA approved test list, and hasn’t expired. DO bring your test to the designated testing room and take it under supervision, as the test strip needs to remain horizontal to develop properly and must be read within a certain window of time. DON’T test in your car and bring your developed test strip to the ticket table, as they cannot process your test results there.

Tickets for Winter Roots are available at https://www.flurryfestival.org/tickets2023/.

Traditionally, the Flurry has had a no refund policy. This year, however, we feel it’s very important that your financial investment not influence any unwise decision to attend when it may put other attendees at risk. If you do not use your advance ticket because of illness or a known close exposure to someone with Covid, you will be eligible to request a refund. This is the only reason we will be providing refunds. You can find our full refund policy on the Covid Policy page. (Note: As in previous years, if you have purchased a ticket and are later accepted as a volunteer from the waitlist, you may request a refund.)

We’re not putting any hard caps on attendance at Winter Roots, but we will be looking at how ticket sales go and how Covid conditions evolve, and may make adjustments along the way. Because we are offering fewer concurrent sessions this year and will not have programming outside of our main venue, the available space will be reduced. We also expect a smaller number of attendees, due to the lingering pandemic and the precautions it has necessitated. If we feel we have reached capacity with advance ticket sales, we may choose not to offer tickets at the door. Such a determination would be made and announced before online ticket sales close.

When it comes to Spring Bloom, the sky’s the limit. Seriously, invite everyone you know, ‘cause it’s going to be quite the dance party.

Visit our volunteer page at www.flurryfestival.org/volunteer for information and crew descriptions. Volunteers typically work 6 hours during the festival, or 8 hours before or after. Volunteers are subject to the same Covid requirements for participation as attendees, so please review them carefully before applying. Also, volunteers MUST submit their vaccination documentation in advance to be confirmed on a committee.

The Friends of the Flurry Facebook Group is a great place to request and offer rides to the festival. You might also check with your local dance organizers to see if they could facilitate any groups of regular dancers who want to attend together.

Unfortunately, we will not be able to offer virtual access to Flurry this year. We wish we could include the folks who can’t be physically present, and loved the broadened sense of community we got from 2021’s Dancing in the Cloud. Although we had anticipated offering some livestreamed programming during Winter Roots, after a thorough exploration we determined that in such a financially difficult year the infrastructure and staff required for streaming would be cost-prohibitive.

Of course not! There will be plenty of camping on-site, with some electric or RV hook-ups available and coin-operated showers, but not everyone is up for camping. There are many hotels/motels in Troy, Clifton Park, Albany, and of course Saratoga, all within 25-30 minutes away. We’ll have some options up on our lodging page closer to the date.

We encourage you to patronize the Flurry’s lodging partners, which have donated rooms for performers and are listed here. The Saratoga Hilton currently (1/25/23) has a few rooms available, and you can book them here.

Unique dilemmas require creative solutions. A February festival felt risky this year, so we’re branching out to toss some of our eggs in a springtime basket. We are planning to return to the normal winter Flurry as soon as it feels reasonable to do so. Beyond that, who knows? We’re taking it one year at a time…

Here’s the backstory, for those who are interested. Going into planning for 2023, the Flurry managers and DanceFlurry Board had two things on our minds: financial sustainability and community inclusivity.

The financial fallout from having no physical Flurry in 2021 and having to cancel the 2022 festival left our organization in a difficult place. That’s because the costs of putting on a festival include not only the performers, sound engineers, and venues, but also overhead and salary for an enormous amount of administrative and programming labor that takes place behind the scenes (and that’s to say nothing of the thousands of hours put in by the all-volunteer planning committee and the festival volunteers themselves). In a normal year, Flurry admission not only covers the many varied costs of the festival, but also supports year-round local programming offered by the DanceFlurry Organization. In late 2021, after many months of intensive planning and pivoting, deposits and negotiations, the arrival of Omicron caused prospects for the 2022 festival to vanish – but many of the costs did not. Our community was wonderfully generous in supporting our Snow Day fundraiser, but we were still in a deep hole.

We understood that much was riding on the financial outcome of 2023, and there was little margin for error. If we planned only a February festival and Covid forced us to cancel again, or our attendance was drastically reduced, the Flurry and the DFO could end up in an unsustainable position, and future years of both the Flurry and year-round programming could be at risk. But this was a year of renewed hope, and opting to let it pass and furlough our staff didn’t seem like the right decision. We knew we could get everyone dancing again, and just needed to get creative with finding a way. It was important to maintain the continuity of our February event, as well as our venue relationships. Winter Flurry might have to scale back, but it wasn’t going anywhere. But considering a temporary relocation of the full breadth and glory of the Flurry to a time and place farther from Covid’s menacing loom seemed like an idea worth exploring.

We’d also been thinking a lot about how to be an inclusive community at a time when people’s risk tolerances and personal needs are so intensely varied and often fraught. We understood that the choice to hold a festival meant that we, and our attendees, would be accepting a degree of risk no matter what. But there’s a pretty big difference in degree between an indoor festival in the height of winter, and an outdoor (we’ll be using buildings, but they’re big and open, and there’s plenty of space in-between) event in the typically lower-transmission spring, and that difference is one that will matter greatly to a large part of our community. We know that our attendees range from those who are ready now to dance in any setting, undeterred by whichever way the Covid winds are blowing, to those who may be most comfortable participating in more distanced events, and sticking to the outdoors. And we want all of you to be able to share in the Flurry experience!

Once we determined that a two-festival solution was worth exploring, we put in an enormous amount of legwork to assess and interrogate all the moving pieces. Was our committee willing? Was there a venue that could work? What would it take to make the budget work out? And how would this decision affect other stakeholders in our community, such as festivals and events which also took place in the spring? This process of exploration was lengthy and intense, and took quite a bit longer than anyone expected it to. In many ways it was like building a new event from scratch, but drawing on the deep experience and creativity of our organizers, and with a sense of excitement that was satisfying after several years of Covid frustrations. Our target was to hold the spring festival in mid-May, but it happened that by the time all the other pieces had aligned, the only weekend available to us was the first in June.

We’ve been having conversations with various stakeholders during the process: our Board, the Flurry Committee, venue managers, and Old Songs, and we’ve had to make difficult decisions along the way. We know this solution isn’t going to work for everyone, but it’s the best fit we could manage, and we think it has the potential to bring something beautiful and exciting into the world this year, while keeping us afloat to bring you more Flurries to come. We hope you’ll join us for some or all of the ride, in whatever capacity brings you joy!

If you’re not already on our mailing list, sign up here. You can follow us on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/Flurryfestival and Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/flurryfestival/

You’ll find sponsor and advertising info on this page.

We will have a performer application available for Spring Bloom on this page after the February festival is completed.

• For general questions, email info@flurryfestival.org 
• If your question is specifically about our Covid policy, email covid2023@flurryfestival.org
• For questions around ticketing, email advancetickets@flurryfestival.org