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, along with some other forms. 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. Although there will be fewer types of dance offered, we will continue to have concerts, workshops, and jam sessions.

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.

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 updated in 2022/23 and rapid testing on the day of entry, and that masking will be optional but encouraged. Please read our full policy for details and nuance, and to address any questions you may have.

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.

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.

Tickets for Winter Roots will go on sale on Tuesday, December 13! Watch for the announcement in email and social media. We’ll also be offering a very special combined ticket for Winter Roots and Spring Bloom, with only 250 available.

Our greatest need at the moment is for volunteer coordinators for a few key positions on the planning committee. See the listings here to help out! Regular volunteer crews will be recruiting first from their pool of past volunteers, and then volunteer positions will be open to new volunteers late in December. The application will be posted on our website when it’s open.

We understand how valuable it is to include folks who can’t be physically present through virtual programming, and loved the broadened sense of community we got from 2021’s Dancing in the Cloud. We are planning to offer some livestreamed programming during Winter Roots, and will update you as this develops. The logistical hurdles to streaming an outdoor festival are such that we do not expect a virtual component for Spring Bloom.

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.

If you already have a hotel room reserved in Saratoga for President’s Weekend, you’re all set. If not, we’ll have options up on our lodging page. The Saratoga Hilton’s waitlist is currently full, but keep an eye on our social media for alerts in case it opens back up again. We expect some folks may wait until closer to the festival date to make a decision, and thus more rooms may become available later.

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!

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