Sidmouth Folk Week 2009: Calculations of floor area and venue capacity for dancing.

The Ham marquee provides a starting point for calculating how much income the festival could expect from a given floor area.

The overall size of the Ham marquee in 2009 was 25 by 50 metres or 1250 m².  Seating capacity was 1050 and with a maximum ticket price of £18. Some people would have purchased reduced price tickets, so the likely maximum gross income per event would be £17,000. The actual seating area, including walkways, was 25 by 29 metres or 725 m² - this was the area that could have been utilised for dancing had the marquee been designed for this purpose. If an allowance was made for chairs at the sides, this might reduce to 650 m².

Many dance venues at Sidmouth FolkWeek and elsewhere are packed with too many people - so there is inadequate room to dance. A few calculations based on local halls are instructive.

The hall at Gittisham (near Sidmouth) has an available area of about 53 m² and can accommodate up to 36 dancers comfortably and 42 at a maximum - so as a rule of thumb each dancer needs at least one square metre of floor space and preferably more than 1.5 m². Calculations on known comfortable maximum numbers for other local halls give similar results.

The Blackmore dance floor in 2009 was 28 by 56 feet - or 146 m², and that at the Bulverton was only slightly larger.

The Methodist Hall had an available dance area (excluding chairs at the sides and ends) of about 30 by 24 feet - or 67 m² and St Teresa's Hall had an available area of about 18 by 42 feet - or 70 m². On crowded days, both these halls accommodated about 70 people each - so the 1m² per dancer rule seems to be valid. (Note added 2011: at the Irish Set dance workshops in St Teresa's hall the caller specified a maximum of 64 people (8 sets) and it felt quite full - and Irish Set Dance needs less space than do many other forms of dance.)

Both the Blackmore Gardens marquee and the Bulverton regularly exceeded their 'capacity', often by a large margin. This explains why it can be so difficult to dance at these venues. Over 90% of local folk dancers avoid Sidmouth Folk Week completely, and some cite 'too crowded' as a reason. However, it would be interesting to discover if this was the prime reason.

As for the Ham marquee, whilst it could accommodate 650 actual dancers (more if they were tightly packed!) and another 100 or so people around the edges the likely maximum gross income would be about a third that of holding a major concert. Even a top name ceilidh dance band would be unlikely to command more than a £10 ticket price. However, the band would cost far less than a top name concert act, so the economics are not as skewed in favour of concerts as might first appear - £17,000 ticket sales could easily reduce to £10,000 net income. The major issue however is that whilst you can reliably fill 1000 concert seats you would be unlikely to find 1000 people who would want to spend an evening at a ceilidh - and certainly you would have problems finding 1000 who could dance.

So the Ham is destined to stay as a concert venue!

Consideration needs to be given to providing larger venues for the social dance and (if anything) increasing the size of the Blackmore Gardens dance floor - maybe by providing a larger dance floor within the same size marquee and putting some of the the chairs outside - under cover if possible! This could be expensive and for little marginal benefit.