It’s a top concern for many couples when it comes to their wedding evening. Most couples want to see the dance floor rammed all night, throwing shapes with their family and friends late into the evening. A wedding entertainment specialist can never guarantee that a dance floor will be full. There are a number of factors that can affect how your guests behave at a wedding reception including:
- The personalities of your guests
- The quality of the act
- The day of the week you are married (people are less likely to dance at a midweek wedding if they have work the next day)
- The time of year you are married
- The weather
- The behaviour of the couple
If your main objective for your wedding evening is to see your dance floor full for the evening then this article will outline some ways that you can help that to happen.
BOOK A QUALITY, WEDDING SPECIALIST ENTERTAINER
Make sure the act you book, whether it be a DJ, band or singer, knows exactly how weddings work. An act who works regularly in weddings will know how evenings are split up in terms of timings and will be able to work with those timings to execute an evening that takes into account all factors from the arrival of the guests to the serving of evening to food to song choices.
CHECK YOUR VENUE LAYOUT
If you are getting married in a big venue with lots of rooms there is an increased chance that your guests will filter off into those rooms. There’s not much that entertainers can do to deal with that. You can’t entertain guests who are not there. So check your venue layout. The evenings that work best are where the bar is in the same room as the dance floor. It means that people have nowhere else to go. They either need to engage in the entertainment or leave. If you want to give guests space to move away from the entertainment area try to choose a venue where there is a small room away from where the main act will be.
YOU HAVE TO DANCE
You’re the celebrity for the day! You’re the happy couple! People want to be where you are so if you spend time on the dance floor then other people will join you. I recently sang at a wedding in Yorkshire where the bride and groom never left the dance floor all night. Consequently the wedding party gathered around them and the dance floor was rammed all evening.
CHECK FOR SOUND LIMITERS
I’m not going to go into detail about the science of sound on this, that’s for another blog post. All I will say here is that you need to check to see if your venue has a sound limiter. Briefly, a sound limiter is a device that is worked into the electrics of the venue. They are designed to cut off the power if the noise goes above a certain level. No venue chooses to have these, they are usually imposed on them by local councils if they’ve had complaints about neighbours. You don’t need to be a genius to work out what it could do to your evening if you trip a sound limiter and the music goes off. It can ruin your atmosphere. So check with your venue. Some venues have sound limiters built into the electrics, some just police the sound by having someone tell the entertainers to turn it around. Either way they can be a threat to your evening, especially if the built in limiters are set to aggressively low levels. Unfortunately, I have experienced a number of venues in Yorkshire that have very aggressive limiters which make it incredibly difficult for me to do my job. There will be more about this in a future post but for now I will say speak to your venue, ask the question and inform your entertainer if there is a limiter. They will be able to speak directly to the venue to ascertain what affect it could have on your evening entertainment.
PLAN WITH YOUR ENTERTAINER
Make sure your entertainer knows how to plan your evening. A high quality professional entertainer, be it a band, a DJ or solo act, will talk to you about music choices and preferences. They will be able to advise on the best types of music to choose and will even have online systems you can access to help you with this.
If you’re feeling anxious about the dance floor being empty then communicate with your evening act. A good, solid professional act will be able to guide you as you plan and will be able to do everything they can to ensure you are happy when the lights go up at the end of your night.
Some time ago, myself and my colleague Pat Mulligan – Wedding Host, discussed these and other tips on facebook live in our #WedChat Live series. You can find the video below.