Do you live in a dance town?

You know what I mean -- a mecca for dance. NYC, or London, or LA, or any of several others? If you do live in a dance town, what advantages do you think you have? How do you take advantage? If not, how do you cope?

I think that I live in a dance town, for it's size - Ithaca NY. There are bigger towns around here which do not have the amount of dances that we do, and the variety. This works well for me as I am a dancing generalist. I do as many different dances as I can. If you are only into one dance, such as swing, or salsa this place may not be so hot. You may only have 1-2 events during a normal week.

Melbourne (Australia, not Florida) is a fabulous dance town. We've got everything from Swing and Capoeira to Hip-hop, adult ballet and ballroom. There ain't a style you can't learn here and there isn't a day there's no dancing. Often the problem is not finding somewhere to dance, it's picking which dance to dance on most nights.

MadamSamba is right :wink: !

Speaking from a salsa-only perspective, Sydney is considered to be one of the better salsa cities in the world (dance-wise, in the Congress kind of way).

While Melbourne has a lot less hype & flash, the live music (salsa as well as other genres) scene is unbeatable. Musician get to play almost all the time (while the money may not be brilliant, the doors are ALWAYS open to talents), and we get to check out live-music 7 nights a week!

Back to dance. We have a lot of salsa events throughout the years plus all the regular ones (not counting studio events either). It is almost assumed that live bands will be playing at any given event ......a unique Melbourne thing 8) .

Vancouver is a great dance town, with three large independent studios (one is the biggest in Canada), two franchise studios and many smaller independents. There are many studios specializing in Swing or Salsa or other forms of dance, and a strong Salsa community that parties weekly at several venues. We have four major ballroom comps each year and several smaller ones, and throughout the summer DanceSport BC hosts free weekly outdoor dance parties in the heart of downtown that feature a group lesson followed by hours of social dancing. The UBC Dance Club at the University of British Columbia is one of the largest in the country. Considering that the city isn't that big in comparison to other North American cities, dance is proportionately huge here. Other Canadian cities that are known for dance are Montreal and Calgary.

Every night of the week you can enjoy a social ballroom dance on a full-sized floor at one of the large studios here, plus three tea dances weekly during the day.

In contrast, when I travel to Orange County with more than 10 times the population, I'm hard pressed to find any venue with a full-sized floor that offers social dancing more than one night a week. Even Seattle, with three times the population of Vancouver, has nothing similar to offer.