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[Suran]

My feedback:

Starting the dance like this was a safety nightmare.
You never pack fursuiters as tight as possible and you certainly don't tell them to all start dancing in that state.
It is a huge crowd of people with different degrees of disorientation, vision- and motion- impairment dressed in their very best dress for the photo. 
(Suffered major damage to the fursuit and nearly lost my expensive prop twice. Luckily easy to repair as the fur itself was undamaged but no fursuiting for a full day of EF.)
Not giving any commands to the crowd for a full minute after Thalian did his photo also wasn't a good idea.
People start to wonder what the heck they are supposed to do now. There would have been ample time to announce what will happen next and for the crowd to disperse enough, so that everyone has some room to maneuver. Being super carefull about the other people's and your own suit you don't just push your way through a crowd like this the way you would do out of suit in a subway.
This can be improved!
Not every suiter is able or willing to dance but I can imagine only few would miss the opportuinty to be on the official fursuit group photo in their "best dress".

Yes, it was announced that the dance would start rigth after the photo. But it was not made clear that there was no chance in attending the photo without the dance or to not bring any props or suit-parts that could break.

Tried dancing in the partial suit later. Too much base drum again=resonated in the head.
Seemed to be more fog then last year (couldn't see any of the black fursuiters right in front of me despite ample experience with the limited vision including dances.).
Lots of others enjoyed it. So I guess it was okay for the ones with a less limited range of vision.

[Snarl]

You never pack fursuiters as tight as possible and you certainly don't tell them to all start dancing in that state.

Oh, yes you do ! I totally loved that way of starting the dance, fursuits everywhere ! I was wondering what to do right after the photo, and the music start was a really nice surprise. Please do the same next year !

(On the other hand, this dance didn't last really long, nearly empty two hours after the beginning, because of the music I think, but that's another point).

Edit : already on youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a3hvwN1wXZU

[Lightfox]

I must admit the first hour of kenai's set was pretty much awesome. But as soon as he removed the head of his fursuit (which wasn't that pleasant, I'm not really a fan of fursuiters doing that in public, but that's another debate) and started to actually mix, we quickly gave up trying to dance  on something sounded like a media player randomly switching rythm after a random period of time ranging between 15 and 40 seconds. And if it was impossible to dance for the regular human, i guess it must have been pretty difficult for a fursuiter as well.

[BigBlueFox]

(On the other hand, this dance didn't last really long, nearly empty two hours after the beginning, because of the music I think, but that's another point).

I think that was mostly caused by a miscommunication between EF staff and the hotel, so the doors were kept shut in order to prevent the fog from triggering the fire alert. With the doors closed, it was hard to even notice the music outside, and people were left with the impression that the dance was over. I have to appologize for that.

[Fafnir Kristensen]

hum, anybody passing by the doors could clearly hear that music was being played inside.

as Lightfox said, the first hour (or so) was fun and danceable, after that not so much

I think that was mostly caused by a miscommunication between EF staff and the hotel, so the doors were kept shut in order to prevent the fog from triggering the fire alert. With the doors closed, it was hard to even notice the music outside, and people were left with the impression that the dance was over. I have to appologize for that.

[Suicune]

The first hour or 1 1/2 of the dance was fun
I loved that so much "old" and good music was played.

But I have to agree with Lightfox and Fafnir: When the music changed to techno or what it was... it became boring and it wasn't fun to dance. I don't like that genre. I don't need music that makes just 'boom boom boom'. (OK, the Buig Blue Dance had it too, but for most time it wasn't that bad)
For the next time, I wish there would be more funny music for at least 2-3 hours

[Lightfox]

I'd like to emphasize i'm not even commenting on the music style being not suitable to my personal tastes, but on the tempo alone, which switched way to much for the mix to be danceable, whether or not you like that kind of music.

[krakendwaggin]

As it was my first time suiting, being told to jump when you're next to a massive crowd of fursuiters, kinda terrifying!
But it's also something I'll never forget and I really look forward to the picture ^_^

[Blaster-Hedgie]

From speaking to other Fursuiters, it seems that Disco and 80's music fits the Fursuit Dance a lot better, since it's not heavy trip-hop bass and acid house which encourages fast dancing which really can't be done in a suit. I was at the Fursuit Dance for a while before I had to go back to work on The Daily, but that style of music fits perfectly!

[BD]

I enjoyed it a lot, and thought the way it began was actually a brilliant idea, starting up immediately after the fursuit group photo while we were all still on the dance floor.

About the perennial topic of the electronic music - I can only imagine how much of a challenge it must be for you DJ's to try and please as many people as possible, the work you put into setting everything up, etc, overall you do a great job and even if a lot of the music itself doesn't give me ecstasies of delight, the dances are still my favorite part of the conventions.

[Pickle]

Starting the dance like this was a safety nightmare.
You never pack fursuiters as tight as possible and you certainly don't tell them to all start dancing in that state.
It is a huge crowd of people with different degrees of disorientation, vision- and motion- impairment dressed in their very best dress for the photo. 
(Suffered major damage to the fursuit and nearly lost my expensive prop twice. Luckily easy to repair as the fur itself was undamaged but no fursuiting for a full day of EF.)

Oh man, I knew I had a good reason for not bothering with the group photo.

Also, I thought the whole point of a 'fursuit friendly' dance was good visibility? Whenever I went in there the fog was so thick I could barely see anything out of suit, let alone while in suit. D:

I did enjoy the music selection though. As others have said, the cheesy pop stuff is generally more fun/easy for suiters to dance to.

[BD]

Hey Suran,
OK I see your point, about packing us close together if you have props or wings or something like that which could be damaged.

About "fursuit friendly" dance: to me it seemed like just another dance, not somehow aimed at fursuiters. That didn't bother me, I actually prefer the funny lighting and fog etc, but I do understand if some fursuiters were hoping for something different or more brightly lit.

[Mystifur]

My Staff-Answer part:

The idea off having the picture taken both,
- on the dance floor and
- as start of the dance
worked really well for the purposes we had in mind. We already had a lot of positive feedback from suiters and DJs that having an instantly filled dancefloor was great, and we will stick to that concept.

Admittedly the "Do not move away, we will shoot a short music video right now!" part was a last minute change of plans we did upon request of the video team. A tight pack of hundreds of suiters in simultaneous dance motion sounded like a nice thing to have on the con video, and I believe you will all love it when the video is released.

However, lessons learned, next year, we will instead tell everyone to spread out some before the dance starts.



My personal Fursuit-Answer part:

I totally agree that "Fursuit-Friendly-Dance" should mean slower and danceable music, rather than utz-utz-utz-utz hardstyle techno!
And that fog should be kept to a minimum, so
- suiters can see each other,
- attendees can watch them,
- and cameramen can get clear shots of them dancing !

(I also like the effect of fog-clouds that eventually dissolve much much more than a homogeneous persistent everywhere-fog, just to show off look-how-much-spectecular-light-efffects-we-rented-for-you.)

From my experience when asking DJs to play Disco/80s/Funny music, the usual answer is "When I start a dance with 80s, it's always empty for the first 2 hours." Well, most dances start with a less populated dancefloor anyways. However, with EF having all suiters on the dance floor already, that reason seems to be not valid for EF any more. So, please I can haz 3+ something hours of that cheerfull/emotional 80s/Disco/silly stuff next year ? 

Conclusion:
We all, staff and attendees need to understand that it is never possible to make everyone absolutely happy. especially not with 1300 attendees. So we wont even try to find the tiny denominator that no one can complain about. Instead EF will always try to get the maximum out of what makes the most people most happy.

And of course this is why we like your constructive positive and negative feedback, so we know what the majority likes. (And to the topic starter: Your way of bluntly putting things like an earthshaking disaster, specifically designed to destroy everyones fun is, as usual, unmatched and uncalled for.)

Cheers,
Mystifur.
<Blametaker for fursuit things>

[James The Dog]

I have to agree with the music commments as well- last year it was the sort of cheesy sort of europop and stuff that I love, and that's what it was for the first hour or so this year, but after an hour it just seemed to change to all the boom-boom-boom techno stuff. Not that I have a massive problem with that, and we all have different tastes in music, but that's really the sort of music that tends to get played at the Big Blue Dance on Saturday, so it's good for the fursuit dance to be playing something different.

My feelings on the cartoon animations being largely missing from the projections screens this year has already been voiced elsewhere. As I said there, it was a bit disapointing that the screens were largely showing rather generic effects you could see in any nightclub, with the cartoons from last year only making a couple of brief appearances, and live footage from the dancefloor not appearing at all.

[Cheetah]

We figured, if people didn't feel like dancing at the beginning, they wouldn't do it. And we left the house lights on for the first minutes so everybody who'd rather not be in the dancemob has the chance to locate the nearest exit. Since most of the people did join in and didn't seem to have a problem with it, we'll do it again next year, though It's not like we didn't have a few hundret of happy suiters there, that's for sure. Next year we'll leave everyone who doesn't want to dance more time to escape.

We did recognize the drop in dancers over the first two hours, and we figured it had both to do with the fact that the Thursday evening dance has ALWAYS been less popular than the one on Saturday, and that due to a communications messup, the hotel insisted on having all doors closed because of a smoke detector in the lobby being triggered, and a non-authorized party going on the second floor elevator platform that took away lot of the attention.

I wasn't at the dance myself, so I can't comment on the music being played, and if there is any correllation. There will always be complaints about all kinds of music, and the type of music being played has not really changed during the last years except for the natrual tendencies within the genre. So if we did have a noticeable drop in attendance this year, either everyone suddenly changed their music preferences at once (unlikely) or we had some other kind of problem. We know that fast, electronic music is not everyone's cup of tea, but we had 1300 people on site, and we know that, on the other hand, a large majority DOES enjoy this kind of music - and kenai usually knows what furries like. He's not doing it for the first time. We are going to review the recordings though, and discuss it with the other DJs - who I consider our panel of experts on issues like these.



So, I'm invoking the same rule like last year: Please no discussions about music styles. It really IS pointless. We're sorry the music doesn't make everyone happy, but it's unrealistic to expect it EVER will. It's impossible