The A.S. Council’s programming department is shaking up its
winter itinerary, scrapping the longstanding WinterFest in favor of an event
smaller in funding, size and name.
Assistant Vice President of
said today’s Winter All-Campus Dance is not billed as a concert — an attempt by
the office to distance itself from the consistently unsuccessful WinterFest. Of
the department’s seasonal concerts, WinterFest, held annually at RIMAC Arena,
regularly records the lowest attendance levels.
that shrinking the event’s size would free up department funds to accommodate
other events, including the increasingly popular
“Because of continuously being unsuccessful, WinterFest was
the obvious place where we could pull money from to fund
said. “Over half of the [WinterFest] budget was cut and transferred to
Last year’s WinterFest was the first to be hosted in Price
Center Ballroom, a precursor that programming aimed to downsize the event. That
concert attracted 1,200 attendees, down almost 50 percent from the previous
WinterFest, which was held at RIMAC Arena.
“We could no longer afford the acts that fill up RIMAC,”
said. “So it was a logical move to the ballroom.”
WinterFest 2007 did not manage to fill PC Ballroom to
capacity, a letdown that
said he hoped to resolve with this year’s All-Campus Dance. The department is
banking on the success of the Fall All-Campus Dance, a heavily attended event
held at the beginning of every school year.
“From an event-planning perspective, it makes no sense to
have just one All-Campus Dance each year because of the fact that it is so
successful,” he said. “The fall dance gets bigger and better every year, and I
want to tap that success to produce more events that students will attend in
large numbers.”
While the fall event featured DJs specializing in pop and
Top-40 music, the winter variant of the All-Campus Dance will add a band lineup
and “cutting-edge and artistically challenging” DJs,
said. The programming department will establish the nature of future winter
events based on how well this dance fares.
“If [the Winter All-Campus Dance] is a big success, I do not
see a reason why it wouldn’t be continued next year,” he said.
This year’s event lineup fought a shakeup of its own, with
the originally slated
act Ima Robot dropping out earlier this week. The programming office’s Festival
Coordinator Garrett Berg swapped the indie rock band, which backed out due to
illness, for another: the Rx Bandits.
“Surely the fastest book this office has seen,”
said.
