I’ve heard similar comments from several people about the afterparty, and regret not spending a lot more time trying to make it a good part of the experience. I think in future years I maybe would prefer the afterparty on Saturday night to be more primarily “for Solstice attendees” and try to make a different night of the weekend the “everyone from all over the extended community comes over.”
(You didn’t mention the decompression zone but I maybe also want to take the opportunity to apologize: I had announced the decompression zone around firepits, but, then it turned out that all the firepits were full of people by the time I got there, and the whole area was so loud it felt hard to do announcements to direct people into the room we found. What I realize now was that I should have put up more/bigger signs about that)
Agree that the afterparty was Too Many Humans. If it was limited only to solstice-goers it might be a more reasonable amount of humans.
I wanted to get pizza but the food area was so crowded that I gave up. Maybe some kind of signage about not loitering in the food line area?
I am a fairly extroverted /social person but it was so loud and crowded that if I hadn’t had the option of running away to the choir room I probably would have left within about 10 minutes of arriving. It was way too much.
I looked for the decompression firepit because a chill mediated conversation seemed lovely, but that did not seem to be happening. Maybe have decompression ROOMS that can be closed off / quieter? Possibly multiples because I bet there was lots of interest.
the tragedy to me is that there was enough physical space for everyone, but people clustered into a much tighter area than they needed to. The drop off at one space was sharp even though there was at most a very mild physical feature delineating it.
I’ve heard similar comments from several people about the afterparty, and regret not spending a lot more time trying to make it a good part of the experience. I think in future years I maybe would prefer the afterparty on Saturday night to be more primarily “for Solstice attendees” and try to make a different night of the weekend the “everyone from all over the extended community comes over.”
(You didn’t mention the decompression zone but I maybe also want to take the opportunity to apologize: I had announced the decompression zone around firepits, but, then it turned out that all the firepits were full of people by the time I got there, and the whole area was so loud it felt hard to do announcements to direct people into the room we found. What I realize now was that I should have put up more/bigger signs about that)
Agree that the afterparty was Too Many Humans. If it was limited only to solstice-goers it might be a more reasonable amount of humans.
I wanted to get pizza but the food area was so crowded that I gave up. Maybe some kind of signage about not loitering in the food line area?
I am a fairly extroverted /social person but it was so loud and crowded that if I hadn’t had the option of running away to the choir room I probably would have left within about 10 minutes of arriving. It was way too much.
I looked for the decompression firepit because a chill mediated conversation seemed lovely, but that did not seem to be happening. Maybe have decompression ROOMS that can be closed off / quieter? Possibly multiples because I bet there was lots of interest.
(Solstice itself was lovely.)
the tragedy to me is that there was enough physical space for everyone, but people clustered into a much tighter area than they needed to. The drop off at one space was sharp even though there was at most a very mild physical feature delineating it.
Yeah, I went looking for the decompression zone and didn’t find it. Gave up and talked to the crowd instead.