When a group of young people came up with the idea of creating a “dance palace” in the empty former Palace Market shopfront on Point Reyes Station’s Main Street some 50 years ago, they could not have fathomed the longevity the homegrown project would have or the strong feelings it would engender. “In 1971, it was such a sort of a potluck-whatever-we-can-do organization,” said Carol Friedman, a co-founder and now-retired longtime executive director. “Nobody was thinking of the future at all. We were on some level just a bunch of hippies who rented a space and then things began to happen.” 

Half a century later, tens of thousands of children and adults have attended classes, performances, weddings, memorials, community meetings, conferences and, yes, potluck dinners both at the original location and at the new Dance Palace built in 1989.

There were big, incremental leaps, Friedman remembers, and lots of small steps. With early funding from the Marin County Board of Supervisors and hard work from a tiny staff and countless volunteers, the Dance Palace matured. Since it was reorganized as a nonprofit in 1978, it has been governed by boards of directors who, every few years, create or update a strategic plan for the period ahead.

Then came the pandemic. 

The Dance Palace was forced to close its doors to the public in early 2020 and, aside from a small number of virtual programs, has been unable to reconnect with the community in its traditional ways. After the initial shock, the organization realized the unanticipated break provided a time for reflection and reassessment. A grant from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation is enabling it to undertake a new kind of planning, one that asks how it can adapt to a world of rapid social, political, economic and technological change.

NewStories, a nonprofit consulting firm led by Bob Stilger, is working alongside the board and staff to conduct individual and small group listening sessions focused on reimagining what the Dance Palace could be in its next iteration, executive director Bonnie Guttman said. The sessions, along with an online survey, are expected to reveal trends and new ideas that will be compiled into several draft planning scenarios. These will be brought to the whole community for participation and comments at Zoom meetings, the first in English on Nov. 15 and the second in Spanish on Nov. 17.

“What got the organization to this point is not likely to take it into its future,” board member Ken Otter said. “While there are seeds of its future in its past and present, the Dance Palace is called to reimagine what it can become as a community-serving organization and what forms its services, practices and actions should take.”

This is not strategic planning in a conventional sense. 

Otter went on, “We want to reimagine a future that helps us grow into what we want to be, and work with the people who may have been disenfranchised or indifferent to the Dance Palace, or loved it but don’t like it now, or loved it and continue to love it.…There’s obviously very clear limits to what one organization can do and certainly the Dance Palace wasn’t going to set out to be a different kind of organization. We’re just hoping to find a sense of who it is and who it could be and how to really take direction from the community it’s intended to serve.”

Board member Daisy Barragan, who has been meeting with Latino community members, sees opportunity. “The pandemic created, for lack of a better word, a death, and parts of the Dance Palace died,” she said. “And now we’re going into this rebirth. It’s like a new age where things can change…instead of doing the same thing we’ve been doing for the past 50 years.”

Stilger, of NewStories, said the challenges facing the region present new beginnings. “What do those things tell us about what’s important and what’s needed now?” he asked. “What does it mean for an organization that comes out of the arts, that comes out of body work, that comes out of music, to be asking questions about how do we best serve our community in these times of major change?” 

He went on, “So many other places don’t have a sense of community and even those that do don’t know where the heart is. I think that there’s some strong magic that’s present [at the Dance Palace]. And as far as I can tell, the times that we’re living in are the times that require magic.”

The community gatherings on Zoom start at 6 p.m. To learn about the draft adaptation planning scenarios and give your input, register for the English event at https://dancepalace.org/vision-meetings-english. For the Spanish event, go to https://dancepalace.org/vision-meetings-spanish. The online survey is open until Nov. 21 at  https://dancepalace.org/vision-survey/.

Elisabeth Ptak lives in Inverness. Her daughter was born at the Dance Palace in 1974.