Your wedding entertainment isn’t just a focus for your wedding reception alone. At the many pre-wedding parties hosted for you, music is an important mood-setter, giving your guests lovely sounds to enjoy during your rehearsal dinner, engagement party, bridal shower, even during your wedding morning breakfast or bridal brunch.
At the Pleasantdale Chateau in West Orange, we’ve hosted some of the top NJ wedding entertainers, including wedding bands and DJs, and our wedding ballroom has been filled with romantic slow songs, club dance music, and cultural wedding music from the tarantella to the hora. Our network of preferred vendors includes entertainment companies that also offer talented solo and small-group musical acts that you can book for your pre-wedding parties.
Some of the most popular solo artists, duos and other musicians you’ll find through professional wedding entertainment agencies include pianists, guitarists, harpists, cellists, flutists and singers. And our New Jersey wedding couples have also found fabulous, multi-talented musical performers through our many nearby universities such as Rutgers in New Brunswick, Drew University in Madison, and other colleges that have music departments. Our couples called the university and were soon auditioning talented performers and groups that they booked for their pre-wedding parties. Some couples tell us they fell in love with the pianists they saw at local jazz clubs and guitarists in performance at local bookstores. These gifted musicians are happy to book engagement parties and rehearsal dinners as well as rehearsal dinners and garden weddings, so they may be ideal for your own star-search as you arrange your wedding entertainment for all of your celebrations.
For your at-home, informal parties such as casual engagement parties with friends or friend and family gatherings when you return from your honeymoon, of course you might arrange your own music using your iPod playlist, as a free option that allows you to personalize your song selections. As a fun wedding gift idea from a teen or budget-crunched friend, it’s a new trend for that loved one to custom-mix a playlist just for you, both as the party entertainment and as a treasured gift that’s actually quite priceless.
Some wedding couples feel that traditional line dances are too cliché for their wedding entertainment, that line dances don’t fit in with their elegant wedding setting, and they may request that their wedding entertainers eliminate all line dances from their reception playlist. However, the line dance is making a comeback in wedding reception entertainment here in the New Jersey region, as it is across the country.
Wedding Entertainment
• Here are the top trends in wedding reception line dances:
• Guests know the steps and moves to the most well-known line dances, and they may feel more confident on the dance floor doing these dances than they do dancing to club music or other ‘free-form’ music.
• Guests love to rush to the dance floor in groups, to do line dances together.
• Kids enjoy line dances tremendously, since they perform them at minor league ballparks such as our nearby popular ballparks in Newark, Bridgewater, Lakewood, Atlantic City, Montclair and also at professional baseball games. When the stadium deejay plays the “Cha Cha Slide” or “Cotton-Eyed Joe,” the kids rush to the aisles to perform the dances, and adults join in as well. The same group thrill can fill your dance floor and give your wedding videographer fabulous footage as guests have a fantastic time showing off their line dance expertise.
• Country line dances may be well-known to your group, especially if you enjoy line dancing nights at your favorite country-western bar in the tri-state area.
• A new trend in wedding entertainment is to include a number of retro line dances such as the Bus Stop and the Hustle…dances that your guests in their 50s and 60s know well, and are happy to perform as a fun-loving group on the dance floor.
A great line dance is a pleasing surprise in wedding entertainment, not a dance floor-clearing loss of your reception’s momentum. So be sure to think about recent friend and family weddings and how line dances were received by your same guests, and if your personal wedding website features a polling tool, ask your guests to cast their votes – line dances or no line dances – to help you decide if you’ll include the wedding reception trend or if you’ll give your wedding deejay or wedding band the ‘do not play’ directive for line dances at your reception.
