Collect availability before you schedule anything
The most common scheduling mistake is picking dates first and asking people to work around them. You end up with recurring absences from the same dancers, resentment from people who had prior commitments, and constant reschedules.
Instead, collect availability first. Use a simple grid — list potential dates and times, ask everyone to mark when they're free. Find the windows with the most overlap. Only then schedule.
Coryo's availability grid collects this automatically — members fill it in and you see the overlap immediately.
Work backwards from your performance date
Count the weeks between now and your performance. Decide how many rehearsals you need (more on this below). Divide those rehearsals across your available weeks.
Leave a buffer — don't schedule all your rehearsals back-to-back with no slack. If a rehearsal gets cancelled, you need room to make it up. A good rule: plan for one cancelled rehearsal per month.
How many rehearsals do you actually need?
A rough guide:
- 2–3 minute piece, experienced team: 8–10 rehearsals - 2–3 minute piece, newer team: 12–16 rehearsals - 4–6 minute piece, experienced team: 14–20 rehearsals - Competition piece with multiple formations: add 20–30% more sessions
These are starting points, not rules. The actual number depends on how quickly your team picks up choreography, how complex the formations are, and how much individual practice your dancers do outside of group rehearsals.
Assign a goal to each rehearsal
Vague rehearsals ("we'll just run through stuff") are the main cause of teams reaching performance week still not clean.
Before each rehearsal, decide what you need to accomplish: which sections you're learning, which formations you're cleaning, whether you're running full-out or drilling details. Share this with your team in advance so they know what to expect.
In Coryo's scheduler, you can attach notes to each rehearsal session so the goal is documented and visible to the whole team.
Track attendance — and act on patterns
Attendance data is only useful if you use it. Check it weekly. If a dancer has missed the last 3 rehearsals, have a conversation before it becomes a problem. If attendance is dropping across the board, look for scheduling issues — maybe the time slot stopped working for people.
Coryo tracks attendance per rehearsal and gives you a view across the full project, so patterns are visible without manual tracking.