Worldwide Wedding Entertainment
Slideshows, a cappella serenades, crazy group dances – what’s appropriate and how much is too much at your wedding?
I recently attended a wedding in New York that was heavy on the entertainment. Aside from the band, hyperactive DJ and wedding itself (which is always entertaining), the bride and groom staged an elaborate, post-dinner ceremony to honor his family’s ethnic heritage. Before dinner, we all watched a slideshow featuring pictures of the happy couple while Michael Bolton played.
Really.
I didn’t know that weddings needed to be more than the ceremony and the reception, so the extra entertainment was throwing me off – and scaring me, since I hadn’t thought for two seconds I might need some for my own wedding. Before I started calling up clowns and dancing monkeys, however, I thought I’d get a second opinion.
Genevra Gallo, a graduate student at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, married her husband several years ago. The couple livened up their wedding considerably with added entertainment.
“We did several different things,” Gallo says. “Some planned, some not so planned. We wanted to have a mix of intentional fun and spontaneous merriment. Since we have a lot of talented friends, we knew that whatever folks decided to do, rehearsed or not, it would be fantastic.”
Gallo’s friends and family didn’t disappoint.
“My brother played yangqin, a Chinese hammer dulcimer, before the ceremony,” she says. “After the wedding, we had asked different folks to do whatever they wanted in lieu of speeches. A large group of our closest friends had prepared “Moon River” for us – they all sang and played instruments while we danced. We ended it all with karaoke so that people who wanted to sing and be silly after the food and wine could do so.”
While I think a wedding like the one Gallo and her husband had sounds lovely, I’m worried that my 500-guest reception won’t offer much wiggle room for performances from my friends or room for extra musicians. I’m concerned with getting everyone into the room without a stampede, getting them fed, and getting them all safely into cabs after it’s all over.
According to one former wedding singer, there are ways to provide entertainment to a group that big without hiring a comedian – though there are plenty of weddings that do feature comedians, improv artists, clowns, jugglers, and magicians. “The key is finding something that's gonna help everyone enjoy the wedding and keep people distracted enough so the bride and groom can make their rounds,” says former crooner Breon Bliss, currently living in Chicago as an independent film producer. Though it makes some brides (like me) groan, but Bliss has to admit to the entertainment value of the group dance.
“Start with the wedding walk and move into chicken dances, polkas, the throwing of bouquet/garter; [then move on to] the bride-and-groom dance, the parents dance, the dollar dance, the shoe dance, the oldest couple dance, “Cotton-Eyed Joe,” “The Electric Slide,” et cetera. These involve the elderly as well as the young and provide plenty of time for people to feel involved.”
Group dances may be all the extra entertainment people get at my wedding, though it’ll be over my dead body if “The Chicken Dance” is involved. We’re hiring an Eastern European folk band and anticipate that lots of my fiancé’s immigrant relatives will entertain everyone with some folk dancing – chicken-free, of course.
But, as I’ve come to understand, in every decision made in the planning process, whatever works for the couple will work for everyone else. Magicians, mimes, whatever. If you like it, it’s all good. “Ours was an unusual wedding in terms of how we planned it all out,” says Gallo. “But it was definitively ours. It fit us and our interests and personality as a couple. And I think that made it more memorable and special for our guests as well.”
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