RPC axes Rondelet due to low ticket sales

By Bianca Walker     2/26/09 6:00pm

After only 60 tickets were sold for Rondelet, the Rice University spring formal was canceled last Wednesday, three days before it was scheduled to take place.The formal would have had a Moulin Rouge theme and taken place in the Grand Hall of the Rice Memorial Center.

Rondelet, which is hosted by the Rice Program Council, has been a Rice tradition since 1947. Turnout in recent years, however, has been meager: The dance was also canceled in 2007 due to lack of interest from the student body.

RPC formal chair Esra Gumuser said the RPC did not know what went wrong this year.

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"[The RPC] cannot predict the reasons why 3,000 or so undergraduates made the decision not to attend the event," Gumuser, a Will Rice College sophomore, said.

Gumuser was one of the RPC members involved in the decision to cancel Rondelet, which was made as soon as they realized that tickets were not being sold.

This year's slow ticket sales came as a surprise after Esperanza's success last November, RPC representative Rhodes Coffey said. The fall formal, held on-campus in the Centennial Campaign tent, was sold out and widely-praised.

"Being on campus, we figured Rondelet would have similar attendance [to Esperanza]," Coffey, a Martel College sophomore, said.

Martel sophomore Mark Hoffman said Rondelet was not as well-planned as Esperanza, and many students were too busy studying for midterms to go to a formal dance.

"I wanted to go to Esperanza because [the RPC] put a lot of effort into it to make it a lot of fun," Hoffman said. "In any case, I could not have gone [to Rondelet] if I wanted to, because I was too busy studying."

Recently, re-elected RPC President Michelle Kerkstra said the low ticket sales may also have been a result of scheduling conflicts.

"I think that the reason we had a lot of difficulty getting people excited about [Rondelet] was this was a really short semester," she said. "There were a ton of events around that time [including] Archi Arts and 100 Days, which went extremely well. And the week before spring break people had work and were maybe trying to save money for trips."

Assistant Dean of Students Boyd Beckwith declined to specify how much money the RPC had allocated toward Rondelet expenses, but Kerkstra said the RPC lost around $500 with the cancellation and have plans to use the remaining funds from Rondelet's $4,000 budget.

"We're going to pour [the extra money] into the RPC and Willy's Pub Performance Series, and we'll do one more performance," Kerkstra said, noting that local rapper Fat Tony will perform April 9. "Then the money that we don't' spend we'll use on the take-me-out to the ball game t-shirts or use for next year.

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