The Ripton Community Coffee House Booking Guidelines

(or, so you want to see what the world looks like from our stage)

If you are unfamiliar with our coffeehouse, please first read the general information on our home page.

We present eleven concerts a year (the first Saturday of every month except for August). Our shows start at 7:30 with a one-hour open mike set, followed by an intermission. The featured performer(s) start their single set at about 9:00. The set lasts an hour to an hour and a quarter. We do not present opening acts (though there are five 12-minute open mike slots).

We reserve about half of our yearly concerts for Vermont musicians (part of our mission is to help keep our local music culture healthy). That leaves only five or six concerts a year for musicians from out of state (which includes all the performers we've had previously that we want to have back). In other words, there are only a couple shows a year for new performers from out of state.

Members of our selection committee attend conferences (notably, the Northeast Regional Folk Alliance Conference), concerts and festivals to find acts that would work for our coffeehouse. We also listen to all submissions, whether received via mail (at Ripton Community Coffee House, PO Box 185, Ripton, VT 05766) or electronically (email bdart@gmavt.net). If you are submitting electronically, an EPK (electronic press kit), or a link to a web site with full song samples, quality photographs and a succinctly written biography will be fine.

Admission to the coffeehouse is $7.00, $3.00 for children and seniors. Economically disadvantaged pay what they can afford. People who are baking get in for free, as do the open-mike performers. Our featured performers are paid from the door receipts. We take $125 from the door receipts for our expenses and the remainder of the money goes to the performers. We offer a guarantee. We also sell the performers' CDs and other merchandise, with all those proceeds going directly to them.

The community house can seat about 120 people and has a top capacity of 170. There are no alcoholic beverages or smoking allowed in the community house. There is no "Green Room" at the community house (it was built quite some time ago) but a house belonging to one of the board members is less than half a mile away and is a place to relax, change and often have dinner. We also put up performers at the house of one of our board members.

We provide a small sound system with an experienced sound technician. Sound check is at 6:00 PM unless other arrangements have been made. We do not have a piano.

A local public access TV channel often sends a camera to record our concerts. These tapes are sometimes shared with other public access channels in Vermont.

For more information about the Ripton Community Coffee House or to sign up for the open mike (we start taking sign-ups two weeks before a concert), contact Richard Ruane or Andrea Chesman at 802-388-9782 or via email at folks@rcch.org.

Performers interested in being the featured performer should contact Beth Duquette at bdart@gmavt.net.