how much time for dancing?

we're planning on having our ceremony at 6:30, cocktail hour from 7-8, dinner from 8-9:30/10ish, and then dancing till 11, when we need to stop the music.

is this enough time? should we start the ceremony earlier? i want to make sure that everyone has enough time to enjoy the dj (should i ever find one)...

what does/did your timeline look like?

maybe you can shorten up dinner a bit, depending on the amount of guests, 1 1/2-2 hours might be a bit long...

Could you do some dancing between courses during dinner?

I would think people would want to hang out and dance for longer than an hour. My favorite part of the weddings I've been to was the dancing afterwards during the reception. I would plan for two hours at least, but honestly I haven't even started a time line yet so take that for what it's worth.

we started the ceremony at 6- then took pics for an hour while guests were at cocktail hour and started dinner at 7:30- and i will tell you this i sometimes wish i had started at 5 so that we we would have had longer to dance and enjoy the recpetion because it felt SO fast!

i thought 1 1/2 hrs seemed long too but that's what the WC said...would they do dancing during dinner? we do it around here, but i was under the impression that it was a strict COCKTAIL - DINNER - DANCING timeline...

Well I'm no help since I didn't have a reception, but I will say that our dinner did take 1.5 hours because everyone ordered off the menu so it took awhile to prepare. Can you ask you WC about what time dinner will be served? I'd say give 45 minutes to eat (well depending on how big your guest list is) But yeah 1.5 hours for dancing is not long enough.

I would ask them if guests gone done eating (before an hour) or so if they could start the dancing music.... it just seems like a long time, I would be twiddling my thumbs!! lol

are you sure it's still light out at 6:30??

Our dancing ended at maybe 11 pm but our ceremony was at 4:30

4:30 ceremony

5:00 cocktail hour

6:30 dinner/cake/toasts

8-11 dancing

(or something like that?) It was perfect and we were all plenty drunk after 3 hours of open bar. An extra hour might have been very bad