| When: | January 8th, 2005 |
|---|---|
| Where: | Wyndham Greenspoint Hotel and Conference Center Houston, TX |
| Competitors: |
Ges (dancing/vocal) Devonna (dancing) Rebekah (dancing) Rachel (dancing/vocal) Luke (dancing) |
| Why We Went: | Rebekah and Devonna demanded I put it on the schedule after Rebekah's Oireachtas performance last year. Devonna even offered to slide |
| Previously Reviewed: |
ORGANIZATION
WHAT WENT RIGHT
- Feisworx handled registration. Personally.
- The preregistration people were really good about things like questions and paying for Rebekah's late decision to compete in the Treble Reel
- The registration packet we got at Preregistration contained a sheet with nothing but local restaraunts and their locations relative to the feis site/hotel. This is incredibly helpful to people from out of town who may not be familiar with that area of the city. We wish more committees would do this.
- When Pat King's your musician, you're never quite certain just what he's going to do between competitions. This feis, he was somewhat low-key -- every time Dennis Dennehy got up or sat down from the stage he was adjudicating, Pat would immediately launch into Hail To The Chief. Not quite the thermonuclear-level smackdown we once witnessed him lay on another well-known adjudicator, but still funny.
WHAT WENT WRONG
- While the feis website contained a link to the hotel that was useful, it was a bit light on other feis-related info we're used to getting online such as adjudicators, competitors, and stage schedules.
- When I looked in the program, I discovered to my amazement that our dance school was actually in California. Uh, guys, Celtic Academy is in Ohio -- right where we left it :-)
- This is a nit more than anything, but they need to advertise the fun competitions at the ceili more than they did. Clan Seger would have been a lot more prepared if it had :-)
GRADE
A.
SCHEDULING
WHAT WENT RIGHT
- Same stage scheduling for solo competitions.
- Beginners danced first, and were done within half an hour. Luke was done in fifteen minutes. Because there was nothing but beginners, the girls were able to get an extra half-hour sleep while I took care of Luke.
- Non-champion dancers were next, and were done by 2:30. There seemed to be enough of an interval between your competitions to allow potty breaks, results checking, or a quick run through the vendors area.
- Prelims and Champions danced starting around 3PM, which meant they could sleep in. Not like I'm bitter or anything, mind you...
- A Mass and ceili were scheduled after the feis.
WHAT WENT WRONG
- If they're eventually going to split music competitions by instrument and/or age, they should go ahead and list them that way on the syllabus.
- By long-standing policy on this website, I have to score the Figure competitions after Beginners as a "What Went Wrong." This may be the only feis we've ever attended that this may have been the right thing to do. Then again, we don't go to many feisanna that have a total registration of only 300 dancers. I would not recommend most other feis committees try this at home.
- Only a 2-level adult competition. This wasn't the issue it could have been because the other dancers in our competitions were Open/Prizewinner, too.
- Age groups were split every two years. The splits they used meant that for the first time ever both Rebekah and Rachel faced each other in a dance competition (Novice U12 Treble Jig).
- The final championship competition was held mid-way through the awards ceremony at the end of the day
- Devonna wanted me to make the lack of a Parent/Child competition a "What Went Wrong." Since she's looking over my shoulder as I write this, I don't have much of a choice... In compensation, they at least had an Adult 2-hand.
- A somewhat limited selection of vendors. When you're this small, though, that's not much of a problem.
GRADE
B.
FACILITIES
WHAT WENT RIGHT
- It didn't seem to be crowded, which may be directly related to the fact so few people were registered to compete.
- This is the first time in years Devonna actually had room to warm up before her competitions without hitting somebody -- either in the ballroom or outside.
- The hotel provided a cash food buffet. While expensive and not containing the variety you might find at other feisanna, it was quickly available if you didn't have time to go off-site.
- Aggressive and cold water service provided by the hotel all day.
- Bathrooms were aggressively maintained all day.
- If you were waiting for the Treble Reel, you were within walking distance of a mall. That made the time go a little faster.
- Somebody was listening to me and Devonna worrying on Friday night about how one would be able to tell when you were at the edge of the stage. When we came down the next morning, really dark and high-contrast duct tape had been used to mark the dividing lines.
- The ballroom was open for practicing on Friday night after 8PM local. It couldn't be opened any earlier because of a wedding that was taking place in one of the adjacent rooms.
WHAT WENT WRONG
- The Hotel PA system was definitely underpowered.
- Pat King was set up to play for all three stages beside stage A. This location meant that sometimes he couldn't see when there was a holdup of some sort on stages B and C. The one example of which I was personally familiar was for our Hornpipe, when he started playing before our adjudicator got back from his potty break.
- Things could get confusing sometimes on the right side because two stages had to get organized there. Stage monitors on that side were real good in directing dancers to the proper monitor all day.
GRADE
B+.
OPERATIONS
WHAT WENT RIGHT
-
As we were walking away from Preregistration Friday night, Devonna and I got to talking with a person later identified as the chairwoman of the Feis committee. When she mentioned the new computerized competition numbering system they were going to try the next day, I cracked a joke about having to dance on stage Blue Screen of Death which in retrospect may not have done anything to relieve her stress level at that moment.
We needn't have worried.
The feis committee's system started with a stock PC running Microsoft Access. The operator typed in the Now, Next, and Check In competitions for each stage into the database front end, which required about thirty seconds of work every ten minutes all throughout the day. The database looked up the age group, step, and competition name and piped it into a PowerPoint template, which was then blasted down a video feed to a large projection-screen TV system set up in the far right-hand corner of the ballroom. I talked with the programmer between some of my soft-shoe competitions, who told me that the whole system was a two-day hack. I never would have guessed, for it performed almost flawlessly all day.
Jaw-droppingly cool as all that was, that's not why I can't say enough good things about their system. This is: Devonna (a woman with half a lifetime's experience with a painful visual disability) could read competition numbers for all three stages from the opposite end of the ballroom without assistance.
- The basket raffle they ran for Tsunami aid was a creative idea that actually ended up collecting over $1,000. When committees have things like this, it's usually a good sign they're thinking of other people.
- Everyone we dealt with concerning this feis, whether committee or volunteer, was very friendly and professional.
- Another huge point: the usual confusion one sees around a stage monitor at a feis with dancers coming up to see how close they are to check in was completely removed with their computerized big-screen system.
- These stage monitors didn't have a problem when Rebekah couldn't remember 32 bars of Hornpipe reliably enough to dance and had to scratch.
- Even our teachers back home thought the medals from this feis (A Celtic Cross in various colors signifying what you won) were cool.
- Stage monitors were real good at racking and stacking competitions. Sometimes, they were lining the next dance up behind an already-running competition. That they managed to do this pretty much all day without disturbing running competitions is a rare and Good Thing. Only Lone Star pulled this off any better, and they had to use a lot of privacy curtains to do that.
WHAT WENT WRONG
- The only reason there was adjudicator rotation was because Dennis Dennehy got tired of his first stage and switched with the middle adjudicator about mid-morning. The adjudicator on stage A only moved for potty breaks.
- We had to wait a really long time for the results of Rebekah and Rachel's Treble Reel competition. Annoying as this was, it only really affected anyone who stayed around to dance it.
GRADE
A. . Once they get the bugs worked out, they might want to think about marketing their competition numbering system. No joke.
AFTERWORD
All of Clan Seger agrees that this was a nice, low-key way to start the competition year. That this was the first feis anywhere in North America for 2005 was kinda cool, too.