2005 Music City Feis

When:	February 11-12, 2005
Where:	Millenium Maxwell House Hotel Nashville, TN
Competitors:	Ges (dancing/vocal) Devonna (dancing/soda bread) Rebekah (dancing) Rachel (dancing/vocal) Luke (dancing)
Why We Went:	We had generally good experiences the previous three times we attended. Plus, they have an Adult Treble Reel...
Previously Reviewed:	2002, 2003 2004

ORGANIZATION

WHAT WENT RIGHT

Preregistration was run in the ballroom that would eventually contain stages E/F.
An online roster was provided so you could check your registration. Or do a little internet reconaissance on your competition...

WHAT WENT WRONG

Given the severe problems the feis hotel had with internet reservations this year, I would recommend that the committee not link to the hotel from the feis website in the future. The hotel system's online reservation system lost not only our reservations but lots of other people's reservations as well.
You had to do a lot of digging through the feis website to find the online roster.
Non-dancing competitions were not counted toward the family maximum. Again to their credit, the extra money was contributed to charities like in previous years.
The medals changed again this year, to a smaller, less durable, and less aesthetically-pleasing design than last year's
While Devonna and I can understand why only teachers should be allowed to enter younger dancers into figure competitions, we and our teachers fail to understand why Adult dancers aren't considered responsible enough to handle their own figure entries for anything less than a four-hand.
ON a related note, our teacher was used to just notifying feis registrars via email or phone to add certain dancers (and does it each year for Columbus). She couldn't understand why someone else would insist on a more formalized process.
Clan Seger seemed to have an awful lot of problems with our registration on eFeis:
- When I was testing a filtering script on the feis' online registration list, I found that I had somehow been entered in the Adult Open/PW Slip Jig. This is a dance that is not only not taught to male dancers in the Midwest, it's a dance I only do once a year (and then only because I have to).
- eFeis failed to record Rachel's entry in the Treble Reel for her level and age group
- eFeis lost our teacher's registration of Devonna and I into the Adult 2-hand competition.
On a related note, a fellow competitor in the Adult Open/PW Single Jig was not included on the eFeis-generated sheet for that competition generated for the Stage Monitor. Said stage monitor was not going to allow him to dance even when he produced the back of his competitor number and showed the monitor that he was entered in that competition -- and had paid for it. I shudder to think how close he came to getting NAFC Rule #1 invoked on him because of the amount of force he had to use to make the monitor leave her post and verify what he was saying.
On another related note, our school's director personally witnessed a family who had just gotten off the road from Atlanta discover that eFeis had lost all their entries. The committee refused to allow the dancer to compete in spite of this.
The last date on which changes to your competition record would be processed was a week before the feis. By the time we discovered the problem with our Adult 2-hand entry, it was too late to officially do anything about it. Even bringing in our school director (who had evidence uniquely available to her supporting our case) was ineffective in persuading the committee otherwise.

Now, I realize that they provided a lot of opportunities before the cutoff date to catch problems. I also have a lot of demands on my time as both sole source of income and sole driver for my family. I shouldn't have to hold other people's hands just to make sure that they correctly perform their job. Other feisanna (Indianapolis, Cincinnati, Dayton, and Peach State spring immediately to mind) do not have problems processing corrections up to and including the day of the feis. So the updated information doesn't make it into the program. Who CARES? The only people who need to see corrections are the affected Stage Monitors and the Tabulation/Results operation. I'm not asking people to run a change operation to the insanely professional degree which Indianapolis does, I'm just asking for a little more flexibility than was shown. It's not like any of us were coming off the street wanting to compete at this feis. We all thought we were registered correctly until it was too late to fix things. A competition change policy this inflexible makes no sense given a computerized registration system so demonstrably flawed.
The comittee's inflexibility on last-second changes also affected a dancer from our school, who discovered to her horror the night before the feis that she had been entered into a Championship-level Treble Reel instead of a more appropriate (for her current level) non-Champ competition. Again, the committee proved themselves immune to compelling evidence that a mistake had been made and needed to be corrected.

GRADE

C-.

SCHEDULING

WHAT WENT RIGHT

Music competitions were run the night before dancing up in the ballroom. What made this a Really Good Thing was that it freed up two ballrooms downstairs for practicing that night.
Figure competitions started the day.
Adult competitions were scheduled on stages C/D all day
Adult competitions were scheduled during the Youth Beginners block for softshoes and with advanced beginners for hardshoes. The hardshoe scheduling was a particularly Good Thing because when we were done the vast majority of competitions requiring traditional-speed music were over.
By running Beginners so early, the ballrooms didn't get crowded until later in the morning.
By virtue of the way they scheduled Adults, they were done by 2:30 PM if they weren't doing the Treble Reel
Another side-effect of the way they scheduled competitions: There was no need to have a site-wide lunch break. Novice and Open/PW youth that had cleared softshoes had over an hour to grab a bite to eat before they needed to change shoes, thanks to the Adults and Advanced Beginners doing their hardshoes at that time. Conversely, Adults had a leisurely lunch thanks to Youth softshoes and the early start to the Lunch Buffet. The only people that might have been inconvenienced by the lack of a lunch break were the Advanced Beginners, but the lateness of the lunch buffet (more below) helped here.
Adult Treble Reel at the end of the day

WHAT WENT WRONG

Rachel's vocal competition was split at age 13. Instead of U13, U18, and Adult, an extra split is needed for music competitions below age 13. Three of the girls Rachel competed agains in vocals were not only pushing 13, they had big, brassy, recording-studio quality voices that younger girls had no physical hope of matching.
The only bad thing about the morning schedule for Adults was that no Youth competitions were scheduled with them on those stages (worse for the Adult Novices because no one else was on their stage). There was hardly any breather between your soft-shoe competitions, but at least you didn't have to sprint across the feis site to get to your next stage. Given how fast the C/D ballroom was running compared to the A/B ballroom at that time, perhaps switching one Beginners year group from A/B to C/D would fix both problems.

GRADE

FACILITIES

WHAT WENT RIGHT

Excellent signage throughout the site, telling people what was in each room
Two stages per ballroom on the ground floor as was done in previous years, with the same beneficial effect on number of musicians needed.
Excellent sound insulation between ballrooms, despite leaving the rearmost partition in each dividing wall open to allow easier access between rooms.
Two vendor areas -- one in the hotel lobby, and a smaller one in one of the side rooms heading back to stages A-F. This freed up the main hall in front of the first floor ballrooms so it wasn't as crowded through the day.
Aggressive water service all day.
A coat rack was provided on the way to the ballrooms for people trying to sell their solo dresses.
Devonna said the bathrooms were well-maintained. She had to rub it in.
The buffet line out in the lobby vendor area had breakfast and lunch service going throughout feis day. The Lunch buffet was run for an incredible length of time, as it was in previous years.
The ballrooms were open early on Friday for practicing
Coatracks were provided across the back of each ballroom, which freed up specator seating for its original designed intent.
The committee enforced a traffic pattern for dancers entering and leaving each stage. Dancers took the stage on its outside, then left the stage on its inside (coming down the middle of the ballroom to do so). This was a Good Idea™ given the size and crowding of the ballrooms.

WHAT WENT WRONG

The dividing line between stages was marked by black duct tape. What made it wrong was the dark gray duct tape in use over the seams between stage modules.
For the first time in my memory, the hotel didn't run Irish Music over the PA system in the lobby.
No chairs for racking and stacking competitors. Dancers were generously allowed to stand against the partition before taking the stage. The first two rows of spectator seating could have been cleared and used very easily for racking/stacking.
To check in, dancers had to fight their way between the very narrow space between the dancers waiting to compete and the spectator seating, then fight their way back through that exact same crowd to get in line.
I don't remember the speaker stands on each stage taking up so much of the back corner as they did this year. The only thing that saved the committee here was that the stands were sited on the row of stage modules otherwise used by dancers on stage waiting to compete.
The podiums for each stage were placed so any dancer whose choreography took them behind the podium was effectively invisible to that stages' adjudicator. Again, I don't remember this being a problem in previous years.
The Men's Room across from the ballrooms was changed into a Women's room for the duration of the feis. If the committee's going to do this, they could at least post on the door where the several hundred feis fathers and dozen or so male dancers affected by this decision could find another Men's Room.
Deep but narrow stages downstairs.
The downstairs ballrooms were (as last year) on the narrow side, and were frequently crowded early in the day. The traffic management pattern onto and off the stage that I mentioned above helped reduce this a bit.

GRADE

C. . Several times I felt like I had stepped into a time warp and emerged in the 2003 edition of this feis.

OPERATIONS

WHAT WENT RIGHT

Preregistration had a (brief) buffet line, along with live music.
Because they post music scores the next day instead of having an awards ceremony Friday night, it makes for an earlier bedtime for dancer/musicians.
A strictly-enforced No Camping policy in the main hall, which also contributed to the relative ease of movement throughout the facility compared to previous years.
The Feile Minnesota system of competition listing at the stage (Now, Next, and Calling) was in use again this year. There just wasn't enough room to run it correctly.
Niall O'Leary was used as a floating musician so other musicians could take an extended break
It appeared Mike Mullane was being used as a floating adjudicator throughout the day.
Significant load balancing of Prelim and Championship competitions was done as ballrooms downstairs finished with their scheduled competitions. There were also enough judges to run two of the three ballrooms as Championship-level stages, which contributed to the feis' early end.
The tradition of ballistic candy at the end of the day continues.
A big kudo to the Stage D monitor who produced a bottle of water for Devonna when she exhibited symptoms of dehydration.
Not only was the After-feis Mass conducted before the Treble Reel, a hold was put on the Treble Reel competitions until Mass was completed.
The stage monitor for the Arts and Crafts room had pre-prepared competition numbers for Devonna's Soda Bread and Photography entries.

WHAT WENT WRONG

Next year, the stage monitor for music competitions needs to announce before the night starts that all cellphones are to be turned off
Luke had problems continually adjusting his step to the changing tempo being played by the musician on stages A/B.
The Single Jig seemed a bit slow for Devonna and I, but we don't have the years of experience with judging its tempo that we have with all our other steps.
The musician for stages C/D was not informed that there was still one more reel competition to play for Adults and started into a jig for our Open/PW reel.
We're not sure what happened, but Niall O'Leary's tempo for the Adult Hornpipe competitions was way slow. This was puzzling, since there wasn't a problem with his Treble Jig tempo.
Stage C monitors tried to force an Adult 4-hand jig to dance to reel music, and succeeded for eight bars.
Nit: something could have been said in the program about where to pick up Arts/Crafts entries at the end of the day
Results posting was on the slow side for a feis that was using an automated system. I found out why afterwards -- the eFeis Competition Manager software that the committee was using was malfunctioning. The committee had to go to a more manual system of transcribing scores into Competition Manager, which slowed things down and made for sizable crowds in the Results Room for most of the day.

To the committee's credit, they bit the bullet and went to a more manual transcription the moment they realized there was a critical software issue. I'm not sure I can say enough good things about their backbone in making the correct decision here, especially when it was guaranteed to anger a lot of dancers and parents who weren't aware of what was happening behind the scenes. Perhaps the comittee should have explained over the PA what was happening.

On a related note, this is the third feis we have attended in a year that has used eFeis and had problems with Tabulation. I can believe operator malfunction at up to two of them (Cincinnati (Queen City) and Nation's Cap), but believing operator malfunction was the cause of problems at three feisanna is beginning to strain credulity.