2006Houston New Year's Feis

When:	January 7th, 2006
Where:	Wyndham Greenspoint Hotel and Conference Center Houston, TX
Competitors:	Ges (dancing/vocal/soda bread) Devonna (dancing/soda bread) Rebekah (dancing/soda bread) Rachel (dancing/vocal/soda bread) Luke (dancing/soda bread)
Why We Went:	We liked it last year, and well enough to start our post-Christmas vacation with it this year.
Previously Reviewed:	2005

ORGANIZATION

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.

Same stage scheduling for solo competitions.
Beginners danced first, and were done within half an hour
Non-champion dancers were next
Prelims and Champions danced starting around 3PM, which meant they could sleep in. Not like I'm bitter or anything, mind you...
A Mass was scheduled after the feis.
Adults were allowed to compete in the oldest Youth Treble Reel category without jeopardizing their eligibility to compete as adults. If it hadn't been so late and my foot not hurting, I would have done it.

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. They've done this both years we've been there, so they should institutionalize it. As per NAFC rules, they do have the right to combine smaller competitions, and I don't think that rule is limited to dancing.
Figure competitions for Devonna and I were between our hardshoe competitions and Trad Set, which made two fairly rapid shoe changes necessary on our part. To their credit, the committee did tell us we shouldn't rush things and that they would hold competitions if necessary.
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 in some of her steps, too.
Rebekah and Rachel arguably had enough dancers in their competitions to justify splitting them by one-year intervals instead of the two-year interval common to Southern region feisanna.
A somewhat limited selection of vendors. When you're this small, though, that's not much of a problem.
Devonna is still peeved by the lack of a parent/child competition
No ceili this year :-(

A-.

It didn't seem to be crowded, which may be directly related to the fact so few people were registered to compete.
The sound system was much better than last year
Plenty of room to warm up, both inside and outside the ballroom.
Even at the end of the day (for us), there was cold water and cups. The hotel is very agressive about water service for the feis.
If you were waiting for the Treble Reel, you were within walking distance of a mall. That made the time go a little faster.
The ballroom was open for practicing on Friday night

Be very careful with the feis hotel if you call them for reservations, and verify that you've gotten room(s) for the dates you think you have. We got off the road the afternoon before the feis expecting our hotel room, only to find that they had made our reservations for one night later. There was allegedly no room left at the inn for that night, but they did put us up at a Marriott a block away that was actually a better hotel.

The computerized big-screen stage numbering system from last year was modified to allow messages to be shown to the entire ballroom. You never had the "What did they just say" effect one gets at a feis which attempts to use a sitewide PA system to notify everyone of something. The committee also (mis)used it to needle Pat King periodically throughout the day.
Pat King was the Energizer Bunny of musicians that day, often playing for twenty minutes non-stop. The stage monitors were really, really good about getting competitions on and off stage while the music was still playing.
Rather than make the few adults in the Trad Set competition wait for a large slow-speed hardshoe competition to finish, the stage monitors flipped the order of competitions around to get the Adults out of the way. The kids were only inconvenienced for five minutes, while we were out of their way.
Even though there was only one level of Soda Bread competition, separate trophies were given the top placing adult and child
We liked it that someone sponsored a trophy for the Adult Open Jig. We don't get very many of those
We can't say enough good things about the attitude and friendliness of the stage monitors at this feis. They're that good.

A+.