2006Southern Tier Feis

When:	August 19th, 2006
Where:	Broome Community College Ice Rink Binghamton, NY
Competitors:	Ges (vocal) Devonna (parent-child/soda bread) Rebekah (dancing/parent-child) Rachel (dancing/soda bread) Luke (dancing/soda bread)
Why We Went:	This was one of our two contingency feisanna for getting Rebekah qualified for the Midwest Oireachtas
Previously Reviewed:

ORGANIZATION

No website. To discover any information pre-feis, you had to either read through the syllabus or wait for the stage schedule to be posted on Feisworx.
No pre-registration the night before.
A list of hotels near the feis site was provided in small print on the front of the syllabus. It was not obvious whether a feis rate had been negotiated with any of them in advance. I do know it was impossible to get into any of them a month in advance.

B-.

Traditional set started the day, followed by Figures. I toyed with whether this was right or wrong because Rebekah had to change shoes so rapidly to do the Parent/Child.
Beginner and Advanced Beginner competitions danced next, followed by Novice level competitions, then Open/Prizewinner. If we didn't have Set or Figures, we didn't have to be there until Lunch.

The one problem with this committee's style of stage scheduling is minor, unavoidable, and only affects split-level people such as Rachel. She had to change out of her hard shoes to do her open/PW reel.
Only one level of adult competitions.
Set competitions were done in two-year increments (U11, U13, etc), and combined both Novice and Open/PW dancers. This made for a very large U13 competition, and had Rebekah dancing against Rachel.

B+.

The rest of the family is going to slam me for making this point a What Went Right: the inside temperature started the day in the low- to mid-60's.
Food could be purchased and consumed in the lobby outside of the rink.

The rink (and its dance stages) could only be entered at two points, one of which was right on top of the exit to the lobby.
Since there was no dedicated space or coat rack to display solo dresses for sale, the railing on one of the ramps to the seating areas was used. Unfortunately, this was the railing next to the lobby exit.
Results could have been posted 30 feet to the left of where they actually were posted, where there was actually room between the building walls and the rink walls to handle a crowd. without blocking traffic.

Feisworx was on-site, which was very useful when Luke's competition number never got handed to me and I needed it re-printed that morning.
Extra numbers were waiting for soda bread and arts contestants when their entries were dropped off in the cultural room.

The musician on Rebekah's stage had an odd idea on what constituted a tempo of 113 for the Reel.
Infrequent (at best) adjudicator rotation. Rachel had the same adjudicator for all her Novice dances, who then rotated to Rebekah's stage before her Slip Jig and stayed there for the rest of her competitions.

B+.