Bluegrass Feis

The 2nd Annual Bluegrass Feis was held on May 12th, 2013 at the Lexington Convention Center in Lexington, KY.

Read this whole review, starts a little negative but has its great points and finishes very strong!

Please add your feis rating for the Bluegrass Feis at the bottom of this review!

NOTE: If you are going to do two feisanna and write reviews in one weekend, take notes. Surprising how fast things overlap in the brain :)

Venue – This is the first feis I have attended at the Lexington Convention Center, and I liked the space for feis venue, but…There were seven performance stages in one large room but I do not think the space was used well for stage setup.

NOTE: We were in and out of this feis pretty quickly so I really only saw the OC/PC stage and the stage my daughter danced on. Comments about other stages appreciated.

Stage 7 was set up for OC and PC and it was big, but that is where good stage size stopped (remember my note above).

We were on Stage 5 which was literally attached to Stage 6 with only a strip of tape separating them. I saw dancers crossing over the tape while dancing, so if that is any indication, the stages were too small. Mix the stage size with some big comps and things were crowded.

Camping was adequate and as far as I could tell, people honored the No Camping signs. People did do that ‘camp in the viewing seats and right behind the seats for the stages’ thing, which made viewing more difficult. Seating at the stages for viewers was not to bad in spite of that, but if all the comps were big it would have been tight.

Feis results were posted on a big wall at the far end of the hall, kind of in one corner, and the awards were on the same end of the hall at the other corner, so fairly convenient.

Parking was adequate and FREE, but was a bit of a walk from the dance area. There was an option to drive up to drop off however.

Venue Score: 6 – Sorry, the stage setup was an issue in my opinion. (see note above)

Judges – Daughter danced 3 times and had 2 different judges. Would prefer a different judge for each dance, and I actually saw judges from the Queen City Feis sitting in the viewing area, so they were available for rotation, but I of course don’t have all the info. Rating is based on what could have been based on my observation.

Judge Score: 6

Music – Remembering I only saw our stage and the Champ stage. There was only one musician for stages 5 and 6, sitting behind the stage were the two stages were joined. There were times when one stage was waiting for the other to finish dancing before they could continue because of the musician issue.

Musician Score: 5

Food – I cannot rate food because I only saw one stand off to the side of the hall, and did not look for others. We did not eat there. Food score not included in this review.

Food Score: NA

Vendors – George the shoe guy, the feis tshirts, and a few small tables. Extremely limited. I like to shop for Irish stuff so this was disappointing.

Vendor Score: 5

Results – Here is were things start sounding a lot less negative :)  Great job here! Results were out quickly, and were in the 15-25 minute range. A friend tweeted me that FeisWorx was posting results real time, but the hard copy made it to the wall very quickly.

Results Score: 10

Feis Flow – Excellent! My daughter danced 3 dances (skipping the TJ again) and from start to finish (including waiting for results) she was done in about 2 hours. They had six different age comps on the stage and they rotated very quickly, but five of the six comps had only 5 – 10 dancers, one comp had over 20 dancers.

Something else that impressed me was the awards table. Each person at the table had a laptop and when the dancer walked up, they looked up the dancers number and had all the results for the dancer. No searching through folders, no hard copies, no initialing papers, etc… Very cool, first time I have seen that (I think).

Combine that with the quick results and good venue(potential to be better), I would say I was very pleased with the flow of the Bluegrass Feis.

Feis Flow Score: 10

And the WTF Rating – a 7.0. For only the second feis, I thought Bluegrass did a great job and the score was brought down by some things they could probably change fairly easily (I have never run a feis, so that is my opinion). I thought they did some things REALLY well and I highly recommended this feis. Looking forward to seeing it develop in the future.

What did you think?

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