Dayton Feis 2013

The 41st annual Dayton Feis was held on June 22nd, 2013 at Sinclair Community College in Dayton, Ohio.

Venue – This is the second time I have done the Dayton Feis at Sinclair. If you are curious here is the review for last year. I don’t think the venue is bad, but I think it has a few limitations.

The feis was split into three floors of the building. The competitions held on the lowest level in an indoor track and field building, a second floor that had a cafeteria, the tabulation room and where the OC/PC presentations were done, and the top level where results were posted and awards were presented. Lots of stairs so not the best for people with limited mobility, but there were elevators available.

There were six stages, which in general were good sizes. The smallest was 24 x 20 and the largest was 32 x 32 (one of the champ stages). While the smaller stage is bigger than some I have seen, the issue with this one is that it was half of a joined stage (stages 5 & 6) that were split down the middle by a piece of tape. Last year I was OK with that, but I am less of a fan this year, especially with the size of some of the comps on those stages. These stages were sharing a musician like last year, but I do feel there was enough room to separate these two, add a little more size and still share the musician.

I saw multiple slips and falls and could see ‘stuff’ on one of the champ stages. Couldn’t tell if it was hair pins, or whatever, but it was obvious. I did not see any floor cleanup or mopping during the day, not saying there was none, but I saw none.

Chairs seemed adequate, a bit heavy for OC/PC but that seems to be the norm. There were lots of standing viewers.

Camping in the dance area was very limited, but the second level had a lot more area available, just not as convenient.

As mentioned, results and awards were on the third floor, and as long as you were done dancing, that was cool, you could just wait upstairs (which is also where you exited the building). Otherwise, having them two floors up caused a lot of walking and stairs during the day.

Parking was plentiful, pretty close, and only $2.

Vendors were at one end of the room, and there were a lot more than last year. I thought they were easy to get to, and separated nicely from the stages.

Venue Score: 8  Would have been better with more camping in the competition area and if everything was on the same floor, otherwise, really not that bad.

Judges – The girl child danced 4 times and was judged by 4 different judges. As good as it gets in my opinion.

Judge Score: 10

Music – All stages except 5 & 6 had their own musician. 5 & 6 shared one, but that really did not seem to be too much of an issue. I did witness one rather long stoppage when dancers were lined up on both stages, and they just milled about waiting for the musician to return.

Maybe my suggestion of separating stages 5 & 6 will be seen and they can add on another musician next year. :)

Musician Score: 7.5

Food – Using the college concession worked to the feis advantage. Food was plentiful, had some variety and was priced for college students. There were also healthy options like fruit cups and hummus and chips in addition to pizza etc…

Food Score: 9.5

Vendors –  A big improvement over last year! George the shoe guy had his table, and the ribbon key chain lady, and the shortbread guy (if you are from this area, you probably know these people), and the wig people, and the t shirt table that had a nice variety of add-ons for the t-shirts. In addition though, there were several jewelry tables, and several vendors with Irish items like hats, scarves, shirts, nic nacs etc…  A nice browsing/shopping experience.

Vendor Score: 9.5 

Results – For reasons I will explain in another post this week, I thought the results were handled pretty well. The ones that I checked were up on the board within 30 minutes.

Dayton is an eFeis feis so electronic results were not available right away like some are on FeisWorx, and the feis was not tweeting or otherwise posting results electronically

Awards were on the same floor with the results, and they had a variety of awards available for Prizewinner 1st place winners.

If there were any negatives, it would be that the results needed to be posted in a more organized fashion. They were just posted as they came out and there was no order to them. IMHO, each comp should have been grouped together and posted in the same area on the board so all results for that comp could be easily viewed.

Results Score: 8

Feis Flow – Not too bad. We started at 10ish and had the last dance at around 3. Huge comps and lots of them slowed everything down a little, but without adding more stages, I don’t know how that could have been better. Our day would have been longer but they moved a few of the last dances to another stage to help get them get done earlier. The stages moved along pretty well I thought.

I did hear complaints that the lunch took to long with someone saying an hour and a half, but I was trying to sell a dress, eat some pizza and find my daughter, so I really did not notice.

Feis Flow Score: 7.5

Scoring

Remember, scoring now has 2 parts, the feis score consisting of Judges, Music, Results and Flow and then the overall WTF rating for all items including the venue, food and vendors.

Feis Score – 8.25

And the WTF Rating – a 8.57. Great job Dayton!

Remember to look for a special Dayton Feis 2013 post coming later this week.

What did you think?

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