Indianapolis Feis

The Indianapolis Feis was held on June 8th, 2013 at the Indianapolis Convention Center in Indianapolis, Indiana.

A NOTE OF THANKS! Some of you may have seen my tweets where we screwed up and failed to register for this feis. Realizing our mistake the Wednesday before the feis, I tweeted on Thursday what happened and that we would miss it. One of the moms from the school hosting the feis offered assistance and put me in touch with the registrar who gladly accepted our late registration, even though it was past the deadline. They turned a negative into a big positive.

NOTE: I am sorry to say since we left for vacation literally right after the feis, and I am just now getting to the review, nearly two weeks after the event, I may be a little light on the details. You do enough of these things and they all blend together.

Venue – This is the first time I have attended the Indianapolis Feis and the first feis I have attended at the Indianapolis Convention Center, and I thought it was excellent as a feis venue.

There was lots of room for camping but I thought stage layout was a bit cramped, especially for the two stages right as you walked in the door. The seating for those two backed up to each other with only about 10 feet or so as a walkway between. People tended to congregate in that area to view the dancing which made walking through there very difficult, and I am sorry to say, a lot of the time it was feis volunteers that were adding to the traffic jam.

This is another feis with huge stages. The smaller ones were 28 x 24 and the larger ones 32 x 32. I did not see any slip or trip issues and heard no complaints about stage condition. I seem to remember them mopping the stages but I am also suffering from vacation brain.

Seating was more than adequate for the OC & PC stages but was more limited for the other stages.

Feis results were posted on a big wall in the main hall outside the dance area, and awards were in a room on the other side of that same hallway, so it was all convenient.

Parking was very adequate and was only $5, but apparently we chose the farthest possible parking garage from where the actual dancing was, and walked for about 10 – 15 minutes to get to the dance hall.

Vendors were at one end of the dance hall/room kind of off by themselves. Concessions and bathrooms were outside the main area in the same hall as the results and awards.

Venue Score: 8.5  I think it could be better if they plan stage a little farther apart, otherwise great. 

Judges – Daughter danced 2 times and had 2 different judges. That is what I like to see, but I determined the pattern for judge rotation was every hour, so it was possible to be judged multiple times by the same judge depending on how the comps ran. At least there was an obvious effort to rotate judges so kudos.

Judge Score: 8

Music – As far as I could tell, each stage had its own musician and there did not seem to be any issues, and I heard no complaints about the music.

Musician Score: 9.5

Food – Alright, gotta admit it, complete brain fart on this one… call it vacation fuzz, but I really don’t recall all the details, so, I won’t even include this. I can say I do not recall any real positives or negatives though.

Food Score: NA

Vendors – George the shoe guy,  the feis tshirts, the wig ladies, the ribbon key fob lady, some jewelry etc… so over all, not terrible. See a complete list of the vendors.

Vendor Score: 7

Results – OK, this was this feis’s (what is the possessive of that word?) big negative. Results were posted extremely slowly, extremely…. not Akron slow, but slow enough for people to grumble about it and for people who were posting the results to apologize as they came out.

Results issues were compounded by technical difficulties and results came out both hand printed and from a printer.

Awards were right across from the results, so that was good.

Results Score: 4.5

Feis Flow -Not too bad. My daughters dances were split by lunch(which seemed to run long to me) and that always slows things down.

The stage we were on moved pretty well. The morning shift really seemed to have it together, and had dancers lined up and ready to go as soon as possible. The afternoon shift was not quite as organized. Here is where vacation fog sets in again… and the details are limited.

Feis Flow Score: 7

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 – 7.25

And the WTF Rating – a 7.41. A couple adjustments, could easily be higher, especially results :(

What did you think?

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