The 20th Annual Ryan-Kilcoyne School of Irish Dancing Feis was held on October 11, 2014, at the Maple Point Middle School in Langhorne, PA.
Venue
A school. A very small, tight school. This mainly presents issues when it comes to parking and navigating the halls. There are vendors in the small hallways, right next to award postings. It is a difficult feat to get between a beginning mother and her much needed pictures of her newest dancer who just received her first 1st. It could take you several minutes to get to the gym navigating the maze. There are many unused hallways in this school. Why does everything need to be crowded into 2 narrow hallways?
Rating 6
Food
didn’t see any, but it may have been there. Trying to stay as far away from the crowded hallways as possible.
Vendors
Typical vendors nothing out of the ordinary.
Rating 8
Stages
Most of the stages including one preliminary stage are in the gym. Once you take 5 stages and all of the dancers, parents and feis gear into one small space, I bet you can guess what happens next? Lack of floor space. After about an hour of dancing, it is difficult to even find a path to walk to any stage in the gym. Camping occurs everywhere and anywhere. If there is an open spot on the floor, by all means, drop your stuff there. It won’t matter if you are in the direct path of the stage. The person behind you will need to navigate that one.
Rating 5
Musicians
Good musicians, but it is always difficult for dancers to hear when 5 stages are in close proximity.
Rating 8
Awards
This is the worst part of this feis. The champ awards are held on the opposite side of the school from the prelim stage. The background is a lovely set of red lockers. There is no school banner covering the lockers. Even after the placements are called, the volunteers didn’t even attempt to move out of the background for the parents to take photos. I actually have a picture of my daughter on the podium with a volunteer picking her nose in the background. I think I will frame that one. I understand that you are dealing with limited space, but a simple banner would fix some of this.
Rating 4
Flow
Good, kept to schedule. Awards came out relatively quickly.
This was our third year attending this feis. I felt there was plenty of parking. Yes, the halls are tight. And noisy. The vendors were the same each of our three years and I appreciated that they were in the same spots. I was able to find the wig vendor quickly. The comps were run quite efficiently. My DD danced three Advanced Beginner comps and two Novice comps all by 10:30am! Phew! Awesome! But then….this feis hand tabulates their results. Judges marks and comments are to be picked up at the feis, they are not emailed. There was a 90 minute wait for her three advanced beginner standings to be posted. Then we had to wait in a long line for her marks. Then another line for her medals. The Novice results were posted at 1:00, two and a half hours after she packed away her hard shoes. The line for marks was so insanely long that my poor kid said she actually didn’t care, could we just leave, Mom? As for food, it may have been in the building but the halls were so very crowded, we just lacked the energy and navigational skills to locate it. Staff is always pleasant, always smiling, they work very hard. I appreciate them. Obviously we like this feis enough to return three years. I just wish they’d update the result process.