NORTH KILDARE CHAMPIONSHIPS

Thank you to everyone who attended the North Kildare Championships at the weekend. We had a huge turn out of dancers and the feis ran very smoothly with no breaks or delays whatsoever. However with the huge numbers, it was a late night on Saturday! We had correctly predicted this and it was the main reason for changing the days around. It was fantastic to see all the dancers especially the younger dancers back in their costumes, full of life so late on Saturday night for the parade of champions. The function room was packed to capacity for the parade and everyone, dancers, audience and adjudicators were in great form and there was a wonderful atmosphere. Thank you to Stephen Carolan for your wonderful music and many thanks to everyone for all the lovely emails, texts and Facebook messages.

The Floors

The dance floor was 100 ft x 16 ft of wooden parquet click flooring which cost €1015 to hire for the weekend. The black Marley floor covering was laid over the parquet floor and was hired from An Comhdhail. It was laid on Thursday giving ample time to settle for the weekend. Additionally, it was tried and tested on Friday evening by our own dancers! The competition floor size that is stipulated in the An Comhdhail rules is 20’ x 16’ and the floors were 25’ x 16’ at the 2012 North Kildare Championships. This gave the dancers an extra 5 ft on each competition floor and the dancers danced in twos from the 3:30 session on. There were a number of falls on Saturday and just one small slip on Sunday. In the championships (where most of the falls happened) the dancers had 50 feet x 16 feet to dance on! It is inevitable that falls will occur at a feis but we were just unlucky on Saturday. We take the health and safety of all the competitors very seriously and we filled the correct criteria for a safe, even and well laid floor surface for the 2012 feis. In the 10 years hosting the feis this was the first year this happened. We are planning to purchase a new type of Marley dance floor for next years feis just to be on the safe side.

Regards

Michelle & Rachel