A feis looks, from the outside, like any other dance competition: a stage, a musician, adjudicators at a table, numbers pinned to dancers. Then you open the syllabus and find three hundred separate competitions in a single day. Irish dancing is organised on two independent axes at once — age group and competitive grade — and that grid is what makes a feis the hardest event of its size to run on paper, and the reason so many organisers eventually go looking for feis competition software. This guide explains how feiseanna are actually structured: the age groups, the grade ladder, the dances competed, how adjudication and qualification work, and what a committee has to build before entries open.

The thing that surprises every new feis organiser: grade is not age

In most school arts festivals, one participant sits in exactly one bracket: an eleven-year-old is in the upper-primary group and that is the whole classification. A feis does not work that way. Every solo dancer occupies a cell in a grid:

• Age group — a narrow, single-year band. A typical syllabus runs Under 6, Under 7, Under 8 and so on through Under 19, then a Senior category above that. Solo competitors dance in their own age group; there is no combining bands to make the numbers work.
• Competitive grade — a progression ladder that has nothing to do with birthdays. A dancer starts at the entry grade and climbs by winning, so a fourteen-year-old who started last year and a seven-year-old prodigy can genuinely be in the same grade.

That second axis is where paper systems break. It is not a rule you can bend for convenience either — the grade ladder is defined in the governing rulebook the feis runs under, and it is deliberately independent of age. Get it wrong at setup and every result, every promotion and every entry for next season inherits the error.

The grade ladder, bottom to top

The grades carry Irish names, and knowing what they mean is the difference between reading a syllabus and guessing at it. Broadly, a dancer progresses:

1. Bun Ghrád — the entry grade. First-timers and dancers in their first season or two.
2. Tús Ghrád — the next step up, reached by placing at the grade below.
3. Meán Ghrád — the intermediate grade, where hard-shoe technique starts to separate dancers properly.
4. Ard Ghrád — the highest of the graded levels, and the last stop before championship dancing.
5. Preliminary Championship — the first championship tier. A dancer competes a set of dances as one combined competition rather than dance by dance.
6. Open Championship — the top tier, and the route toward regional and world-level qualification.

Two structural consequences matter to the organiser. First, promotion is per dance in the graded levels — a dancer can be in one grade for the reel and a different grade for the hornpipe, which multiplies the entry list again. Second, championships are scored differently from graded competitions: they combine several dances into one result, so they need their own competition setup, their own adjudication panel and their own results treatment. Do not model a championship as “just another item”.

The dances a feis actually competes

A feis syllabus is built from a fixed vocabulary of dances, split by footwear and by whether the entry is a solo or a team. Note that a feis under Irish dance rules is a dancing competition only — traditional singing, instrumental music and storytelling belong to a different circuit of competitions entirely, and putting them in your syllabus will confuse entrants about which event they are attending.

Dance	Shoe	Entry	Notes for the organiser
Reel	Soft	Individual	Offered at every age group and every graded level — usually your largest single competition
Light Jig	Soft	Individual	Common at the lower grades and younger age groups
Slip Jig	Soft	Individual	Traditionally danced by girls in the older groups; check your syllabus convention before publishing
Single Jig	Soft	Individual	Frequently a graded-level dance rather than a championship one
Treble Jig	Hard	Individual	Hard shoe — noticeably longer stage time per dancer, plan the schedule for it
Hornpipe	Hard	Individual	The other core hard-shoe dance; usually paired with treble jig in championships
Traditional Set Dance	Hard	Individual	Danced to a fixed traditional tune from an accepted list
Open Set Dance	Hard	Individual	Championship-level; the dancer’s own choreography to a chosen set tune, at a chosen speed
Céilí Dance	Soft	Team	Fixed figures danced by a team — needs a roster, and one school may enter several teams
Figure Dance	Soft	Team	Choreographed team piece; the same roster and multiple-team issues apply

The team dances deserve a separate thought at setup. A céilí or figure entry is not a person, it is a named team with an explicit roster, and one school will commonly enter more than one team in the same competition. Your results have to identify the team, not merely the school it came from, or the podium announcement will be ambiguous the moment a school takes first and third.

How a feis is adjudicated

Adjudication in Irish dance has two properties that shape everything downstream, and both need to be set up correctly before the first dancer takes the stage.

• Adjudicators mark a raw score out of 100 per dancer per dance. That raw mark is the input, not the output. It is not a rank, and it is not comparable across adjudicators without conversion.
• Championships sit under a panel, not a single judge. A minimum of three adjudicators sit on Preliminary and Open Championship competitions. Each marks independently; the panel’s marks are then combined through the official points system, which converts raw marks into placement points before a winner exists.

This is the part organisers most often underestimate. Between the adjudicator’s sheet and the published result there is a conversion step — raw marks to points, points totalled across the dances of a championship, ties resolved by the published rule. Done by hand on a busy stage day, with three panels marking simultaneously, it is slow and it is exactly where mistakes get made in front of an audience. Set the maximum score, the criteria and the panel size once at competition setup and the conversion stops being a person’s job.

Why a feis syllabus explodes — do the arithmetic before you print it

Here is the number that explains why feiseanna outgrow spreadsheets faster than any other event type on our books. Take a modest syllabus: fifteen age groups from Under 6 to Senior, four graded levels, eight solo dances. That is 15 × 4 × 8 = 480 distinct solo competitions before you have added a single championship or team dance. Every one of them needs its own entry list, its own stage slot, its own adjudicator sheet and its own result.

Almost no feis offers every cell in that grid — committees prune it, offering fewer dances at the youngest ages and combining thin competitions where the rules allow. But the pruning itself is the work, and it has to be decided and published before entries open, because a dancer’s family is choosing which competitions to pay for. Practical advice from events this size:

• Publish the syllabus grid, not a prose list. Entrants read a feis syllabus as a table of age group against grade. Give them that table.
• Decide your minimum-entry rule in advance. What happens when Under 7 Ard Ghrád Hornpipe draws two dancers? Combining age groups, combining grades, or running it as-is are all defensible — announcing the choice on the day is not.
• Number the competitions and put the number on everything. The stage board, the adjudicator’s sheet, the entry confirmation and the results sheet should all carry the same competition number. On a multi-stage day this single discipline prevents more chaos than any other.
• Plan stage time by shoe, not by headcount. Hard-shoe dances take materially longer per competitor than soft-shoe. A schedule built on an average will drift by the afternoon.

Setting a feis up in eTalenter

eTalenter models a feis as a judged Arts event, and the two-axis structure maps onto the setup directly. The single-year bands — Under 6 through Under 19 and Senior — are entered once as age groups. The dances go into the competition catalogue, then get assigned to the age groups you actually offer, each with its participation type (Individual for the solos, Team for céilí and figure dances), its maximum score, its time limit and its entry fee. The grade ladder is carried on the event’s own level structure, so a dancer’s grade travels with them rather than being retyped into every competition.

From there, families register online and the committee reviews, approves or sends back submissions before they hit the entry list. Competitor numbers and cards print from the same data. Each adjudicator scores on their own device against the number on the dancer’s card — three panellists on a championship, each marking independently — and the system totals, converts, applies your points and tie-break rules, and flags anything that needs the committee’s decision. Results publish online, to a podium display, or to social cards, and certificates and trophy stickers print from the same marks. Where the event feeds a larger circuit, qualifiers promote upward instead of being re-entered by hand.

The setup is a template, not a bespoke build: eTalenter ships a ready feis structure with the age groups, dances and participation types already in place, so a committee starts from a working syllabus and prunes it rather than typing 480 competitions from scratch.

Read how the panel and the tabulation work in our judge scoring and tabulation guide, see how age groups and level structures are built in setting up age groups and houses, and compare the scoring approach used in other dance circuits in our guide to dance competition scoring software and the dance competition score sheet template.

Frequently asked questions

What are the grades in a feis, and how do you move up?

The graded levels run Bun Ghrád, Tús Ghrád, Meán Ghrád and Ard Ghrád, with Preliminary Championship and Open Championship above them. Dancers move up by placing in competition, not by getting older — the grade ladder is independent of the age groups. In the graded levels promotion is generally per dance, so the same dancer can hold different grades in different dances.

How many adjudicators does a feis need?

Graded competitions are commonly run by a single adjudicator, but Preliminary and Open Championships require a panel of at least three, each marking independently out of 100. Those raw marks are then converted through the official points system and combined across the dances in the championship — which is why a championship result takes longer to produce than a graded one, and why the conversion is worth automating.

Can one dance school enter more than one team in a céilí competition?

Yes, and it is common. Each team is a separate entry with its own name and its own roster of dancers, so your entry list, stage board and results must identify the team rather than just the school. Build the teams at registration with their members attached, and cap the number of teams per school in the rules if you need to protect the schedule.

Running a feis this season?

Whether you are organising a local feis of a few hundred entries or a championship weekend across several stages, the grid is the same and so is the work. Explore eTalenter’s competition management software, message us on WhatsApp, or write to support@etalenter.com and we will set up your syllabus, your grades, your adjudication panels and your results the way your rulebook defines them.