Cultural Rhythms

This past Saturday, I danced. And I don't mean Zumba, for once.

With a group of Filipino students, we danced a traditional dance called Sayaw sa Bangko, or Dance of the Benches, at a show called Cultural Rhythms. Cultural Rhythms is an annual celebration of Harvard's diversity and is a showcase of various different groups on campus that do performances of some kind of cultural significance. I watched the show last year and knew that I just had to perform in it the next year with the Harvard Philippine Forum.

Conveniently, I became the Co-President of Harvard Philippine Forum with another Filipino in my year, Brian. Performing in Cultural Rhythms became a priority for us, and when the time came around, we immediately became proactive about our participation and tried to get a group together.

That's the intro. There's a lot I can say about having done this performance, but I'll post pictures and the video first so as not to be boring.

The smile of a Broadway star
Alternative caption: "I'm king of the world!" 

Also applauding all our work and dedication to making this happen 

Ready to attach the pentagon formation

Benches level 2

Can you tell we're Co-Presidents? 

Literally can now trust Brian with my life

Brian and me talking to LUCY LIU

WHADDAYA THINK OF THAT

Putting it together was kind of a shit show because we only had a week to practice together before auditions, and the benches were kind of...not super stable. When we first got them. We somehow dealt with them and got them in acceptable condition. Brian and I were also a bit irritated at people for not taking our *mandatory* practices and practice times seriously. FUN FACT: the entire group of ten never performed together until the actual show. After lamenting (The Filipino spirit is waterproof...but not to tears!) and sending threatening and pitiful emails for a certain amount of time, we were eventually just purely entertained by the hilarity and patheticness–Blogger says that's not a word but I'm keeping it–of it all. 

Apparently, during auditions, the committee was having some doubts to our preparedness to perform this and concerns with safety, but two of my good friends who helped decide made a very strong case for us and we were in!
After that, we had just around three weeks before the actual show.
Most of the time, I wouldn't practice the high jumps on the stacked benches because there weren't enough people during the practices to hold them down, lol. At first, I was kind of terrified (still clearly remember the first time I walked to the top of the final formation), but for this dance and the chance to perform in Sanders Theater I was willing to do anything. When Brian said we would do that dance, I wanted quite badly to be the part of the pair that was left dancing on the highest stack, due to some kind of primadonna complex that hadn't yet been fulfilled during my time here. (Politically, it made sense, because Brian and I were the Co-Presidents after all, so I wasn't worried.) One of our board members who had to hold down the benches would say "That took a few years off of my life" whenever we practiced those jumps in the stacked formation, so I figure that's another reason we didn't actually practice those jumps that much.

In the end, as it usually does with Harvard Philippine Forum events and stuff, it worked out amazingly. (I'll probably discuss having been leader of this group more once my term is...over...)

Everyone showed up at the actual show, thank god, and as you may have seen in the video the crowd was absolutely awed and stunned and shocked by our performance. The Dean of Harvard College himself congratulated me, told me he had never seen anything like that before so it was a performance that everyone would remember, and then showed me this article the next day: http://www.thecrimson.com/flyby/article/2016/2/21/cultural-rhythms-2016/ Oh right, the business of talking to Lucy Liu. Every year, the Harvard Foundation picks someone to award the "Artist of the Year," and it's usually some kind of artist who is also involved in humanitarian work. The Artist of the Year sits on the stage during the show, and two representatives from each group that performs get to have a conversation with her about their act. So yeah. That was that.

Words cannot explain the immense pride I have at us having accomplished this dance, as well as the pride we all felt for being Filipino, belonging to such a culture that seems to enjoy having this element of danger in its forms of entertainment. Not only that, but the thrill of performing, the exhilaration, was such a high point in my semester. The crowd's gasps and cheers are definitely gonna help power me throughout the rest of the school year.

This year's Cultural Rhythms was, without a doubt, a highlight of my Harvard experience, and I'll just use this final sentence to be "so cheesy that the lactose intolerant people in the audience are going to shit themselves" (in Brian's words, when he told us to smile throughout the entire dance) and say that I wouldn't be feeling this way without my incredible group of dysfunctional performers, and the rural people in Pangasinan who created this dance as a way to have fun in the first place.