FSA Culture Night

The Planning Process/Rehearsals

GZ: Hi, welcome to our Culture Night interview with the organizer – the Filipino Student Association (FSA) at UD. Thank you so much for coming! Please introduce yourselves and tell us about the process of planning the Culture Night as well as your roles. 

ZB: Hi, I’m Zendelle Badiang and I’m a senior Computer Science major. I am currently the Vice President of FSA and was previously the Event Coordinator for 2 years. In terms of the timeline, we actually started planning much later this year due to the challenges of getting together safely amid the pandemic. Normally, it would take months to plan and prepare for an in-person Culture Night. However, with this year being online, we were lucky enough to have a closer and more personal collaboration with artists, performers from RSOs, and the University. It seems like everyone was eager to showcase their arts to the audience. Indeed, without Zoom calls, we would not have been able to connect with J.R. Aquino – one of our headliners. So, I would say it was truly a blessing in disguise. 

BB: Hi, I am Bernadette Bautista and I’m a senior serving as the current Event Coordinator of FSA. I was formerly the Philanthropy chair. I believe that my past experience as a Philanthropy chair has allowed me to organize and plan this whole event online, but I could not have done it without the help of my E-board. As an Event Coordinator, I come up with themes for events and activities for general body meetings, and supervise the whole organizational process of an event. The biggest project of the Event Coordinator at FSA is Culture Night, besides the Big-Little program.

GZ: What is Culture Night? 

BB: Culture Night is an annual event to celebrate the uniqueness of cultures around the world. We usually invite artists and performers of Filipino-American descent to headline as well as other multicultural RSOs to showcase their cultures. It is the accumulation of a year-long planning process of every member at FSA and other RSOs. Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, we were unable to host our annual tradition in-person, but still managed to hold it virtually. This year, we invited the Dark Arts Performing Dance Company and Kamaal – an Indian student-led dance group, and previously the Irish dance club as well. 

GZ: I think it is really amazing that you dedicated a lot of time and effort to celebrating Asian culture. Julia, do you want to share a little bit about Culture Night and what you did this year?

JS: Hi, I’m Julia Sayco and I am the Secretary of AAPC and current member of FSA. I participated in the traditional Filipino dancing and facilitated the rehearsal of the dance with my friends. I learned it online and translated the dance to in-person choreography. I contributed to the filming of the dance practices, too.

GZ: How did this year’s planning start out? Did you always know it was going to be virtual or did you have a hybrid plan in mind?

BB: With Culture Night, we have to start planning within the fall semester. We wanted to make sure we had the option, so we booked Mitchell Hall in October. My largest responsibility regarding Culture Night is being the main point of contact with headlining artists and their managers. I have to make sure that we are all on the same page when organizing meetings,setlists, promo packs, etc. We had anticipated and hoped to have the event in-person so we did plan on having it hybrid with the headliners performing virtually and RSOs performing on campus. We even arranged to host only a certain number of students to participate in the dance live at Mitchell. But after meetings with our E-board, we ultimately came to the consensus that we would want the event virtual in regards to the safety of the students. 

GZ: How did you reach out to the headliners? Who were they this year?

BB: We usually select an artist who is of Filipino descent, or who has had a great impact on the Filipino community. While there is a community of Filipino artists who have been popular throughout the country, it is still a very difficult process. Reaching out is not hard, but it can definitely be discouraging to not get a response in a timely manner. Luckily, we were still able to secure the headliners for this year’s event. J.R. Aquino is a singer with nearly 2 decades of performing experience and used to compete on Season 3 of the Voice. The other headliner was Gabe Bondoc, a popular singer/songwriter who has a huge following on social media. His songwriting has allowed him to rise to fame on Youtube. Both are super talented and I am really glad that I had the opportunity to be in contact with them. I will say that being addressed personally in contacts was a pretty cool experience.

GZ: When you did rehearsals, did you find any challenges? How did you overcome them?

JS: I’m not a professional dancer, so learning modern dancing on a virtual platform was challenging. The layout was hard, especially since the screens were flipped. Everyone struggled with following online instructions, so we ended up learning fewer dances for a longer period of time. Fortunately, when the COVID situation got better, we were able to meet up in persona twice a week to put everything together. It was way more helpful, efficient and fun to learn 4 dances, including the modern and traditional Tinikling and the candle dance, in person. 

GZ: Did you know the people you were performing with?

JS: I knew most of the people who were performing since we were all already friends. The girls from my lineage were participating as well. There were a lot of people I didn’t know but after meeting them in person, we all became good friends.

Section 2: The Actual Event

JW: What was your favorite act of the night? 

BB: I tried to refrain from watching all the performances during practices because I wanted to have a genuine live reaction from start to finish. And I have to say I was in awe that there’s so much talent at this university. The headliners that we chose were incredible. We started with our Miss FSA Valerie West singing the Star Spangled Banner, which was then followed by the Filipino national anthem by our last year’s Mr.FSA, Kyle Campo. They were undeniably key elements in the success of the event by conducting the Q&A segments throughout the night to create a personable cultural experience for the audience. 

As I watched all of the FSA dances, I knew how much work and rehearsal was put into their creation. Even though I did not get to participate in dancing this year, I understand the difficulty of learning an unfamiliar choreography that requires collaboration with at least two other people [to hold the sticks] on your own. It was not until three weeks after the virtual dancing workshop that we got to rehearse in person. But eventually, with determination, we were still able to put the dance together so quickly. 

As our RSO knows so well the struggle of performing amid the pandemic, I am also proud of other RSOs that we invited to the Culture Night for pulling together spectacular performances while observing the social distancing guidelines of the university. For instance, the fact that Dark Arts, one of our performers, could not practice during the whole virtual fall semester but still successfully produced a professional performance is undoubtedly praiseworthy.  

The Culture Night is also an opportunity for FSA members to showcase their musical talents. Indeed, I was singing with three other members, who all blew my mind away with our final recording. Even though we did not practice until we could get together safely, all of the performances, including ours, exceeded my expectations. 

To top it all off, we also succeeded in raising funds for the PUSO foundation. We invited the top donors to a meet and greet where they could turn their cameras on [in a webinar] and ask Gabe Bondoc a personal question. The whole process went so smoothly that I could not help feeling grateful to everyone, especially Ryan Allarey – our documentation chair, for working hard behind the scenes to organize such a large-scale virtual event.

GZ: You mentioned the huge contribution of the documentation chair to the event. Can you elaborate on this position and its responsibilities? 

BB: The documentation chair is the latest position on our E-board. Within this role, the individual documents and records all FSA events to create promotional content on our social media. This role is not only different from, but also in close collaboration with the Public Relations chair as it focuses on different creative outlets, such as screen recording and editing clips from breakout room activities to showcase the events. As for the Culture Night, Ryan designs our culture night shirts, handles the technological aspects of the show and works on seamless transitions between performances. I could tell it was incredibly stressful, but as our first documentation chair, he handled it with ease and grace. We are very lucky and proud to have him as part of FSA. 

JW: Was there any outstanding theme or message delivered by performances in the Culture Night? 

ZB: One of the highlights of the Culture Night was cultural dances performed by ethnic groups. For our performance, it was an expression of who we are as both Filipinos and Americans. Even though we are paying homage to our home cultures, we also fused our performance with American culture such as rap, hip hop, and sometimes R&B. That is the reason why you may see some modern dance moves in our choreography. This fusion is to show that we embrace and accept both halves of our identity.

GZ: Did the actual event go as planned? Were there any technical glitches? How did you sort them out?

BB: Coming into the Culture Night, we were all expecting the unexpected and preparing for any possible technical issues that could happen even though we were hoping not to experience any of them. Because we could only reserve a 2-hour time slot within a week in accordance with UD policy, we rushed setting up in 1 hour, made some adaptations at the last minute, and ran late a little bit. For example, when we were having virtual soundchecks with our headliners, the microphone was cut out unexpectedly. But luckily, the problem got sorted out and everything worked perfectly for his performance as well as meet and greet. I want to give credits to Ryan Alleray – our documentation chair and Kevin – the only professional who helped us with setting up the Zoom webinar and made the event work beyond my expectations. 

ZB: Besides the sound system, we also had troubles with our video cameras. One of them could not even attach to the tripod, while the other failed to connect to my laptop. Luckily, Ryan brought his lighting equipment and camera along so we were able to adapt quickly to this technical difficulty. We also had smaller issues such as having to take down the backdrop even though we had already designed it. But overall, I think we have all done a great job of running the show, especially with the incredible insights from Kevin who were kind enough to answer every stupid question we had and came up with every possible solution to our problems.