I just came out of the one event that has me busy and distracted these past couple of months! This year's East West Fest - an annual event of cultural booths and performances from all over. I had the temerity to actually participate and boy was it a wild ride!
Apparently, last year, there weren't enough interest to actually have a performance from the Filipinos so they settled for just a cultural booth. This year, with the influx of us new Filipinos into the EWC, we had enough to actually get something going - a most ambitious "something" at that... we ended up with a 15min medley of performances from across the Philippines: an Ifugao tribal dance, Kapamalong-malong (Malong dance), Tinikling(!) and a couple of songs to break the flow. I was part of the Tinikling group (yes, I danced the tinikling!) which was our "wow" climax for our performance - apparently, people were pretty impressed with the skill involved with the dance, hehe.
Unfortunately, since I was dancing, I didn't have pictures but there were a lot of other people who had cameras out so I hope to get copies in the future... one of our friends here video taped the whole performance so I'll have to see if I can get a hold of a copy ^_^
For now, here's some pictures of the rest of the Fest:
Here's me with Rose, Rusyan and one EWC Filipino Alumni behind our humble Cultural "booth".
Here's a wider view of our handiwork. That's Jovel in Ifugao costume and Rose in the middle. I pretty much handled most of the the booth logistics: the signage and writeups as well as keeping tabs with the artefacts. It was pretty tedious work but was a welcome break from all the math and physics I'm getting swamped with in my classes. By the way, thanks to the Airheads for the Mindanao Salakot that they had me bring over - it was a really welcome addition to locally accessible Filipino implements ^_^ Bulk of the items were from a local Filipino, Elena, who's been gathering all these knick-knacks from garage sales and whatnots as a personal hobby.
It's unfortunate that having a cultural booth prevents you from actually watching the performancing going on the whole afternoon (from 1:00 - 6:00pm). I had the opportunity to step away from the booth for a bit and snapped a few photos of the other performances. Here's an excellent Korean Drum ensemble...
... and here's an amazing Tahitian dance troupe. I swear, if their skirts were any longer, they would've been able to sweep the stage clean of debris... they reminded me so much of brooms, hehe.
Here's Rose's group of ethnomusicology majors doing a series of songs from Sulawesi...
And here's me, exhausted after our performance, rewarding myself with a bowl of exorbitantly priced flavored-ice >.< $3 for a bowl, but I felt I deserved it ^_^










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