FIUTS CulturalFest 2015: A look behind the scenes
By Sascha Krause, FIUTS Facilitator
Every year the FIUTS community organizes CulturalFest to celebrate the diversity and talent that international students bring to the UW and the Pacific Northwest. However, this event would not be possible without the help of the FIUTS staff, many UW students, and the UW international community, who work very hard behind the scenes. This blog entry should give you a little impression about the committee work to organize such an event.
This year’s event kicks off with the International Expo on Thursday February 26 from 10:30 AM-3:00 PM at Husky Union Building (HUB). International students and volunteers share insights into their cultures and countries. On Saturday, February 28 the festival continues at 5:00 PM with a Reception and Silent Auction followed by a Performance Showcase at Meany Hall with cultural dance, music, and singing performances from all around the world (tickets are available here).
Back in October, I joined the performance committee which is involved in recruiting, selecting, organizing, and supervising different performance crews from the UW community. So far it was a great experience for me and I made many new friends. But let’s start from the beginning.
A very diverse performance planning committee was created under the leadership of MinhTu Nguyen and Thilini Kahandawaarachchi. I was impressed by our team’s different cultural backgrounds and study experiences that formed and excellent basis to organize the Performance Showcase for CulturalFest 2015. One of our early mile stones on the way to an awesome event required some advertisement to get people and groups from UW to participate. We had lots of fun posting flyers all over the U-District, chalking the campus, and spreading the word when and wherever possible. All our efforts were rewarded by over 35 performance applications from groups and individuals connected to the UW.
Now everybody was looking forward to see and evaluate the performers and their shows. It was amazing to see how much talent is out there in the UW community. We held auditions over three days to help us to decide on the final participants list. During that time Brianna, one of the FIUTS staff members, took care of us so we could focus on the performances.
Almost done, that’s what I thought! But with all this great talent how should we ever make a fair selection of performers for the show? Well, after an afternoon with pizza and long heated discussions we were finally satisfied with the list of performers. Although I have traveled a lot in my life, I learned so much about other countries throughout this process.
Winter break! Short time to recover and prepare for the next tasks to come!
Right after the winter break the performance committee members had to decide on the line up of performances and individual responsibilities for different performance groups. It was great to discuss and think about the flow and composition of the final event, especially how the audience might respnd to it. Now we are working hard on promoting the event that many people can experience a trip around the world in just one evening.
Thank you FIUTS, the committee members, the UW international community for such a great experience so far. I hope it continues like this…