If someone asked you, a busy college student, to spend several consecutive weekends constructing and painting elaborate backdrops for a scene that only lasts 15 minutes, or for several months, without pay, to disable your social and academic life to plan logistics for an evening event that will be over in about three hours, you would think that most rational people would say no.
You would be surprised.
Just very recently, the Nikkei Student Union at UCLA had their twentieth Nikkei Student Union Cultural Night show. It is a huge event that always takes place on the weekend closest to February 19, which any Japanese American should know is the anniversary of Roosevelt's Executive Order 9066.
For those of you who don't know, cultural night shows are elaborate productions put on by student-run ethnic organizations that showcase various aspects of the culture that the organization represents. In the case of NSU, our main showcases are traditional odori dancing, taiko drumming and modern hip-hop dance, all interspersed within an original storyline involving the JA community.
This has been my third year being involved in it and my second year being the scriptwriter. Every year, I am amazed just how much work and time goes into something that only lasts for a single night.
Why do we do it?
Good question.
Being involved with an NSU Cultural Night production means that for the majority of your winter quarter, your entire life revolves around Cultural Night, whether it means having odori practice every other day, practicing your dance moves in a cold parking lot late into the night or cramming in four weeks to remember lines from a 40-page script. In the crunch time leading up to the actual event, it means all day rehearsals over an entire weekend and ordering out a lot of cheap Asian food during practice.
While I'm sure individual reasons to take on such a masochistic endeavor ranges widely from personal growth to simple stage-whoring, it's still inspiring that all of these things culminate to a single event that gives young Nikkei and other non-Nikkei interested in the JA culture a chance to show everybody else their dedication in keeping the voice of the community alive.
In particular, one minor event sticks in my memory. It was a cold Sunday morning, and I was walking up to the main auditorium tired and running late for an all-day rehearsal. Preoccupied with being sleep-deprived and overly stressed, I caught the eye of a fellow cultural night performer walking beside me whom I've seen around but never directly talked to before. As we made our way up the stair steps leading to the rehearsal area, we both began talking about how we got involved with the show in the first place.
An Indian American fourth year student, he said that he got into odori dancing by a random fluke because one of his classmates involved in NSU happened to mention how odori dancing is always in dire shortage of men. Unlike the fast pace of taiko drumming and modern hip hop dance, odori is much more subdued and subtle in the movements of the body.
"It's insane just how intense it is," he said. "You watch the teacher do it and it looks so easy, but it's so much more complicated than that. It's like telling a story with your body, and you have to get it down just right."
What do you know. Being involved with cultural night means that you still get to learn something new about your own culture, and it does not necessarily have to come from another JA. Little things like that keep me going.
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