Students Celebrate the Year of the Pig

The Chinese Students Club rang in the Chinese New Year with an eclectic mix of confetti, traditional Chinese acts dating back thousands of years, yo-yos, and giant dancing lions at its 28th annual Lunar Gala festival on Saturday night.

The CSC board centered this year's event ringing in the Year of the Boar around the theme of "momentum." The student-run show, which drew about 800 spectators, consisted of a ten-act cultural show and a fashion show. The proceeds from the event will go to charity.

"We chose momentum to represent a sense of progress, either to push yourself forward or to push society forward," said CSC Executive Board member Christina Tzeng, CC '09, who was involved in organizing the event.

There were several new additions to this year's event. The night began with a performance on the guqin, a traditional Chinese string instrument. Organizers also hired progressive rock band Hsu-Nami, which incorporates Asian elements with more mainstream drums and guitar.

Other acts included a kung-fu demonstration, an assortment of Chinese songs, a fusion dance, and a performance by the Columbia University Lion Dance Troupe featuring several large lion costumes dancing around the stage. The fashion show consisted of several Asian and non-Asian routines.

"Each year we try to be better than the last," Jeremy Xia, SEAS '08 and a CSC Executive Board member said, pointing to the recent additions of video and more modern technology into the production. The annual CSC Board skit, for example, has been a pre-produced video shown on stage the past two years.

Alumni were also a "lot more responsive this year" than in past years, according to Ben Wang, SEAS '09, another organizer of the event.

Tzeng was quick to emphasize the variety of the Lunar Gala acts and the effort that went into producing them while Board members mentioned the broader benefits of the cultural show.

"It's a way to consolidate the entire Chinese community-people from Hong Kong, Taiwan, and so on," as well as a chance to incorporate other Asian groups such as Koreans and Vietnamese, Xia said.

"The goal is to bring in a variety of ethnic groups-last year we had an African American and Korean girl singing a Chinese song," Wang said.

"The culture show part of Lunar Gala was an excellent combination of the traditional ... and fusion-the more pop songs, hip hop dance, and the Hsu-Nami performance," said Katie Besch-Hart, CC '09.