UCLA world arts and culture graduate student
Joanna Ursal dances with a fan in her WorldFest
performance Monday. The festivities will continue throughout the
remainder of the week.
By Mary Williams
Daily Bruin Staff
When an on-campus concert is announced, a combination of
Brazilian Martial Arts, modern Indian dance and Afro-Cuban drumming
is rarely the sort of thing that comes to mind.
WorldFest 2001, being held this week at various campus
locations, is changing that. Its long list of performances, both
traditional and contemporary, include multiple representatives from
every populated continent.
“We are spotlighting culture through those avenues of
music, dance and food, and we’re doing it for the reason of
educating the student populace on the richness of someone
else’s culture,” said Ikemefunna Asimonye, WorldFest
coordinator and second-year communication studies and
ethnomusicology student.
This year’s event constitutes the 11th annual WorldFest.
The tradition began in the 1980s, when racial tensions on campus
lead the administration to hold the first of these
cultural-awareness weeks.
Since WorldFest’s early years, the planning has slowly
been taken over by students, and in recent years, it has been
produced entirely by the Cultural Affairs Commission.
“The last three WorldFests are all improvements over the
way that WorldFest used to be structured, in that there were a lot
of vendors and people who would come from food companies on campus
and there weren’t as many students involved with the event as
there are now,” said Marselle Washington, the cultural
affairs commissioner for USAC.
 Joe Addington plays the drums during a
performance for WorldFest in Westwood Plaza Monday at noon. This is
just one part of the festival which was designed to introduce
students to the traditions and customs of the diverse groups on
campus through music, dance and food. Performances will be taking
place at various locations around campus. As it has been in the
recent past, presentations by different cultural groups will be
mixed, rather than separated into blocks representing each culture.
“It really gives a broad spectrum of different cultures all
in one week, as opposed to being disjointed,” Washington
said.
WorldFest is designed to familiarize students with the
traditions and customs of the diverse groups found on campus. The
purpose of the event is to help students achieve a better
understanding of a diverse array of backgrounds through music,
dance and food.
“There are all kinds of improvements that need to take
place here, everywhere and around the world, making people more
aware of those things will cause them to get involved and try to
help,” said Janiene Luke, program coordinator for Delta
Terrace and a member of the committee that programmed the residence
hall events for the week.
The involvement of Office of Residential Life staff in the
planning of WorldFest marks a trend on the part of the Cultural
Affairs Commission to include other organizations’ events
into the WorldFest week.
Both the Office of Residential Life’s world arts and
culture appreciation program and the American Indian
Association’s Pow Wow have been linked to this year’s
WorldFest.
“We wanted to encourage people to go to Pow Wow,”
Asimonye said. “That is something that is highlighting
culture, that is something that is going into the reason why a
certain culture has existed and their place in this American
culture; and how they can still claim their own Native American
self and identity within this whole American culture is something
that is amazing to me.”
The performance aspect of WorldFest will culminate in a
four-hour-long concert on Friday in Westwood Plaza. The concert
features a variety of dancing, singing and instrumental acts and
possibly a performance by the hip-hop group Run DMC.
The group has agreed to appear, but Washington said concerns
have been raised by UCPD over the size of the expected crowd.
“The school’s actions have been reflective of their
being largely against this performance,” Washington said.
“They said … it’s just that this group is too big,
and we need a Special Events meeting and security for the event
because of this group. My problem with that statement is that
I’ve been putting on events in Westwood Plaza for five years,
and never once have we had a Special Events meeting for a Westwood
Plaza concert, let alone any security out there.”
A meeting with UCPD and the event’s organizers has been
scheduled for this afternoon, after which a decision will be made
about whether Run DMC will be allowed to perform.
Calls to the UCPD Special Events office were not returned before
press time.
Asimonye hopes the group will be allowed to perform because he
said it contributes to the themes and message of WorldFest.
“It definitely highlights a culture in itself,” he
said. “Hip-hop is a very big subculture in the whole American
culture. It’s something that transcends a lot of social,
economic and racial barriers, and it’s something that brings
a lot of people together, so by them participating in a WorldFest,
it not only pulls a lot of people, but pulls people from different
backgrounds.”
Whether Run DMC performs on Friday, the event’s organizers
hope that students will come and learn from the variety of
performances that will take place throughout the week.
“It’s a great chance to encourage others to
celebrate the diversity that we pride ourselves on at UCLA, and
it’s also a great chance to explore and learn and to gain new
insights into a lot of different people,” Luke said.