With a portable wooden-paneled dance floor and vibrant stage decorations, the World Music and Movement Festival Organization will bring together performances from jazz, hip-hop, pop and folk groups.
The organization will hold its second annual fall World Music and Movement Festival on Sunday in Bruin Plaza and will showcase 13 student, alumni and staff performances. Fourth-year community music student and co-director of programs Lindsey Kunisaki said students can expect the organization to push its three pillars in the event’s programming: entertainment, education and interaction.
Nine of the performances will be musical, ranging from a multitude of jazz groups such as Latin jazz band Zulu Ali Quartet, jazz combo Grant Milliken Quintet and big band jazz group Nate Schwartz & His Jazz Orchestra to Banda Oliva, which will play Italian folk instrumentals.
Also lined up are pop-folk vocalist Elena Loper, a fourth-year ethnomusicology student, and pop vocalist Ryan Nealon, a second-year ethnomusicology student. The multicultural fusing group TurnTabla will perform as well.
The remaining four performances will be dances including hip-hop by Frizz N’ Flow, modern and contemporary dance by Audacity Dance Movements, a traditional Mexican folk dance by Grupo Folklórico and capoeira, a Brazilian dance martial art form, performed by Omulu Capoeira LA.
Ryan Vig, a fourth-year ethnomusicology student and director of WMMF, said the goal of the festival is to introduce and give opportunities to UCLA’s diverse cultures by hosting these performances that are not normally presented on campus, in one day.
Kunisaki said exposure might be the best way to help performers thrive.
“My main interest is to reach out to artists in the UCLA community who are either looking toward turning their arts practice into a profession or just doing it for its cultural and personal value,” Kunisaki said.
Nate Schwartz & His Jazz Orchestra, a newly formed group, will headline the festival, which will be its first ever performance. The orchestra is named after Nate Schwartz, a second-year ethnomusicology student with a concentration in jazz.
Schwartz will be conducting the orchestra to play his original musical compositions, “Mapleton Stomp,” “The River” and “If You Build It.” Schwartz said his work was influenced by Appalachian folk music and bluegrass, which he would play for his family while growing up in a suburb east of San Francisco. His role as a guitarist with the on-campus group The Street Hearts plays a large part in his musical identity.
Third-year dance student Sandra Parra is half of the hip-hop dance duet Frizz N’ Flow. Trained in Latin American and African dance styles, Parra said she incorporates these polyrhythmic influences into popping, locking and breaking.
Parra said she is part of the Versa-Style Dance Company and has been practicing five hours a week for the past month for the festival, which will feature choreographed and free-styled sections in a matter of 10 minutes.
“The festival itself is like a little woven basket with all of these different threads that come from … different colors (and) flavors,” Parra said.
Parra said students should attend the event not only to support the arts, but also to give a chance at falling in love with a performance or culture.
In addition to the festival, the organization is planning on holding monthly workshops, which Vig said will educate interested students and focus on the performance arts at a deeper level than the larger-scaled festivals can by having past musicians and dancers collaborate with one another.
The first workshop, which focused on Tahitian dance moves, took place in Kaufman Hall on Tuesday and was led by third-year world arts and cultures/dance student and co-director of programs Leanna Bremond.
“Rather than seeing the performance happen on stage, (students) actually get to indulge in the culture physically, mentally and spiritually sometimes,” Bremond said.
At the festival, a growing public art project will concur with the performances. There will also be a raffle and several craft and clothing vendors throughout the day.
These vendors will include Inicreations, which will have Dia de los Muertos folk-art clothing, LunaSol Mexican Vintage with its clothing and trinkets and Sonam Dolma, a Southeast Asian-inspired vendor of clothing, jewelry and books. Connecting Cultures Mobile Museum will also present a mix of cultural and traditional artifacts, as it has in the previous festivals for the organization.
“For the festival, I anticipate and hope that the audiences will at the very least, benefit from the exposure to the artistic and cultural practices that they see on stage,” Kunisaki said. “As well as the familiarity of their peers.”