At 7:08 pm, colorfully clad dancers could be seen conducting last-minute rehearsals in the McNeil Room as well-dressed guests of Lambda Upsilon Lambda’s 10th Annual Cultural Pride Night enjoyed hors d’oeuvres—distributed by students—and punch in the Union foyer. They also had non-alcoholic piña colada and strawberry daiquiri smoothies while surrounded by artifacts of GM weeks past.
Camera flashes dotted the room, recording the snazzy outfits of the guests for posterity. The piano had been moved from its usual place so that one guest, Jose Suazo, could take advantage of its new location near the main desk in the foyer to play some light music on this most unusual of Saturday evenings.
Around 7:40 pm, the approximately 180 guests made their way into the McNeil Room to dinner tables full of salad, and after the opening remarks, were treated to the first act: a cultural play by the Malaysian Student Association. The story is of two princess sisters, who are inseparable until they fall in love with the same man and succumb to jealousy, tearing the kingdom apart. The story is an admonition in Malaysia, advocating the unity of the people above petty disagreements. The dancing that accompanied the story was very evocative, reflecting the moods of the story with impressive clarity.
After that, the Indian Student Association—the announcement of which elicited an enthusiastic yell from one guest—contributed two performances to the festivities. The first, a drum act, was fast-paced and foot-tappingly good, but it was ultimately outshone by the dancers of the second ISA act. Performing a composite of older and newer styles of Indian dance, two young women in bright blue and yellow, and the two guys in gold and black, seemed to capture a dynamism reflecting all of humanity as they ducked, dodged, weaved, and bounced to the joyful multichoral music. The audience was thoroughly impressed with the sincerity and energy on display in this act.
After the ISA dancers finished, Lambda Upsilon Lambda member and former Grand Marshal Gil Valadez introduced the keynote speaker of the evening, RPI President Shirley Ann Jackson. Jackson spoke, naturally, of diversity. Specifically, she discussed a growing emphasis in businesses on more creative thinking as it relates to diversity. She also outlined RPI’s commitment to diversity as elucidated in the Rensselaer Plan, finishing her speech to warm applause from those in attendance.
Dinner was served after a ten- minute intermission. Guests selected in advance from a chicken, beef, or pasta dish. The latter was a delicious cheese tortellini with pesto sauce and carrots, broccoli and peppers, which was very impressively done. The next act began as the guests were eating: Steel and soul, a performance of steel drums accompanied by a standard drum set. The drummers played various songs associated with soul music, including the well-known “Just the Two of Us.”
Two awards were presented next; the Administrator Achievement Award went to Eddie Knowles for his contributions to the goals of the Lambda Upsilon Lambda fraternity, and the Alumni Achievement Award went to Jason Peter Torres, who was instrumental in establishing the Alpha Gamma chapter of Lambda Upsilon Lambda at RPI and the first Cultural Pride Nights. Knowles could not attend, but an acceptance video was projected onto a large screen.
The Philippine American League was next, with its annual Cultural Pride Night staple, the Tinikling, the national dance of the Philippines. Named for the movements of the tinikling bird, performers dance in and around pairs of bamboo poles as they are clapped together with increasing tempo. First, the music and dance moves were of a more traditional variety, but then the PAL Tinikling dancers awed the crowd with an even more fast-paced routine using modern music, rearranging the bamboo poles to form an X, showcasing a furious whirlwind of feet and bamboo, all moving in time.
On a more low-key note, Roopa Venkateswaran followed with an a cappella rendition of a Hindu song as a delectable vanilla cake with fruit was served for dessert. The song had a slow, flowing melody that gave the audience a chance to breathe in between the Tinikling dancers and the next act, the perennial favorite: the NSBE Step Team.
As usual, the Step Team’s staccato maneuvers were intoxicatingly rhythmic. With the precision and timing that only students of an engineering school can bring to bear, the Step Team engaged in fantastically complicated sequences of steps, stomps, claps, cracks, thwacks, and thundering smacks, all in perfect unison. The Step Team’s performance was nothing short of astounding.
After an act such as that, the only thing left to do was end the show, and indeed, after closing remarks by alumnus Hector Gutierrez, that is just what happened. Everyone was invited to stay as a Spanish band played meringue machata music, a jaunty, lively guitarring that had most of the remaining guests on the dance floor during songs.
Eventually, the band had to go home too, and those guests who had stayed left with an enhanced sense of the truly staggering cultural diversity and pride in evidence on RPI’s campus. The 10th annual Cultural Pride Night was an amazing spectacle of the diversity of humanity and it failed in no respect to do justice to that diversity.
