21 student acts perform in International Extravaganza
by Sonia Lachter
The International Club hosted its annual International Extravaganza on Sat. April 20 in Page Commons. At the Extravaganza, 21 student acts participated in a wide variety of performances including singing, drumming, rapping, and Bollywood dancing.
Two of the performers this year were Zijing Gu ’22 and Xingyu Zhang ’22, both international students from China. The two performed in an East Asian band formed this semester which features six students playing traditional Chinese instruments. Gu told the Echo that the band performed “a traditional Chinese music [piece] called chūn jiāng huā yuè yè,” which roughly translates to “the moonlight on the spring river.”
Zhang told the Echo, “The instrument we’re playing is called Guzheng and it has a history of 2,000 years.” Both Zhang and Gu have been playing the harp-like plucked string instrument since they were six years old.
Gu added, “We think the Extravaganza is a good chance for us to introduce Chinese instruments to Colby.”
Himanshu Bhurtel ’21, a co-president of the International Club, told the Echo that the International Extravaganza has been a College tradition for almost 20 years, making it a vital part of the international student experience.
Bhurtel said that the club tried this year “to get a variety of acts and a variety of people doing those acts. In the past, I’ve seen a lot of people do a lot of things like singing and dancing mostly, but this year we also had rap and traditional instruments.”
Bhurtel stressed the amount of hard work required to put on an event like the Extravaganza, which required board members and performers to attend a number of sound checks and rehearsals. Despite the time and energy required, Bhurtel acknowledged that “so far it has always been worth it, which is why I think we stick with it always.”
Carissa Yang ’21, the other co-president of the International Club, told the Echo that the Extravaganza is a “really cool way to celebrate the amount of diversity we have on campus, because there’s not a lot of spaces where you get to say, ‘Hey, this is who I am, let’s celebrate that.’ So I think it’s really cool to be able to support one another and have that space.”
Bhurtel added that even though some of the acts “are not things that people might do on a daily basis back home, these are things that connect them back to their culture, their nationality, their ethnicity, whatever it might be, and in some cases, it’s also a chance from someone from another culture or nationality to engage in something different.”
Zhang shared in Bhurtel’s excitement about teaching students from other cultures different crafts, observing that “there are a lot of students from East Asia that play these traditional instruments but there’s no one who gathered people together, so we think that we’re the first to do this. We’re hoping that actually, later on, there will be students coming from other areas like Japan or Korea or other parts [of the world] to join so it’s not just Chinese students.”
Yang emphasized that “one of the big changes overall for International Club this year was we wanted to reach out to more people. And I think a lot of our attendance in the past has been primarily international students, which is great because International Club is a place for international students and we want that to be a community.”
When International Club was founded, “it wasn’t meant to have only international students in it,” said Yang.
In fact, Yang is not an international student; she’s from Chicago. As co-president, she has broken the stigma around non-international students going to International Club events.
One way that the International Club has been reaching out this year with Yang and Bhurtel’s leadership is by building relationships with other colleges. The co-presidents noted that students from Thomas College performed in the Extravaganza and that some Bowdoin students attended the event.
Yang reflected, “The relationships we’ve built with Bowdoin and Thomas this year are pretty exciting because International Club has been around for a long time at Colby, we were one of the very first clubs that was in the Pugh center, but we haven’t really done a lot of outreach with other schools. And I think a lot of what International Club does here at Colby is fostering connections, whether that’s within international students or within the Colby community. I think we really wanted to highlight that this year, obviously there’s only so much you can do in a year, but we’re hoping that by working with other colleges we can really continue to build our community.”
The International Club is also working in collaboration with Special Collections at Miller Library to develop a collection for the club called the International Archive. Yang said that there are “a lot of things that are in the archive right now. They’re either pictures, videos, or actual gifts that have been passed on from international students or that have been taken by or of international students so far. So, this past year, we’ve been working to collaborate with Special Collections more.” Yang and Bhurtel plan to “have a showing of the things that are in that archive, and we’re hoping to document the international history here at Colby.”
