This month, Camosun’s annual Cultural Showcase Event returns to the stage. The showcase aims to celebrate its participants’ different cultures in a loving and moving way, this year featuring acts ranging from Hawaiian dancing to a acrobatic mother-and-daughter performance. Second-year Community, Family & Child Studies student and Cultural Showcase Event volunteer coordinator and performer Dana Pankowsky says that the event aims to celebrate the culture and traditions of everyone who participates.
“This is the 14th edition of the Cultural Showcase,” says Pankowsky. “It started like a talent show. [The original organizer] wanted some students to share their personal talents or skills, in terms of artistic skills, of course. So every year, our wonderful instructor and counsellor Brian Herron decided that we had to carry on with this tradition.”
Pankowsky says that this year’s showcase celebrates culture in numerous ways.
“For some years, the Cultural Showcase took place in a theatre in downtown Victoria, but then they decided to bring it back home, and ever since it’s been taking place at the Gibson Auditorium in the Lansdowne campus. It’s very special that it’s usually around the third week of March, because it aligns with the day of racial elimination, which is on March 21. We try to celebrate diversity, celebrate culture, celebrate all the traditions that we all bring from our home countries.”
The show has a lot of interesting performances, says Pankowsky.
“You are free to bring your own roots to the event or you can do something different,” says Pankowsky. “For example, we have an amazing Japanese student who will be dancing a Hawaiian dance, which is not part of her personal history but this is something she’s learned since she was a kid, so that’s wonderful. Then, we also have a mother from Brazil, with her four- or five-year-old daughter, they’re going to be dancing together, this is going to be like an acrobatic kind of performance.”
One of the hosts of the event, second-year Office Administration student Yamano Montero, says that what drew her to be a host is the chance of helping out international students.
“As an international student, being in a place that’s not familiar to you can be overwhelming,” says Montero. “Not only that—it is a bit hard to balance, you have academics, you have your social life, you have work, too. But then, I think the Cultural Showcase is one of the avenues where international students can stay in touch and connect with their roots and their culture, of course, and it also gives them an opportunity to share it with others, to show it to other international students and other groups there in the audience. I want to be part of the foundation wherein the students have that avenue.”
Montero says that the main thing students can expect from her as a host is energy.
“What I can say about us hosts is that we have the energy,” says Montero. “We are able to deliver our lines in a manner that connects with our personalities, and the three of us have different personalities. You can expect that it will, of course, be diverse. I am from Philippines, [host] David is from Mexico, and [host] Annie is from Vietnam, so you can see the sides of these cultures in one group during this showcase.”
Cultural Showcase Event
7:30 pm, Thursday, March 23
Gibson Auditorium,
Lansdowne campus