by Melissa Sipin

It was pitch black.

I was sitting in the lighting booth in Bovard Auditorium, holding the God Mic, and I gave the cue. The house lights went back on and a thunderous applause ensued. The 17th Annual Pilipino American Culture Show ended and the audience roared with applause.

With that, the most ambitious USC culture show season had come to a close, and I was part of it.

I ran to the back of the Bovard, entered through the doors, heard my name called as Skit Director and took a long bow.

But then it hit me. The colorful lights, the booming audio, the crowds of people — how much did it all cost? Do these shows really connect a group of people with their culture?

Countless of cultural organizations, like Troy Philippines, USC Nikkei Association, Chinese American Student Association and Southern California Indo-Americans, produce ambitious culture shows, but the amount of money put into them can reach more than $50,000.

This year alone, the bigger culture shows (like CASA, Troy Philippines and SCIA) spent $12,000 to $30,000, and the smaller culture shows (like VSA and Nikkei) around $4,000 to $6,000.

The cost to rent Bovard Auditorium’s first floor is roughly $4,000 (not including staffing and special effects, like lighting and a projector), and the price goes up to $7,000 to rent the whole auditorium. To offset the costs, culture clubs can apply for school funding through organizations like Asian Pacific American Student Assembly (the umbrella organization for all the individual Asian Pacific American organizations) or the Discretionary Board Fund, for up to $4,000. But that’s only half the price tag.

“Cultures shows are self-funded from org members or fundraisers by the organization, like an E-Board auction. The rest would be funded by sponsors and program ads,” said USC Alum Jeffrey Okita, last year’s Troy Phi skit writer.

When University Student Government gives out money through the Discretionary Board Fund, it wants the money to be spent on the undergraduate population.  They expect that if $4,000 is given to an organization, it will serve at least 400 undergraduate students.

“The audience is filled with family and friends from other schools, and usually culture orgs don’t’ know how many USC students attend,” Okita said. “Demographics are never taken at these shows.”

APASA budget’s is the second largest to Concerts Committee, and if students aren’t attending events funded by APASA, are they worth their price tags?

“For culture shows produced by cultural orgs, there have a for sure audience because they are set in tradition — there’s an alumni base and family base they can target for marketing. Since there’s more people involved, it’s easier to draw an audience,” said APASA Events Coordinator and Troy Phi External Vice President Julia Reyes.

“If we count about 70 students participating in the culture show itself, only 330 students have to be in the audience,” Okita said. “I would say that it’s not farfetched to think there are that many students in attendance.”

But there was no such audience at APASA’s first annual culture show, also the first USC culture of the season.

Only about 60 students attended APASA’s culture night, said APASA Executive Director April Ta. And that number includes the students who performed on stage.

Why did APASA feel the need to produce a show in addition to all the others?

“APASA wanted to put on a production that would show USC how big our Asian community is — we’re 25 percent of the student population,” Reyes said.

“We wanted to bring all the organizations together, not just the ones with culture shows,” Ta said. “But also to include orgs who don’t put on culture shows.”

But why did it fail, compared to their umbrella organizations’ highly successful (and profitable) shows?

“It was disappointing. APASA’s show had great performers and a good intention behind it, but the timing was off because it was a date before all the other cultural orgs’ shows; it was hard to make people care about aside their own shows,” Reyes said.

There are problems with leadership in APASA’s executive board, especially when it comes to planning events. Events are planned either in pairs or by one person on board. Though APASA already had the funds, they had the marketing power, and they had the student base. But what they didn’t have was the family and alumni base that’s behind the cultural orgs.

With Troy Phi, we planned events together and had a set goal we were all reaching for,” Reyes said. “With APASA, it was so compartmentalized — it was like, ‘you’re in charge of this,’ and ‘you’re in charge of that,’— there wasn’t a sense of camaraderie,” Reyes added.

The number of culture shows college clubs produce raises the question: why are we spending all that much money on another culture show? Every year, we run the risk of getting the same culture show as the year before— it’s another three-hour melting pot of songs and dances, meshed together with a cute skit.

“With repetitive themes in culture shows, Japanese American identity becomes only about World War II camp history and Filipino American identity becomes only about large, quirky families,” said Sean Miura, a communications major and co-writer of USC Nikkei Association’s Japanese American skit.

Culture isn’t as compartmentalized as our shows suggest.

“Culture isn’t a singular thing; it’s many things. We tend to think that culture is made of these elements: religion, language and food,” said Leland Saito, professor of sociology and American studies and ethnicity. “When I think of culture, I think of all those elements, but also what makes them a community, and their importance and history as group.”

The danger of culture shows is they risk meshing all identities and making it one big generalization of Asian-American identity. Maybe this is why APASA’s culture show failed.

Since students produce and create these expensive and ambitious shows, each performance reflects what they think and know about their culture.

“What they’re putting together is a reflection of how they view their culture and themselves,” Saito said.

“Songs and dances are powerful traditions that can resonate with students and help them fold what their culture means to them into their identity,” said Jade Agua, assistant director of APASS.

Culture shows do have an influential power that a class setting does not; a show give an audience a unique glimpse into a culture that they may not be a part of.

“Shows that leave you with a message makes you think about what it means to be Japanese, Chinese, Filipino or whatever American, if you’re Asian or not,” Wang said.

“The whole point of cultures shows is to share what is different and the same about us,” Saito said.

Great culture shows should captivate you, and change your previous conceptions about a culture. They are unique expressions of the human experience, but…

“Unless students understand how symbolic these motions are and how powerful they are, like how Taiko drumming was used as a political symbol in the ‘60s, then they are ignoring what their community has given them,” Miura said.

APASA and cultural orgs, before producing their shows, must remember that culture cannot be encompassed in just a production; if they forget their roots and why they’re doing it in the first place, so much money will go to waste.