By Camille Rasor | Reporter
A new group took the Waco Hall stage for the first time during All-University Sing as they try to bring diversity to the long-time Baylor tradition.
Multicultural Alliance, a group composed of students from many multicultural affairs organizations, performed their act, “Homecoming: Another Side,” for the first time at Thursday night’s performance.
West senior Krista Cardenas, one of Multicultural Alliance’s Sing chairs, said the group decided to put together an act as a way to make a space for students to participate in Sing who may not have had the opportunity to participate before.
“None of our organizations were really big enough to do it beforehand, so we decided to do it as a unified group,” Cardenas said. “We also don’t see a lot of groups who look like us perform in Sing. We just felt like it was a good time to finally be able to see the different faces that are on campus and the organizations that are here that people are allowed to be a part of, just because we don’t feel like we get a lot of that representation.”
One of the main challenges the group faced when preparing for their Sing performance was getting enough participants interested in performing in the act.
Baytown junior Angelica Torres, one of Multicultural Alliance’s Sing chairs, said the newness of this group’s participation in Sing made it difficult to get the word out to potential performers.
“When recruiting, it was kind of tough because we didn’t have any experience under our belt like other organizations who’ve been doing this for 20 or 30 years or so,” Torres said. “So that was definitely a challenge, just recruiting members and not necessarily getting people to believe in us, but just like taking that risk and starting this tradition for the Multicultural Alliance.”
Buras, La, sophomore Dalshawn Jones, one of the act’s choreographers, said he thinks the performance will garner respect for the new group to establish a tradition of future Multicultural Alliance performances in Sing.
“I feel like this year, we will really set a tone that we’re capable of not only going through the whole act, but actually being really competitive and an actual competitor,” Jones said.
Cedar Park senior Tre’ Nelson, singer and dancer the act, said he hopes the group will allow future generations of students to have a way to participate in such a large campus tradition.
“What we’re doing here is pretty historic, especially considering the history of Sing,” Nelson said. “We could be potentially laying the groundwork for an entire tradition of Multicultural Affairs participating in Sing, students of color being able to tell stories from their point of view, from their perspective with maybe different styles of music, different styles of choreography, and still letting that expression of Baylor identity come to the stage at Sing.”
