Raisa Ho and Rico Setyo anxiously awaited their cue to go onstage and perform an acoustic mashup of current popular songs. For these seniors, this would be their last time performing onstage in Schine Underground.

 

‘We were extremely nervous because we wanted to make our last performance the best,’ said Ho, a marketing and supply chain major. ‘Rico and I wanted to top all our previous performances, so it was even more stressful.’

 

Their performance was met by loud cheers from the audience members, who sung along to hits such as Rihanna and Drake’s ‘What’s My Name,’ Katy Perry’s ‘California Gurls’ and Keri Hilson’s ‘Pretty Girl Rock.’

Schine Underground was transformed into a café last Friday for Café con Bubble Tea, an event hosted by Syracuse University groups Asian Students in America (A.S.I.A.) and the Latino Undergraduates Creating History in America (La L.U.C.H.A.). Attendees were treated to student performances, fresh beats by hip-hop duo Magnetic North and emotional words by award-winning slam poet Daniel Custódio. One hundred tickets were sold for the event.

 

The second performer, Tyler Rice, whose stage name is Huey Calhoun, showed his sensitive side with a short poem about his mother. As he finished, the crowd wanted more, and Calhoun delivered with a poem about love. The audience chuckled at his witty lines: ‘How about we do a little mathematics — how about you add me, subtract him? Me over your place? Sounds like a really good fraction.’

 

Rice, a sophomore marketing major, said the feedback he received from the show was genuine. The audience members provided him with an unbiased opinion of his performance, he said.

‘I didn’t tell my friends to come tonight because, as friends, they’ll always support you,’ Rice said. ‘Friends will say you did well regardless, but other people will give you real feedback. ‘

 

One of the night’s headliners was Asian-American hip-hop duo Magnetic North. One of the members, Derek Kan, was dressed in a green Adidas track jacket, jeans and blue Nike sneakers. His partner, Theresa Vu, was decked out in a fedora and bomber jacket. The pair got the crowd laughing as they poked fun at the ‘Asians in the Library’ YouTube video. Later, Kan and Vu drew the crowd to its feet with their hits ‘It’ll Work Out,’ ‘Summertime,’ ‘Home:Word’ and ‘Drift Away.’ Though technical difficulties disrupted Magnetic North’s performance, the duo continued, and the crowd clapped in unison to supplement their beats.

 

Slam poet Custódio then took to the stage to deliver his heart-wrenching and emotional poems. His raw words drew gasps from the crowd as he spat out his anger about Daddy Yankee, professed his love for his mother and expressed sadness at the fading Latino identity. 

 

Veronica Abreu, vice president of La L.U.C.H.A., said her favorite act was Custódio’s.

 

‘He was amazing, he almost made me cry a couple times,’ said Abreu, a junior communication and rhetorical studies major. ‘There are a lot of people who don’t know how to express themselves as well as he does. He really hit some soft spots.’

 

Rice said events like Café con Bubble Tea are beneficial for the SU community because they create connections between diverse groups on campus.

 

‘I feel like people came together and broke boundaries,’ Rice said. ‘With a campus as big as this, it’s segregated. But these events bring people together.’

 

jwong04@syr.edu

Published on March 27, 2011 at 12:00 pm