Worldchella to celebrate cultures at UCLA with music, dance

In the midst of festival season, the Undergraduate Students Association Council Cultural Affairs Commission has put its own twist on Coachella to produce Worldchella, a cultural music and dance night.

The first Worldchella will take place on Tuesday at Pauley Pavillion and will feature student clubs and musicians performing dance and music, as well as headliner DJ Sante DuBois with a special appearance by Azad Right, an Iranian hip-hop artist.

The performers will include student groups such as Salsa Society at UCLA, Kyodo Taiko as well as performances from first-year economics student Raunak Rupani and fourth-year history student and rapper Brenton Allen.

Worldchella is one of the main events included in CAC’s annual Worldfest Week, a weeklong series including events such as “Around the World DIY” in Kerckhoff Art Gallery and a fashion show held in Pauley Pavillion.

Vanessa Basulto, a fourth-year international development studies student and co-director of Worldfest, said Worldfest Week has changed a bit every year, but maintains the ultimate goal of celebrating cultures and traditions within UCLA.

“We want to bring in all these kinds of different cultural aspects and traditions and shed light on people who might not know what these cultures and traditions are and what they entail,” Basulto said.

Basulto said her goal with Worldfest Week and Worldchella is to get an overall appreciation of the different cultures on campus.

“We see each other all the time going to and from BruinWalk and we just see faces and we don’t necessarily know each others’ stories,” Basulto said. “With Worldfest Week, hopefully we can bring more of a connection between everyone and their cultures.”

Worldfest staff member Adam Herrera, a fourth-year Arabic, economics and political science student, helped create the idea of Worldchella when the staff members were given the freedom to create events that provide cultural education to the student body.

Herrera and other Worldfest staff members focused on bringing different cultural experiences in the form of performances to the event. However, they decided to expand the definition of culture beyond ethnicities, including hip-hop culture, through the performers.

“We feel like students come (to UCLA) and everyone’s speaking of diversity, but not everyone necessarily goes out of their way to expose themselves to diversity, so we feel like (at) a simple event like this … students can learn about a different culture, and it’s going to be in a fun way,” Herrera said.

Herrera said if this year’s Worldchella succeeds, it has the potential to become an annual event in Worldfest Week.

Noor Habib El-Farra, a third-year geography and environmental studies student and a staff member of Worldfest, said she wanted to bring a musical and artistic aspect to the event to showcase the diverse cultures that represent the UCLA campus.

“I really wanted to make sure that Worldchella was a big enough event so people could really see the worth in Worldfest and really see coming out to our events are not only fun, but that you do get a lot from it, in terms of an educational and insightful experience,” El-Farra said.

El-Farra said that the inspiration behind Worldchella is similar to Coachella, where concert-goers can see and hear new and upcoming performers and can explore artists from the genres they are typically not exposed to.

“A lot of people don’t even know who’s performing, and that’s kind of what makes it fun,” El-Farra said. “You don’t know you like something until you get exposed to it; You get to see it; You understand it.”