UNIVERSITY OF NOTTINGHAM’S INDONESIAN FESTIVAL 2013
Heyya! At last.. I have the chance to finally write a post on Indonesian Society’s/PPI Nottingham’s IndoFest on the 15th of June.
A quick overall summary of the festival? Huge success! The festival was held in Nightingale Hall Field, one of the big fields in our humungous University Park campus (University of Nottingham has a few campuses in Nottingham). The weather was partially sunny in the morning, rained quite hard for a bit in the noon (but it didn’t turn people off), and was sunny for the rest of the day. Approximately 3000 people came! The committee counted the amount of festival bracelets given out and this includes an approximate of those who came in without it since they didn’t go through the main entrance. Furthermore, with the festival, we also held a sports competition called BhinneCup from the morning until noon where reps of PPI within the UK region compete against each other in football and badminton matches. It wasn’t located in the same area though.
Anyhow, this post is about IndoFest :)
So, how was the process of making this festival? It’s the biggest Indonesian Festival in the UK and the Chief of PPI UK named Haikal, gave us compliments and his salutations that with the few amount of committee we had, we were able to pull a festival of this scale off. In scale, 1 committee handled around 100 people on the day, which wasn’t easy. Big wide smile! We had around 30 committees, but I guess 20-ish overall active ones. Hehe. Hm. We also had significant VIP guests who were: Ambassador of Indonesia to the United Kingdom: H.E. Teuku Mohammad Hamzah Thayeb - Knight Commander of the Victorian Order (KCVO); Deputy Chief of Indonesian Mission in London: Harry RJ Kandou - Commander of the Victorian Order (CVO); Assistant Pro Vice Chancellor (International) Asia, University of Nottingham: Michelle Clarke - Professor of Environmental Change, Faculty of Social Sciences.
It took about a month to organise this festival, bear in mind that in May most of us had exams and deadline of essays. So we had to squeeze in time within our schedules to organize this event. I give my salutations to Aldo and Erny, our head and vice duo who had to face directly all the bureaucratic things. They are undergrads here. It isn’t easy to hold a big scale event at campus. There were concerns about sound, date clash, until environmental reasons. I myself was the vice chief of the Media and Marketing group. The chief was Andry. I led most of the publication things and rolled as web developer especially through FB where it had the easiest access to the mass, and since Andry’s of an IT major and understood all the technical stuff, he led more of the designs. Mbak Janne helped too with contacting some people to work with. Other team mates of the division helped spread posters later on. There are of course other divisions too from bazaar until arts and performances and each division contributed really well.
Talking about arts and performances, me and a few other girls performed the Saman Ratoh Duek dance, a traditional dance from the Aceh region! We practiced for a month. It was a handful process, really. May was the month of exams and essays but we managed to practice in a schedule. No matter how busy you are, you will always find extra time for meaningful things. Mbak Ratih who is the best at saman ratoh duek out of all of us was also strict in teaching the choreography haha. We even got some bruises on our legs from practicing, that’s how serious it was. Saman dancing isn’t easy if you want to get it right. We didn’t want to give a performance with no energy. Boh-ring. We wanted to try take it to the next level. Be fierce and in synch, yeah! It was worth it, no regrets. But there’s still room for improvements. :)
Our saman ratoh duek performance you could see on YouTube:Opening and Closing.
We prefer our closing performance, to be honest. We were boosted with extra energy from eating Indonesian foods in the food bazaar just before hahaha. Also, the Indonesian Ambassador was so humble, he sat on the ground in front of the stage not in the VIP area as seen in the pics above. Afterwards he told us our performance was honestly the best he has ever seen from PPI students and he wanted us to perform again in other events if possible. *Insert deep red cheek flush* kikikik. But most of us are Masters students so, those who are undergrads have to teach the newbies.
Btw, the pics above weren’t taken by me because I was busy on the day being an MC/Master of Ceremony as well! I was the main MC with Yuko. A guest MC, Jennifer, who is a Brit, also took part. We didn’t practice before the day, we just went for it. I helped Jen make some notes. Also, I’m glad people came up to me and said they liked my MC-ing haha. It was laid-back, I felt like an MTV video-jockey. Eaaa. Threw in jokes and all-out. Didn’t want to bore people. I’ve done some MC-ing in the past from the formal until informal, but for this one I felt extra comfortable somehow. I also held a spontaneous Dangdut Dance competition on stage to the lagu Goyang Dombret to kill some time when there was a sudden disruption hahaha. Basically its just requiring anyone to bust some simple moves to the music, community-style. No weird or inappropriate public moves such as goyang ngebor, goyang patah-patah or goyang gergaji LOL. You need something cultural and unique where you could have a few laughs, dangdut’s it! Hahaha. People were shy at first but eventually the more confident ones popped out of the crowd. My friend Dana told me that all the women audience who went on stage were all inang-inang hahahhaa. But it was fun and we gave out goodies too such as fancy batik bags (which were originally Mbak Ratih’s souvenirs lol). Tiffany also helped Yuko and I do the poco-poco dance and some of the audience took part. I also gave cute little keyrings to some adorable little kiddies who danced in front of the stage. They were more confident than the adults! Lol.
Some other highlights were the regional fashion show (the models were non-Indonesian students), photography exhibition (awesome pics of Indonesia!), batik workshop (by PPI UK’s chief: Haikal), Indomie cooking demo (haha yeah, they were our main sponsor), traditional games competitions for children, and many more. We also handed out great quality medallions and trophies for the winners of BhinneCup and the food stall competition! Awesome, hey ;)
About the photos above, I don’t have much in my camera which was given to Andry as a sub-camera of the day. The photos above don’t do justice of the event. If I could take pics on the day, I would take many food pictures hahaha. Also of other performances. But for now, I guess its enough.
I hope next year’s IndoFest will be much more awesome than this year’s! Goodluck to future PPI Nottingham peeps! And if you’re in the UK, don’t miss out on this festival held around the beginnings of summer! :)
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