On Saturday  in Memorial Hall,   Zylia Zhang and her dance team, UNC Flying Silk, spun onto the stage accompanied by red ribbons, white fans and flowy tulle costumes.

Flying Silk was the first of 12 acts performed at UNC’s Asian American Student Association’s annual Journey Into Asia festival. This year’s showcase theme was “Moonfest.” 

“Each year we try to do a theme centered around a facet of Asian American culture,” Abi Karthikeyan, one of the co-cultural chairs and Journey Into Asia planners, said.  “We try to spread awareness about this theme, and about different cultural groups and cultural performances, at our event, to the greater UNC community.”

JIA is UNC’s largest cultural student showcase, featuring groups from UNC, Duke University and North Carolina State University, Karthikeyan said. 

Of the 12 performances, nine of the acts were choreographed and performed by Asian performance clubs on UNC’s campus. These groups consist of members from all across Asia, and they drew artistic inspiration from countries including the Philippines, Vietnam, India, China  and South Korea.

The additional, non-UNC groups were Duke’s Temptasians, N.C. State’s Diablo Team and special guest Kavya Borra. Borra is a Nashville-based singer-songwriter and advocate who has amassed over 21.3 million likes on TikTok.

The AASA planning team selected the performance groups through auditions in the fall, but they have been planning the event since the summer, Karthikeyan said.

Although hours of planning went into the event, the cultural chairs were able to successfully assign tasks and responsibilities to each committee member’s skill set. This led to a good team dynamic, Aditi Rai, one of AASA’s cultural committee members, said.

“I think it’s great to showcase how, as an Asian community, we all just stick together, and that we are very welcoming too,” Aiden Tumangan, who performed with the UNC Taekwondo demonstration team, said. “I think it shows that no matter where we are from — it could be Cambodia, or Vietnam, Philippines, Korea — we are all a very good community that likes to stay together.”

Tumangan said  demonstration Taekwondo is different from competitive Taekwondo. Demonstration is less strict, has high energy and is more “free range.”

The UNC Taekwondo demo team told a story in their performance, in which they worked to ‘seal the honmoon,’  a reference to the recent hit movie KPop Demon Hunters. The team performed two songs from the movie, such as “Your Idol.”

Towards the end of their piece, Tumangan took center stage to perform with nunchucks  as the rest of his team awed  the audience with backflips, blindfolded kicks and breaking of boards and cement blocks.

Although some groups, like the Taekwondo demo team, decided to use existing choreography for their acts, other groups, like UNC Flying Silk, created something entirely new for their JIA performance. JIA is one of Flying Silk’s biggest performances of the year.

Zhang, who is a choreographer for Flying Silk, has been performing Chinese dance since she was four. She said that part of the reason she came to UNC was because of the Chinese dance team.

“I wanted to find a community here where I can share what I have learned, because I’ve been trained in China mostly,” Zhang said. “Also, to see how people in the U.S. do Chinese dance and how people see it.”

Another group that focused on storytelling in their performance was UNC Kasama, who brought 44 dancers on stage to perform dances such as a traditional Filipino folk dance with coconut shells called Maglalatik, and the Philippines’ national dance, Tinikling, which involves coordinating footwork between long bamboo poles.

Kasama choreographers Mireya de los Reyes and Sammy Quiboloy grew up dancing, but Reyes said  coordinating 44 people with varying levels of experience was a challenge. 

“We are seasoned,” Quiboloy said. “But there’s always something magical about a full house and getting to perform, because we both love performing.”

Before coming to UNC, Tumangan said he thought that coming to a white majority school would be intimidating, but was surprised by the amount of diversity he found. Initially, he went to many other Asian club meetings. He said he has even attended Vietnamese and Chinese club meetings despite identifying as Filipino, saying that he wouldn’t have known about the Taekwondo club without exploring the other opportunities.

Borra ended the night with a few original songs. She also shared an unreleased music video for her song Consequence of Life, which was shot in her family’s hometown in India.

“I think it’s incredible that we get to put on a showcase that so many people get to come to and enjoy and then learn more about all these different cultures and different forms of art, especially,” Karthikeyan said. “It’s just really rewarding to have worked on something for a really long time and then get to see it actually come together.”

@dthlifestyle | lifestyle@dailytarheel.com