Black, Indigenous People of Color’s Group for Performing Arts and Visual Arts (BIPOC PAVA) is a new campus organization focused on uplifting racially marginalized liberal arts students. The group is open to community members and allies from the music, dance, art and theatre departments on campus.
Their first event will be a Black History Month recital on Monday, Feb. 12 at 7:30 p.m. in Swope Recital Hall. Tickets are $5 for students and $10 for the public.
“We’ve got a pretty good list…allies who are not Black who are dedicating their performances to uplifting Black voices, and then we’ve also got some Black students on this campus who are showcasing themselves and also still uplifting Black voices,” Chrystal Sircely, BIPOC PAVA president said. “I think pretty much everybody is going to be [performing] work done by a Black composer, or Black choreographer, or dancer, or singer, or drummer, or something.”
The group hopes the recital can become an annual event.
Sircely, who is a music student at SRU, founded BIPOC PAVA with the help of Choir Director Timothy Little Trần.
“The idea is just to have kind of a support group, open to…people who are allied to people of color, and also people of color, to just discuss and have that support of what it’s like being a person of color in a liberal arts major at a predominantly white school,” Sircely said.
Currently, the group is still in the process of developing a constitution and becoming an official SGA organization. However, they do have an established e-board of students from varying liberal arts majors.
“I want to stress that anybody can be a part of this,” Sircely said. “We don’t want it to be just people of color, we don’t want it to be mostly white people because part of movements like these are the oppressed and the people who are uplifting the oppressed.”
