By Claire Wallace, deputy lifestyle editor
Northeastern University’s Fenway Center was packed to the brim last Friday as the Asian Student Union, ASU, presented their sold-out show “A Night With Poreotics.”
Poreotics, a hip-hop dance crew from Westminster, California, got their start in 2010 when they were crowned the champions of “America’s Best Dance Crew” and went on to perform on “World of Dance.”
Five of the eight Poreotics members, Aidan Carberry, Matt Dumbo Nguyen, Can Trong Nguyen, Lawrence Bravo and Minoru Iwasaki, performed their unique hip-hop dance style, followed by an audience Q&A and a meet-and-greet.
Their performance was also quite interactive, as they stopped at one point to invite 10 Northeastern students to the stage to engage in their own dance-off. The dance-off winner, second-year business major Christophe Lu, has been a Poreotics fan since the beginning and was glad to be able to perform with the crew.
“I was very surprised. It was very unexpected,” Lu said. “I am very grateful. I think it’s just a good time to be on stage with all of my friends and getting to be on the same stage as Poreotics and watching them live because I have watched them ever since I started dancing way back in sixth grade. It was definitely a surreal experience.”
The evening was full of student performances, as a number of ASU members sang and played instruments before Poreotics even began. The night opened with a performance by Northeastern’s Eon Dance Troupe, a group that began on campus in 2016. Francesca Mei, a second-year international business major, has been a part of Eon since she started at NU.
“We were established in 2016, so we’re pretty new,” Mei said. “We’re taking opportunities as they come. We do a lot of traditional dance as well as fusion, classical and ethnic dances. The people who are here have been really committed to learn a whole entire new dance, like a full four-minute set, within these three weeks. We’re really proud of them and excited for tonight.”
“A Night With Poreotics” was part of a series put on by ASU every semester to bring Asian-Americans from diverse backgrounds to campus in order to educate students about job diversity in the Asian-American community. Megan Lau, a third-year computer science and finance major and president of ASU, emphasized the importance of the series.
“This series has been happening every semester for more than five years,” Lau said. “It is a really important event to show the diversity of Asian-Americans and the careers and the paths that we take. We’re not just mainly in the STEM field. We can be dancers, comedians — anything.”
During the post-performance Q&A, Poreotics discussed topics ranging from performing on “World of Dance” to their family lives and favorite land mammals. All five members concurred that they owe a lot of their success to “World of Dance.”
“Just being able to focus on dance for eight weeks was the best,” Carberry said.
Dumbo Nguyen emphasized what a hectic and stressful experience reality TV can be but shared the major thing that got him through the entire process.
“It’s a lot of stress. I almost threw up on the first show,” Dumbo Nguyen said. “My newborn daughter was the one giving me the most energy to suck it up and do it. For those of you who want to pursue your passions, play the long game.”
The night concluded with members performing one final dance to the song “A Thousand Miles” by Vanessa Carlton, which elicited an excited reaction from the crowd. The crowd cheered on Poreotics quite passionately as they finished off their set for the evening.
The next ASU-sponsored event is scheduled for Oct. 7 in Curry Student Center. It will celebrate a number of different cultures and feature Korean-American rappers Lyricks and JI.
