Students were enraptured by performances on Nov. 5 from crowd favorites like the Street Dance Club and the string quartet where, in a salute to youth, the audience sang along to Aerosmith’s “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing.”
The annual Homecoming Talent Show event is hosted by FIT’s Homecoming Committee and the College Players. This year, about three-quarters of the bleachers and chairs assembled in Clemente Center were filled with students.
Students could enter into two competitions, the Talent Show and the Homecoming King and Queen Lip Sync Competition.
The audience watched 25 acts sing, dance and play instruments.
Graduate student Thomas Rochester and Homecoming Chairperson Rebecca Demczuk were the main hosts of the event. Rochester was the jokester of the night, introducing most acts with a joke and throwing t-shirts to the crowd.
The homecoming theme, Around the World, was evident in the decorations and performances. The lip sync competitors had to come up with a routine based on the theme.
Contestants played on a stage surrounded by cutouts of structures from around the world, like the Eiffel Tower and the pyramids of Egypt. The backdrop featured an airplane flying across a sunset-colored globe.
Erick Celedonio’s performance on the electronic violin earned him first place in the talent portion of the show.
A student in mechanical engineering, Celedonio has been playing the violin for 11 years and started playing the electronic violin last year.
“The piece I played was a song I made last year for my high school,” Celedonio said. “I just wrote it to my school because they did a lot for me and I wanted to give it back a good performance. I named it ‘My Beloved Oceanside.’”
The second place winners, Ebube Ubochi and Tim Christopher, presented the audience with their take on Drake’s “Hotline Bling.” Ubochi also played the guitar and sang an original song while Christopher played the keyboard.
And although he had a cold, Zack Francais blew the crowd away with his performance of The Hills’ “Can’t Feel My Face,” earning himself third place in the talent portion of the show.
Celedeonio said, “Just seeing all the different acts you know, I didn’t realize how talented most of the students here were. I enjoyed every other performance, I didn’t really care if I won or lost. It was very fun.”
Junior in mechanical engineering, Maria Vittorida Elena, was the queen participant of Chi Phi and Alpha Phi’s lip sync.
Elena said they sat around a table throwing out ideas and making a list of the best ones. Then they agreed on the best one, took pictures at FIT Aviation and started putting moves together.
“The hardest part was going all at the same time in unison and learning everything at the same time because we couldn’t meet all together, so people had to catch up, but we managed to do it,” said Elena. “I had a lot of fun.”
Chi Phi and Alpha Phi were the winners of the lip sync competition.
The Caribbean Student Association earned second place. They turned Dora into a travel agent that sent their group to everywhere except the Caribbean. Swiper the fox even made an appearance.
Tau Kappa Epsilon and Gamma Phi Beta came in third place.
Winners were given glass globes and a stand with their place etched on it. The base said “Homecoming Talent Show” and the place the contestant won.
Demczuk said, “We picked out these horrible twelve-foot globes on top of like a stick, and then someone was like ‘no, we’re getting these.’”
