Sun rises on Kuvia's silver anniversary
For a week during her first winter in the College, Agnes Bugaj and several of her floor mates in Alper House woke before dawn while the rest of Hyde Park soundly slept. Bugaj was on a mission to get her dorm mates out of bed and out into the snow—all before sunrise.
“A couple of us would go and bang on doors and get everyone awake,” Bugaj recalls. Five mornings in a row, Bugaj trekked through the snow to Henry Crown Field House to practice martial arts, dance, and yoga routines at Kuviasungnerk/Kangeiko, the University’s annual winter celebration. This year’s festival runs Jan. 12-16 and includes morning exercise sessions, afternoon activities and faculty fireside chats.
Students who participate in all five days of exercises win a Kuvia T-shirt boasting this year’s theme: “Kuviasungnerk/Kangeiko: Hard to say, even harder to do,” and houses will compete to have the highest participation in Kuvia events.
“We definitely try to get people psyched up and ready for Kuvia,” adds Bugaj, now a third-year in the College and a student organizer of this year’s festivities with the Council on University Programming.
“I think Kuvia shows a little bit of our craziness,” Bugaj says. “At the University of Chicago, we pull these all-nighters and work until late hours, but sometimes we do crazy stuff like waking up at 5:30 in the morning to head out into the snow.”
A Chicago winter tradition
Kuviasungnerk/Kangeiko has been a Hyde Park tradition since January 1983, when former Dean of the College Donald Levine introduced the festival to the University community. On-campus Kuvia festivities replaced winter retreats to Wisconsin formed by the College Dean of Students Office for first-years.
“The idea was, why send only some of these students away to camp when we could do something on campus?” Levine says. “A campus festival would be a morale booster during winter and cheer up the whole University community. And giving it those exotic names would appeal to the distinctive intellectual snobbery of our place.”
Levine says the name Kuviasungnerk comes from an Inuit word meaning happy times, and Kangeiko from a Japanese samurai tradition of rigorous winter training. For years, one highlight of Kuvia was ice sculpting on the main Quadrangles.
Now in its 25th year, Kuviasungnerk/Kangeiko still garners wide enthusiasm from the University community. Each year, more than 250 students, faculty, and members of the University community meet at Henry Crown for morning calisthenics and warm-ups. On the festival’s final day, they march to Lake Michigan to entice the sun to rise with the yoga practice “Salute to the Sun.”
Each morning, members of the University faculty and student martial arts and dance groups lead exercise demonstrations. An avid martial arts enthusiast and fourth-degree black belt in aikido, Levine kicked off this year’s celebration Monday morning with a stretching routine that combined yoga, chi kung, and aikido.
A little bit of everything
This year’s Kuvia festivities mark the engagement of an array of campus organizations. “Kuvia is invigorating because it requires such involvement on campus,” said COUP board member Michelle Chun, a fourth-year College student. “Attending all five days is something that’s difficult to manage during Winter Quarter, but it’s such a success when you manage to finish it.”
In addition to student martial arts and dance groups, this year’s events will include a knitting contest. Over winter break, teams competed to knit the most scarves by Monday evening of Kuvia week. A $50 prize awaits the winning team, and all of the scarves will be donated to Chicago-area shelters.
In the afternoons, students and professors can interact during several faculty fireside chats at the Office of Multicultural Student Affairs at 5710 S. Woodlawn Ave. Speakers and topics include Philip Gossett, the Robert W. Reneker Distinguished Service Professor in Music and the College, on Italian opera; Laurens Mets, Associate Professor in Molecular Genetics & Cellular Biology and the College, on alternative energy; and Grace Tsiang, Director of Undergraduate Programming in Economics, on the recent economic recession.
Each year during the final day of Kuvia, scantily clad students run through the snow-covered Quadrangles in the annual Polar Bear Run. The run will start at 3:30 p.m. Friday at Harper Memorial Hall and will end at Hull Gate. That evening, the weeklong festivities will culminate in Hutchinson Courtyard with a bonfire and S’mores.
“Kuvia is representative of the University’s desire to challenge itself and to keep active. Although it’s a different manifestation than what we normally see, I don’t think Kuvia is an anomaly in that respect,” Chun says.
“It’s about learning new things, about exploring different aspects of the community, different people in the community.”
By Rhema Hokama
