Activities & Organizations News

Frontier Fiesta brings back crowd at full capacity

Frontier Fiesta 2022

T-Pain performed as the headline artist for Frontier Fiesta 2022 and opened his set with his song “Booty Wurk.” | James Schillinger/The Cougar

Frontier Fiesta attracted students, alumni and families at full capacity over the weekend with a variety of performances and attractions splayed around the TDECU Stadium.

Day one of Frontier Fiesta showcased performances, a roller rink, arcade games, carnival rides and plenty more. 

The inspiration for the Throwback Thursday theme, shared by Frontier Fiesta vice chair Heavenly Ukejuh, came from a collective goal of making everyone feel welcomed. 

“The Board of Directors, we all sat down together in a meeting and we decided that would be a great theme for Thursday night as it’s a popular thing,” Ukejuh said. “There are people that were born in the 90s, people born in the early 2000s, (people) who haven’t seen Fiesta, so we wanted to give them a chance to relive and experience that kind of stuff.” 

Thursday night included the step show competition from a few of the Divine Nine fraternities and sororities. 

Alpha Kappa Alpha, Sigma Phi Beta and Zeta Phi Beta showed off creative routines with the spotlight being on the winners of the night, the Zetas. 

In addition to the activities, musical groups such as “Deniz Love” took to the stage performing multiple songs to the growing crowd. 

“Well, this is my first time so I’m just excited to kind of see what they have going on and the rides and the music is all pretty fun,” said communication science junior Emily Gonzalez. 

Day two of Frontier Fiesta hosted varying parody performances of movies and different musical performances. 

The theme of the night was Latin, where attendees got to partake in Latin dances lessons, attend performances 

Despite this being the first fully in-person Frontier Fiesta after the start of the pandemic, not many changes were made to the original capacity of the annual event.

“There were a lot more people that came the first day than there (were) in 2018, which was our last Frontier Fiesta,” said Frontier Fiesta director of operations Aria Shankar. “I think everyone’s really just excited to be back in person and to have it happen, because this is the longest programming tradition at UH.”

The last and perhaps most anticipated day of Frontier Fiesta included “Buy U a Drank” singer T-Pain’s performance and presented itself as an all day event packed with fun. 

As with day one and two, attendees kept themselves occupied with games, food and musical acts from local Houston groups and joint fraternity and sorority performances. 

However, all activities were viewed appetizers to the main act of the night, T-Pain. 

At 8 p.m on the dot, an anticipatory buzz filled the air as people piled in line to enter TDECU Stadium. 

Opening the show was returning performer Julian Divine, who introduced himself to the audience with his tunes. After a brief intermission from Divine’s set, a montage of T-Pain’s career accomplishments flooded on the stage’s screen, a loud cheer emitted from the audience. 

As soon as the montage concluded, the rapper came on stage delivering a high powered performance of “Booty Wurk.”

An eclectic mix of songs old and new, T-Pain commanded the stadium with his melodic voice and various dance moves with the help of his hype man, DJ Montay.

Popular songs such as “Buy U A Drank,” “I’m Sprung” and “Up, Down” were performed, driving people to get up from their seats and dance.

Ending the concert with a heartfelt shoutout and thanking everyone, T-Pain left some concert goers with a nostalgic show they could never forget.

[email protected]

Leave a Comment