Quad-a-Palooza brings the carnival to campus

Amid budget cuts, Syracuse University’s student programming board, University Union announced a pause on its annual fall music festival Juice Jam. This year it was replaced by a carnival-themed event called Quad-a-Palooza, however the event did not seem to escape the shadow of the concert it was replacing. 

The event featured student DJs, local food and several carnival-themed games from caricature drawings, balloon animals and body art. The biggest draw was the build-your-own stuffed animal station, where the line stretched across the Shaw Quadrangle. 

UU public relations director Catie Blackman said Juice Jam will be on an indefinite hiatus. However, Quad-a-Palooza should not be considered a replacement.

“It’s more of just a reallocation of our funds,” Blackman said. “That’s how our budget works, it’s a case-by-case basis, so this is just how it happened to fall this year.” 

For the past five decades Juice Jam has been an early fall semester tradition at SU, featuring headliners such as Ashe, Quavo and T-Pain.

While Quad-a-Palooza is not a concert, music was still a big part of the event. 

DJ duo Madeline Wolcott and Tannah Hines, known as Body Glitter, kicked off the event with their set. Wolcott and Hines said that although Juice Jam gets a bigger crowd, performing was their ultimate goal. 

“It’s not as successful as Juice Jam probably would have been with attendance,” Hines said. “I always enjoy seeing who is going to perform, but in the end I got to DJ.” 

Wolcott explained that she felt a lot of people already came into the event with the wrong mindset. 

“I think there was a lot of cohesive disappointment going into this event,” Wolcott said. “But we will see after more people come and experience it, I know we had fun.” 

In the past Juice Jam attendance was consistently around 10,000 students.

Quad-a-Palooza did not seem to reach near that amount. 

UU public relations director Christian Figuereo said UU did hear backlash from students, but he remained focused on using the funds available to put on a fall event. 

“With a lot of the events we (University Union) put on, everyone is going to have an opinion on it,” Figuereo said. “We use this more in a constructive way or we are not going to be able to do our job as effectively as we’d like to.”

Figuereo said the decision to cut Juice Jam was not easy, but had to be done. 

“We know that Juice Jam is a very big thing in the community,” Figuereo said. “But we are putting it on a little bit of a hiatus to test a few things and see what we could do with what we are provided with by the university.”

Quad-a-Palooza was not Juice Jam, and it never claimed to be. With a smaller budget, University Union still found a way to give students a fall event, and for the people who showed up, that was enough.