Michigan Womyn's Music Festival celebrates 25 years of controversy

by Anngel Delaney 
New York Blade
August 7, 2000

For some, the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival is a bacchanalian
experience punctuated by Holly Near and Ronnie Gilbert's feminist
anthems, and discussion groups on everything from car repair to crystal
healing. To others, it is a political and personal journey focused on
organizing against the Christian Right, attending the Class War 101
workshop, and finding the right harness.

Even though festival-goers arrive with more personal predilections than
there are varieties of labrys jewelry, the Michigan Womyn's Music
Festival has managed to draw women from around the country and around
the world to one square mile of land in the Midwest for a week of
camping, music and the exploration of women's culture. This week marks
the 25th annual gathering.

Women's experiences at the multi-faceted event vary wildly from playing
pick-up soccer to attending workshops on Amazon Cellular Memory, but
most festival-goers express a common sense of wonder at landing in such
a large community of women, the feeling of safety that they experience,
as well as the acknowledgement that they belong, and their voices
should and will be heard.

A safe place for women

Seventeen-year festival veteran Alix Dobkin has seen a wide range of
women pass through the festival in her years as a performer and worker
but cites one nearly universal response: "Women are overwhelmed by the
fact that they can walk on the festival grounds at three in the morning
and feel completely safe." This feeling, says Dobkin, is quickly
followed by a realization "of how on guard and unsafe we, as women,
feel in the world all of the time."

Producer Lisa Vogel says though the festival makes room for a multitude
of experiences and has changed significantly since 1976, but the core
ethic remains the same: "It's a place for women to gather together
where there is room for all voices and where we can decide what is
going to be important in our everyday lives."

Though the guiding principles may have remained constant, nearly
everything else including the administration, the performers, the
festival-goers and even the layout of the land has changed since its
modest beginning. The festival grounds, now privately owned by We Want
the Music Company, features underground electrical wiring, wheelchair
access to all areas, running water, hot showers and meals that verge on
gourmet.

In the beginningc

Vogel traces the seeds of the festival to a drive back to Mount
Pleasant, Mich., from a National Women's Music Festival in Washington,
D.C., in 1975 where she, pal Mary Kindig and sister Kristie Vogel were
ruminating on how they would like to have a festival that they did not
have to drive across the country to get to.

Having no production experience, the three women nonetheless forged
ahead with the idea of a weekend festival that included a sleepover.

"We were innocent and ignorant but it was a radical rockin' time and
women where doing a lot of things that had never been done before,"
recalls Vogel. With the help of co-producer Boo Price, word about the
upcoming Michigan festival spread through women's presses and
bookstores, coffee houses, community papers and through other festivals
where the trio would hand out cold Old Milwaukee beer to whomever would
take and distribute a bundle of fliers in their hometowns.

From 2,000 people in 1976 to a record high attendance of 8,200 women,
the festival has evolved into a marvel of outdoor engineering, a high
quality stage production, and a locus of political and cultural debate.

The secret to the weeklong festival's success in Vogel's experience is
that the event "is changeable, mutable, and responsive" and that women
make the festival their own and develop a lasting commitment to it. But
with all of these women from around the country and around the world
feeling invested in the festival, conflict and controversies crop up in
every field and tent. Some of the flare-ups that threatened to burst
into consuming conflagrations over the decades include the question of
whether to admit male children, how to eradicate racism, the inclusion
of transsexuals and the practice of S/M on festival grounds.

Felice Shays, a New York-based performance artist who has done sign
language interpretation for six years at the festival, admits that she
does not agree with all event policies but sees the festival continuing
to thrive because women are dedicated to working out their political
and ideological differences.

"Women are committed to the festival as to a lover," observes Shays,
"and for 25 years, the festival has continued because it has decided to
not break up."

An evolving scene

A veteran worker and festival participant, Shays notes that the
mutability of the festival combined with a feeling of safety and
empowerment is a reason why women return year after year, but it also
leads to an environment where conflict can blossom.

"One thing I see is that the number of freaks, queers, pervs and kinky
girls has grown over the years because people feel safe and empowered
to be who they want or need to be," she says. Shays also notes that
this group of sex radicals and others contribute to the intense debate
about transsexuality at Michigan and in turn, the festival's reputation
for controversy.

Vogel offers insight into the origins of these conflicts saying that
conflict "happens because it's already happening in each woman's home
community, and because we try to foster diversity and community
conversation, it comes to the surface at the festival."

Festival grows through adversity

Vogel also admits that festival organizers have worked hard to
transform the festival from a homogenous one populated almost solely by
white women in their 20s to an international, multicultural gathering
of women from teen-agers to those in their 70s.

Pamela Sneed, a New York-based performance poet and writer, recalls
going to the festival to perform for the first time in 1994 with a fair
amount of ambivalence about it being a women-only space,

"When I heard that there was supposed to be no male music I thought it
was hysterical, but to my surprise, I found it quite powerful," says
Sneed. "There is a certain kind of magic being in a space like this."

As an artist, Sneed found that rather than limiting her expression and
experience, the special focus of the festival afforded her the
opportunity to learn as she performed to a crowd of all women.

"It was kind of like the feeling I get if I have an audience of black
lesbians or an audience of primarily black people; each can hear and
experience my work from different points of view," says Sneed.

From folkies to riot grrls

In addition to the producers' focus on multigenerational and
multicultural programming, Vogel also stresses that the schedule is
purposefully made to appeal to a wide range of musical tastes and
styles.

"Everyone doesn't have to like everything," states Vogel, whose
programming choices have sometimes been the target of vocal protests.

One such clash due to diversity stole the spotlight in 1994 when groups
of women picketed the band Tribe 8 for their extreme performance and
use of lyrics that evoke images of violence. In a show of
solidarity\and in a spirit of genuine fun\lesbian folk icon Alix Dobkin
stage dove into a seething mosh pit. Dobkin recalls the moment saying,
"I wanted to make a connection with younger lesbians, and I felt safe
when I saw all of those women who I knew waiting to catch me."

Michigan's legacy

Being rooted in Michigan for the past 25 years, the festival now has a
faithful audience that has been with the event for a full generation.
Bonnie Morris, author of Eden Built by Eves: The Culture of Women's
Music Festivals, sees this as a major catalyst for change in the
festival.

"There is now a generation gap, and with that comes the challenge of
wanting younger women to appreciate the legacy of the women that came
before them and hoping that older women will be exposed to the issues
that younger women are facing," says Morris.

As a historian, Morris also notes that the festival's formidable
history impacts the world outside of the festival in tangible ways.

"Over the years women's music festivals have been the training grounds
for hundreds of women in non-traditional jobs like sound, stage, and
lighting production and construction," observes Morris.

When the first festival performers took the stage in 1976, they were
plugged into a patchwork of equipment that was borrowed from men and
run by women with scant training. Out of necessity rather than
opportunity, women like veteran festival sound engineer Boden Sandstom
broke into the male-dominated field of music production and after years
of persistence ended up with their own equipment, their own companies
and a legion of women who have followed in their footsteps.

Producer Vogel sees the legacy of the festival not only in the lives of
the women who attend but also in the community that surrounds the
festival site near Hart, Mich.

"It has really changed the county," she says. "There are men who have
grown up in rural Michigan knowing that there is a thing called
'women's space' and its not something to be challenged."

Though Vogel admits that she and her co-founders never envisioned a
festival of this magnitude or longevity when they planned the 1976
event, she is equally unwilling to make any claims about when or if the
festival will end.

"As long as a big enough group show up to sustain the event, we'll
continue," says Vogel, who says the festival "doesn't show signs of
wearing out yet."