Michigan Womyn's Music Festival

Michigan Womyn's Music Festival

Location(s)	Hart, Michigan
Years active	1976–present
Genre	Women's music festival
Website	michfest.com

The Michigan Womyn's Music Festival, called "the Original Womyn's Woodstock" and often referred to as MWMF or Michfest, is an international feminist music festival occurring every August since 1976 near Hart, Michigan, in a small wooded area in northern Oceana County known as Whiskey Creek near Crystal Township, Oceana County, Michigan. The event is completely built, staffed, run and attended by women. The spelling of "womyn" in the name of the festival is deliberate, a reflection of feminist politics.

History

America’s first “women’s music festivals” began appearing in the early 1970s, starting with day festivals at the Sacramento State and San Diego State University campuses, the Midwest Women’s Festival held in Missouri, the Boston Women’s Music Festival, and the National Women’s Music Festival at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. These first regional women-only events exposed audiences to feminist and openly lesbian artists, most of whom operated independently of the mainstream recording industry. Festival gatherings offered an alternative to urban bars, coffeehouses and protest marches, which were some of the few opportunities for lesbians to meet one another in the early 1970s.

In addition to showcasing new artists, offering workshops, training interested women in land-based or sound production skills, and urging commitment to anti-racist practices and processing, festivals of the 1970s and early 80s provided fans of women’s music a temporary haven where performances, politics, and spirituality strongly affirmed a woman-loving sensibility. Early on, the exclusion of men became a hallmark of the specific festivals able to meet at privately owned or rented spaces. Festivals such as National (NWMF), hosted by various university campuses, offered the comfort of dormitories and equipped classrooms, but at a public setting where men remained part of audiences, living spaces, or as union techies at concerts. Other festivals, eventually including the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival (MWMF), Campfest, NEWMR (the Northeast Women’s Music Retreat), the West Coast Music and Comedy Festival, and the East Coast Lesbian Festival (ECLF) committed to producing women-only events where female workers filled all roles from drumming to plumbing. Today, the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival is the oldest, largest, longest-lasting women-only festival.

As a private, women-only and clothing-optional camping event, the Michigan festival was founded in 1976 by 19-year-old Lisa Vogel, who, with sister Kristie Vogel and friend Mary Kindig, planned an event along the lines of the recent Boston Women’s Music Festival and the Midwest Women’s Festival. Showcasing a variety of women’s music and speakers over one affordable weekend, the first MWMF met on 120 acres near Mount Pleasant, Michigan. Within a year, a larger site in Hesperia was leased and served as the annual site through 1981 (now affectionately referred to as “the Old Land” by longtime workers.) The festival operated as a collective known at WWTMC, or We Want The Music Collective, later becoming a cooperative, then a company; staffed entirely by volunteers, the festival gradually grew to distribute small salaries or honoraria to long-time “coordinators” (experienced workers who helped run “crews” such as security, garbage, childcare, kitchen, land maintenance, and stage production). While the early years were marked by much trial and error in terms of weather, constructing pedestrian paths without damaging the natural environment, food preparation, and sound amplification, the festival continually expanded its attention to care and cultural diversity. Adamant that all womyn-born womyn should have access to lesbian culture, the festival initiated American Sign Language (ASL) translation for deaf campers, a “DART” area (Differently Abled Resource Tent), childcare, sober support, and eventually a Women of Colors tent and sanctuary. Diversity workshops were led by experienced facilitators, including Papusa Molina, Amoja Three Rivers, Penny Rosenwasser, and Margaret Sloan-Hunter.

By 1978, the festival’s logo of oak tree and piano, designed by artist “Sally Piano” (also known as Sirini Avedis), began appearing on brochures and sale items; some longtime workers and “festiegoers” have acquired tattoos in this popular design. With an identifiable logo and a regularly returning fan base, the festival was able to initiate sales of “festiewear” (t-shirts, caps and tank tops) and to attract “festievirgins” from as far away as Japan, New Zealand and Australia. Artists appearing in the first five years included most of the stars of the burgeoning women’s music movement, such as Holly Near, Margie Adam, Sweet Honey in the Rock, Linda Tillery, The Dance Brigade, Mary Watkins, Alive!, Edwina Lee Tyler, Teresa Trull, Alix Dobkin, Maxine Feldman, Cris Williamson, Meg Christian, Ferron, and Casselberry & Dupree. By the festival’s fourth year, the expansion of performance space led to the addition of a popular Day Stage. A focus on women’s spirituality and goddess heritage emerged from artists such as Kay Gardner, Z Budapest, and, later on, Ruth Barrett; lesbian comedians such as Kate Clinton also began to be featured, often serving as witty emcees (comedy would expand substantially throughout the next three decades.) Playing to enthusiastic audiences, festival artists mixed with fans and/or offered workshops during their stay on the land. This ease of access to stage performers was another contrast to mainstream rock festivals in the same era.

In 1982 the festival, then in its seventh year, moved to its present 650-acre location near Hart, Michigan, attracting the largest audience to date (upwards of 8,000 campers.) Gradually, the festival added an acoustic stage (and an August night open mic stage) in addition to day stage and night stage programming. After much discussion, cement-paved walkways were added to ease women with mobility challenges and baby strollers. Barbara “Boo” Price became Lisa Vogel’s business partner after the 1985 festival and was increasingly involved with production until the two parted ways in 1994, during a decade which saw many unique challenges to the festival—including the production of a 10th anniversary double album in 1985; the growth of the festival to five days (with new intensive workshops) by 1986; the extraordinary thunderstorms of the “Harmonic Convergence” year in 1987; an outbreak of shigella in 1988 (the swift handling of which was praised by both local and national health inspectors);^{[citation needed]} charges of racism in 1989, resulting in festival-style town meetings; debates over visible S/M sexuality, which led to an activist flying a small plane over the land and scattering flyers.

Addressing the global community of women, the festival added an international welcome greeting in many languages as a regular feature of the opening ceremonies, and featured more and more award-winning international artists, such as New Zealand’s Topp Twins, Canada’s Sawagi Taiko drum ensemble, South African ensemble Shikisha, and China’s rock ground Cobra, as well as individual artists touring the United States. A film festival, showcasing independent documentaries and feature-length films made by women, drew enthusiastic crowds, as did the many unique reappearing “traditions” emerging during week of the festival, such as the Redhead Parade, a barter market, two-step and belly dance lessons, a children’s parade, and spontaneous mud wrestling in rain puddles after thunderstorms.

During the 1990s, the festival updated structurally and musically to expand styles of stage performance for a new generation of performers, adding a runway to the Night Stage, a mosh pit, and acts including the Indigo Girls, Tribe 8, The Butchies, Le Tigre, Bitch and Animal, Sister Spit, and Ubaka Hill’s Drumsong Orchestra. Bridging the generations with legacies of both folk and rock was performer Toshi Reagon, daughter of Bernice Johnson Reagon from Sweet Honey in the Rock; and comedy played a larger role, with returning appearances by performers such as Sara Cytron, Marga Gomez, Elvira Kurt, the Topp Twins, Suzanne Westenhoefer, and Karen Williams.

Writing from a personal perspective for the Village Voice in fall 1994, festival artist and kitchen worker Gretchen Phillips expressed a nearly universal reaction to her first festival--“I had never seen so many breasts before, so many bare asses, so much damn skin on such a vast terrain. I decided to make that weekend all about studying my body issues”—and went on to include another frequently cited reaction: “I’ve always used Mich as a place to charge my batteries for the rest of the year, planning my life around being there in August and learning my lessons, both fun and hard.” Playwright Carolyn Gage would later give voice to another key appeal motivating campers to return: “At Michfest, she can experience a degree of safety that is not available to any woman any time anywhere except at the festival. And what does that mean? It means she achieves a level of relaxation, physical, psychic, cellular, that she had never experienced before. She is free, sisters. She is free. Often for the first time in her life.”

The coy phrase “See You in August” appeared on bumper stickers sold by the festival as a means for women (many of whom remained closeted for professional reason throughout the 1980s and 90s) to signify their Michigan attendance to one another; attendees respond quickly to the sight of a woman in “festiewear” off land, and by 2000 the festival’s popular Cuntree Store had expanded beyond t-shirts and stickers to sell camping gear, premium ice cream, and a range of tools and snacks. This represented a substantial upgrade from the early years on “Old Land,” where only popcorn, sold in brown bags labeled Mamacorn, was available as a between-meal treat for purchase. The festival’s crafts bazaar expanded to as many as 150 booths of woman-made products, from art and pottery to books, drums, sex toys, and new music CDs autographed by festival artists.

By 1995, with 8,000 women attending the 20th anniversary festival, longtime workers, artists, and returning audiences had popularized a lexicon of slang terms and code names for aspects of the Michigan experience: “Porta-Janes” (rather than Porta-Johns) for the freestanding toilets, “Belly Bowl” for the worker eating area backstage (referencing a popular Ferron lyric), “Sano” for the Sanitation crew, “The Womb” for the medical services tent, and “chem-free” for seating areas and camping spaces with no smoking, alcohol, drugs, or artificial fragrances. The latter emphasized awareness of the many women attending who were in recovery or who had allergies and chemical sensitivities.

From 1994 to 2005, in addition to production values attentive to ethnic diversity on every stage, Jewish women’s visibility increased with mainstage artists such as Isle of Klezbos, Divahn and Mikveh; at these performances, hundreds of Jewish women and friends linked hands to dance the hora at Night Stage. While dance had always been an important feature, with opening night ceremonies typically featuring the impressive choreography of Krissy Keefer’s Dance Brigade, the decade from 1999 to 2009 also saw a surge in spoken word (Sister Spit, Alix Olson, Staceyann Chin). The Acoustic Stage in particular produced plays including The Vagina Monologues and Jeanette Buck’s “There Are No Strangers Here,” the acrobatics group Lava, a reading by Alice Walker, and, on Sundays, the Drumsong Orchestra, gospel choir, healing ritual and closing ceremony, as well as a regularly appearing comedy lineup to send campers homeward with laughter.

Throughout its first three decades, the festival attracted remarkably little coverage by the mainstream media, in part due to careful protection of attendees’ privacy. (This was true for nearly all other regional festivals as well, with the exception of Camp Sister Spirit in Mississippi, where local threats against the lesbian producers roused a national campaign for their protection). In the lesbian feminist alternative press, however, every Michigan festival year and individual artist received coverage in HOT WIRE: The Journal of Women’s Music and Culture, published by one of the festival’s photographers, Toni Armstrong Jr. Eventually, newer magazines such as Curve and Girlfriends, tailored to a new generation of lesbian fans, began to address festival culture. However, when the mainstream press discovered Lilith Fair—Sarah McLachlan’s tour of female artists in the late 1990s, mixing male musicians with female headliners out front—readers gained the false impression that Lilith Fair was America’s first-ever women’s music festival. With the growth of Internet use and sites, the Michigan festival gained greater attention and publicity, and MWMF fans established a lively bulletin-board forum in cyberspace.

By the first decade of the 21st century, the audience demographic at Michigan included a notable wave of children, resulting in family-friendlier campgrounds and practices. Many younger women arrived as the next generation ready to uphold women-only space. The schedule of workshops and discussions regularly included intergenerational dialogue spaces, some with an emphasis on understanding the festival’s history. Young women who had grown up at Michigan, attending since early childhood, were now workers and performers, and mothers returning with now-adult daughters could be found both on and offstage (spoken-word performer Alix Olson brought her grandmother one year.) Ageism became an issue addressed through greater visibility of both elders (Miss Ruth Ellis competed in the annual “Lois Lane Run” challenge well into her nineties) and youth (a "teen tent" grew out of the Community Center space, adjacent to the "Over Forties" tent; all ages met over the quilting workshop in Over Forties.)

With so many age groups present, stage performances in the 21st century now included the artist Bitch performing alongside the older Ferron, or The Butchies covering Cris Williamson songs, as well as cutting-edge performers like God-dess and She, Hanifah Walidah, Slanty-Eyed Mama and MEN. Longtime “land crew” worker Flowing (Margaret Johnson) offered land walks to small groups each summer to explain the festival’s natural environmental state and the history of decisions made to add structures or to increase camper safety in the woods. The ideal of land stewardship, respect for nature, and sustainability through “green” policies guided the festival’s recycling crew, dishwashing stations, and tree care. Sweat lodges and workshops led by Native American worker Shirley Jons also helped emphasize awareness of the indigenous women who had first walked on the land.

Work crew “wrap-up meetings” also reflect the sheer nuts and bolts of labor: “We used 37,200 feet of twine this year.” “We ordered 4,416 rolls of toilet paper.” “We used 1,250 pounds of ice in the kitchen alone.” “The main kitchen produced a total of 100,000 meals.” “The massage crew gave over 890 massages.” “The interpreters worked with 45 deaf women from five different countries.” “130 gallons of water were used for the Dance Brigade performance.” “Childcare had 60 toddlers under age four; our youngest camper was three months old.” The Festival is now attracting academic researchers whose theses and dissertations examine every angle of MWMF culture—although there are almost no places for them to plug in their computers on the land. In an era of increasing Internet and cell phone dependency, some first-timers are stunned to realize they will be living off the grid for a week, without access to their e-mail messages, while others relish a unique opportunity to exist apart from the “outside” world. (However, all campers are able to make calls from temporary pay phones set up near the front gates.)

Thousands continue to make the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival their annual pilgrimage, some coming specifically for the intensive workshops scheduled in the earlier part of the week’s events. Most festival-goers conclude that even a few days in women-only space are a life-changing experience largely unavailable anywhere else. Many point to one song, in fact, as the essence of their festival experience, for MWMF has an anthem of sorts—the late Maxine Feldman’s composition “Amazon,” later adapted into an upbeat version by longtime performer and opening ceremonies director Judith Casselberry. As Casselberry is now finding through an independent research project, many women who have been to the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival even once feel that hearing the first notes of “Amazon Womyn Rise” from the Night Stage on opening night (with thousands of women singing along) sets the mood for the festival week itself.

Functioning, activities and services

Attendance at the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival ranges from 3000 to 10,000.

Women build all of the stages, run the lighting and sound systems, make the trash collection rounds, serve as electricians, mechanics, security, medical and psychological support, cook meals for thousands over open fire pits, provide childcare, and facilitate workshops covering various topics of interest to the attendees, who are referred to as "festies". Hundreds of women spend upwards of a month out on the land building the festival from the ground up because every year the festival is torn down, leaving the land as close to how it was found as possible.

Community decisions are made through worker community meetings where the youngest members of the community are given as much access to participate as the oldest. While men are not allowed at the festival, male children age 4 and under are allowed within the festival. Childcare for girls and boys aged 5 and under is provided by Sprouts, and for 5 and over girls the main venue is "Gaia Girls". There is also a teen tent. Brother Sun Boys Camp is available for boys aged 5 to 10.

Three vegetarian meals are served daily to attendees and festival workers, which is included for all ticket holders. There are also alternative venues for food, which sell pizza, pretzels, calzones, coffee, doughnuts, etc. Ice is made available for purchase on-site for coolers. There are no buildings on the land, so sanitation is provided through two outdoor dishwashing areas, multiple cold water taps, four sets of outdoor heated shower facilities, as well as rented portable toilets nicknamed "porta-janes."

The festival takes great care to provide healing space for various communities; accordingly, there is a "Womyn of Color"-only space and a "Jewish Womyn's Tent", as well as separate spaces for girls and teens. In addition to ample "general camping" areas, specialized categories of camping areas include "Chem-Free," "Scent-Free", "Over-50s", families with young children, "DART" camping (Disabled Access Resource Team), and an area for deaf and hard-of-hearing attendees to camp together, should they wish. There is also dedicated space for "Loud and Rowdy" adult campers and late-night revellers, called "The Twilight Zone." (These policies are explained in the festival program made available to each festiegoer after she has signed up for her work shift upon arrival.)

Artists and craftswomen are an integral part of the MWMF experience, and have provided original, visual expressions of women's culture since the festival began.

Production and performances

The festival creates a high-tech production with four working stages in an extremely rural outdoor venue. Built over a month-long period by a volunteer workforce, the festival land starts completely in its natural ecological state. After the week-long festivities, the workers tear down the entire operation and completely remove all non-organic materials from the land. The equipment is then stored in a variety of local barns and warehouses to be used the following year. By the time the last woman leaves the land, nothing remains as evidence of the event; even the electrical boxes that power the festival are buried at each festival's end.

The festival has absolutely no corporate sponsorship, with each year's festival paying for the next.

Womyn-born-Womyn Intention

The Michigan Womyn's Music Festival holds an intention that the festival is a space for womyn-born womyn (also known by some as cisgender or cissexual women), that is women assigned female at birth, raised as girls, and currently identified as women. Men and trans women are asked to respect that intention. The intention first came to popular attention in 1991 after a festival goer named Nancy Burkholder was asked to leave the festival after revealing that she was transsexual. Co-founder and owner Lisa Vogel once explained the intention as follows: "It's our right and it's our responsibility to say who we want the event to be for and. . .who we're organizing it for, and it's not making a judgment or a statement. . .about anybody else. It wasn't back in 1976 when we said it was women only, and it's not in 2005 when we want it to be for womyn-born womyn. Our queer community is diverse, and I support separate and whole space for anybody who wants it." Vogel also argued that womyn-born-womyn experience femaleness in a radically different way than trans women do. In her view, women assigned female at birth experience a particular form of misogyny and subordination under patriarchy because of their biology at birth, whereas trans women, when perceived to be male, experience male privilege prior to transitioning. According to Vogel, this distinction continues to color the respective experiences of both groups of individuals throughout their lives. On April 11, 2013, in response to a Change.org petition asking performers to boycott the festival as a result of the intention, Lisa Vogel released a statement once again explaining her reasons for the intention around supporting and sustaining womyn-born-womyn space. In it, Vogel reaffirmed her support of a women's community that recognizes and includes trans women but also respects and recognizes the life experiences of women born female, noting: "I reject the assertion that creating a time and place for WBW to gather is inherently transphobic. This is a false dichotomy and one that prevents progress and understanding. I believe in the integrity of autonomous space used to gather and celebrate for any group, whether that autonomous space is defined by age, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, ability, gender, class or any other identity. Whatever spaces we carve out in our community to encourage healing and rejuvenation should be accepted, and we should support each other in this endeavor. Nobody should be asked to erase the need for autonomous spaces to demonstrate that they are sisters in struggle."

Criticism and protest against the policy

After Nancy Burkholder was asked to leave the festival in 1991, a protest movement against the intention developed. Opponents contend that the intention constitutes discrimination against transsexual and transgender people, many of whom they say identify as women, are legally female, and have to cope with the effects of sexism and misogyny in their daily lives. Transsexual activist Julia Serano provided her perspective on the issue: "Some of the women who travel from all over the country to attend Michigan think nothing of wearing their suspicion or hatred of trans women on their sleeves, and they will often make extraordinarily ignorant and insensitive comments about trans women in their attempts to justify our exclusion. . .[The] idea that the femaleness of my mind, personality, lived experiences, and the rest of my body can somehow be trumped by the mere presence of a penis can only be described as phallocentric." Activists for including trans women have handed out pamphlets to festival goers waiting in line for admission, protested at the gate, and boycotted performers who have played at the festival. They have also established an annual protest encampment near the festival known as Camp Trans. Several trans women have, since that time, attended the festival openly.

Current status

In 2006, a transsexual woman and Camp Trans organizer named Lorraine was sold a ticket at the box office. Supporters of trans women inclusion then issued a press release declaring, incorrectly, that the womyn-born-womyn intention was no longer in effect. In response, Lisa Vogel reaffirmed her support of and the festival's adherence to the intention. The Festival's intention of being created for womyn-born-womyn is still in effect.

Documenting the festival

Lesbian photographer Angela Jimenez spent five years, from 2003 to 2008, documenting the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival, specifically focusing on the workers who create the festival each year. Angela stated that “The worker crews are really at the heart of it and it’s a really important part of history that’s been happening for 34 years and I just felt like this is a story that we need to know,” says Jimenez. Her self-published book, Welcome Home: The Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival has been sold at the festival and is available online.

The Michfest Half-Way Soirée

For years, women created small gatherings outside of the festival and August in their own local communities, consisting mostly of small house parties and potlucks. After attending a festival in August 2004 and a pre-fest potluck, festie goer and entrepreneur, Lisa A. Snyder, was inspired to take the gatherings to the next level by creating a party that highlighted pieces of the festival in the middle of New York City. In 2005, she created the very first "Michfest Half-Way Soirée", a party that supported the local Michigan Womyn's Music Festival community, female musicians, and women-owned businesses. The worker community and festie community were encouraged to co-mingle and introduce new "festie virgins" to feel a slice of the festival energy, halfway to August. The benefit, the first of its kind (started by Snyder in New York City) also created buzz about the festival, appearing several times in Time Out New York and most recently in February 2011 issue of GO in "The Very Best of New York City Music" section.

The Michfest Half-Way Soirée - NYC consists of a musician or several musical artists who have either attended the festival or have appeared on one of their three stages in the past, dancing, and a raffle where women can win a number of prizes, including a ticket to the festival. Past acts have included Nedra Johnson, Staceyann Chin, Amber Darland, Hanifah Walidah, Pamela Means, Gina Breedlove and Reina Williams, who was seen in 2011 on The X Factor.

In the last three years, additional locations for the Half-Way to Michfest Parties (sometimes also called Mid-Way Parties or Michfest Half-Way Parties) have begun to pop up across the United States. Known locations include Chicago, San Francisco Bay Area, Portland, Oregon, Boston, Ann Arbor, Michigan, Santa Cruz, California, Syracuse, New York, Long Beach, California, Western Massachusetts, and Bellingham, Washington.

The Michfest Half-Way parties, usually held between February and April, have played an important role in keeping the spirit of the festival alive throughout the year, to keep local Michfest workers and attendees connected, to spread word about the festival, and to raise money for the women and children's fund

See also

• Feminism
• Herstory
• Lesbian feminism
• Radical feminism
• Women's music
• Womyn

References

• Morris, Bonnie J, Eden Built by Eves: The Culture of Women's Music Festivals, Alyson Publications, New York City, April 1999
• Wiltz, Teresa XX Marks the Spot, Washington Post, August 16, 2001
• Lo, Malinda "Behind the Scenes at the Michigan Women's Music Festival" After Ellen, April 20, 2005

Further reading

• Eaklor, Vicki L. (2008). Queer America: A People's GLBT History of the United States. New York: New Press. ISBN 978-1-59558-636-0. 
• McHugh, Erin; May, Jennifer (2010). The L life: Extraordinary Lesbians Making a Difference. New York: Stewart, Tabori & Chang. ISBN 978-1-58479-833-0. 
• Shneer, David; Aviv, Caryn (2006). American Queer, Now and Then. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers. ISBN 978-1-59451-171-4. 

External links

• Michigan Women's Music Festival