Michigan Womyn's Music Festival - History

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 women 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); 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.