June 30, 2000 GAY PEOPLE'S CHRONICLE MWMF (5)

An August tradition

The Michigan Womusic Festival marks a query

by Holly Pruett

Goddess-worshippers, stage divers, RVing women, riot girls and women of every preference and persuasion are gearing up for the 25th Michigan Womyn's Music Festival. Upwards of 8,000 women from around the world are expected to attend the festival, held the week of August 8-13 near the western Michigan town of Hart.

For the more than 50,000 women over the last twenty-five years who've made the pilgrimage to this lesbian phoenix that rises from the ferns each August, the word Michigan no longer means a state sandwiched between two giant lakes. Michigan represents, instead, a state of mind, a place where what's scarcely possible in the greater world becomes possible and is celebrated for one week's time.

"It's an exuberant celebration of our lives where we can love who we are as women," says Krissy Keefer, collective member and artistic director of Dance Brigade and Wallflower Order.

Michigan demonstrates what women can create when provided the space and what the world might be like if it were run by women. "The festival shows that it's possible to create a sustained reality with shared values, even when our ways of expressing those values aren't all the same," says Papusa Molina, who will travel from Mexico for her fifteenth festival.

Lynne Breedlove, lead singer of Tribe 8, who feared "some kind of hippy-dippy experience" when the band first played Michigan in 1995, now considers the festival "a model for the whole world."

"It's my dream future," she says.

But, first and foremost, it's a party. Festival-goers will enjoy 40 performances, hundreds of workshops, a film festival, crafts fair and the 650 wooded acres that are home to this annual women's village. The line up of performing artists will knock your socks off, whether those socks are anchored by Doc Maartens, Birkenstocks, platform thigh-highs, or Keds.

We'll get to the artists in a minute. First, consider the stages they perform on. They are out, way out, in the woods: the lush green woods, so full of oxygen that anything can happen.

"Women get an experience here that's crystal clear because it's so pure," says 25 year veteran Karen Dodson. "They can feel what it's like to have their energy less diluted."

The crowd at the Night Stage

This is a place where sisters were doing it ⚫ for themselves long before Aretha and Annie ever thought to sing a song on the subject.

In 1978, still married but following her first female crush to the festival, Amoja Three Rivers marveled at the sight of "women taking care of all the business themselves. It was the year of the tornado,” she recalls. “There were women up on the stage scaffolding and the lightning was like a strobe light. These were not scared women. These women were shouting back to the thunder."

Elvira Kurt

to know, 'I can do that!' Seeing women so strong in their womanness, living on their own without men, is an incredible thing for a young girl to see."

That's not to say it's a perfect place. The

Ubaka Hill

With women handling everything from sound to security and plumbing to popsicles, the festival is an annual antidote to the culture at large that continues to deny women's abilities, ethics and basic worth.

Evelyn Harris

For the girls who've grown up at the festival, says 17-year-old Amber Jones, "It's so empowering

storms that rock the land aren't all on the weather map. Holly Near observes, "Since we bring all our stuff to the party, it's no paradise-though there are heavenly moments." Michigan has long been recognized as a petri dish: a place where different cultural strains germinate and grow into a larger, complex organism.

"The issues brought to Michigan are what's important to women," says longtime sound engineer Boden Sandstrom. "Issues that are discussed and often resolved in a way that doesn't exist anyplace else, and then is taken back to communities around the world."

Ferron confirms Michigan's vanguard role: "What starts at Michigan ends up in the public in five or six years."

Whether it's work on race and class awareness or insistence on sign language interpretation, many of the practices that are taken for granted in feminist enterprises around the country were the subject of testing and turmoil at Michigan.

Underlying the methodical process used to support the eruption and resolution of conflict lies an abiding commitment to connection that's often missing in the larger world. Michigan native Susan Allborell says, "It's my family, truly. We've stood around knee deep in mud, we've screamed at each other, but it never changed the fact that we love each other."

That abiding sense of connection to a place, to a vision, and to each other-has brought Michigan to its twenty-fifth year at a time when the closing of lesbian-feminist bookstores and other institutions is all too common. In a sense, the festival is a time

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Giant puppet parade