The Michigan Womyn's Music Festival, called "the Original Womyn's Woodstock" [1] and often referred to as MWMF or Michfest, is an international feminist music festival occurring every August since 1976 near Hart, 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.
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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 in Champaign-Urbana. These first regional woman-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 often the only 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 radical 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 woman-only festival.
As a private, woman-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 Mt. Pleasant. Within a year, a larger site in Hesperia, Michigan was leased and then 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 ASL interpreting 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, now aged 7, moved to its present location of 650 acres 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; and ongoing disagreement over the presence of boy children and transwomen. Eventually, the debate over the Festival’s womyn-born policy would escalate into the construction of a Camp Trans site beyond the festival gates.
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 Festival week, such as the Redhead Parade, a barter market, two-step and bellydance lessons, a children’s parade, and spontaneous mudwrestling 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.”[2] 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.” [3]
The coy phrase “See You in August” appeared on bumperstickers 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; festiegoers 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-Jons) 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 1994-2005, 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 1999-2009 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, a 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 festiegoers’ 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. Some younger women, accustomed to queer-defined rather than woman-defined activism, challenged Michfest’s womyn-born policy, while others arrived as the next generation ready to uphold woman-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 (performer) 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 (band). 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 indigenous women who had firstwalked 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 festiegoers conclude that even a few days in woman-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.
Women build all of the stages, run the light 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.[4]
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 under 5 girls and boys 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.[5]
Three vegetarian meals are served daily to festies 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 "Womyn of Color"-only space, 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 festies 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 workshift 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.
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 to bear witness 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.
Since its inception, "the Michigan Festival...always has been an event for women, and this continues to be defined as womyn born womyn" (Lisa Vogel & Barbara Price). This policy has gained notoriety for the festival, as it officially requests that the attendees be "womyn-born-womyn" (WBW) only. That includes those who were born and raised as girls, and currently identify as women.
Opponents of the policy believe that WBW is a questionable category permitting discrimination against transsexual and transgender women. They point out that very little of the festival's content and language about itself centers around specific experiences of being "born and raised", but rather focuses on the idea that the festival is by and for "all women". Opponents argue for a less deterministic understanding of gender, insisting that "women's space is for all self-identified women," regardless of whether one was assigned female or male at birth. Trans rights activists claim that the festival's policy exerts cissexual privilege.
After a 1991 incident where MtF transwoman Nancy Burkholder was evicted from the festival, an active protest movement has sprung up around the festival. Opposition has included performers criticizing the policy from the stage, boycotts of performers who have played at the festival and not taken anti-policy stances, vandalism and spray-painting, and Camp Trans, a protest camp near the festival site.
In 1999, the then organizer of Camp Trans, Riki Wilchins, led an on-land protest of the WBW policy. Wilchins called a highly charged community meeting regarding the policy. Wilchins invited several people along the gender continuum to the land during the protest as a means of physically challenging the policy. One invitee, Tony Baretto-Neto, a post-operative trans man, infamously took a nude shower on the Land. Baretto-Neto would later argue that he deserved to attend Michfest because he had "paid his dues" as a lesbian.[6] A year later, Wilchins returned for a second protest that included other male identified trans men, such as Simon Strikeback. Strikeback, formerly a female identified member of the Chicago contingency of The Lesbian Avengers during the 1999 protest, had transitioned and was identifying as male by the time he entered the festival in August 2000, as part of the "Son of Camp Trans" action.
In 2006, an out trans woman and Camp Trans organizer named Lorraine was sold a ticket at the box office. Following a press release from Camp Trans declaring that the womyn-born-womyn policy was no longer in effect, Lisa Vogel reaffirmed her support of and the festival's adherence to the policy.[7] The Festival's WBW policy is still in effect and requests that it be respected. Open debate continues between supporters of the Festival and Camp Trans.
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.[4] Angela stated that “The worker crews are really at the heart of it and it’s a really important part of herstory 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.[8]
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 of 2004 and a pre-fest potluck, festie goer and entrepreneur, Lisa A. Snyder, was inspired to create an even bigger party that showed off more pieces of what the festival could bring to a womyns life. In 2005, she created the very first "Michfest Half-Way Soirée", a party that supported the local Michigan Womyn's Music Festival womyn and their businesses and invited new "festie virgins" to feel what it might be like to attend the festival, half-way to August. The party, the first of it's kind, was 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 (American magazine) in "The Very Best of New York City Music" section. [9] [10]
The Michfest Half-Way Soirée party consists of a set of 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 womyn can win a number of prizes, including a ticket to the festival. Past acts have included Nedra Johnson, Staceyann Chin, Amber Darland, Hanifah Walidah, and Reina Williams, who was seen in 2011 on The X Factor (TV series).
In the last three years, additional locations for the Half-Way Parties (sometimes also called Mid-Way Parties or Half-Way to Michfest Parties) have begun to pop up accross the United States. Known locations include Chicago, San Francisco Bay Area, and Portland, Oregon.
The Michfest Half-Way parties, usually held between February and April, have become an important role in keeping the spirit from the festival alive throughout the year, to keep local michfest workers and festies alike connected, and to spread the word about the festival.