The Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival Celebrates 40 Years Of Women’s Music In The Woods For The Last Time This Week
by Heather Cassell
The final song has started for the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival this week.
The festival’s, also known as Michfest, producer, Lisa Vogel, announced in April that this would be its final year for the festival that has been an institution dubbed as “the Original Womyn’s Woodstock” promoting women musicians and performers for 40 years.
The 40th anniversary of the week-long festival kicked off Tuesday opening with award-winning poet C.C. Carter and comedian Marga Gomez, performing her hit one-woman show, “Lovebirds.” The festival brings down its final curtain Sunday, August 9.
Many past performers have returned to the remote Michigan woods, where the festival has been held for four decades, to honor it. Upward of 10,000 festival goers will dance and laugh in the woods to Aima the Dreamer, Bitch, Cris Williamson, Ferron, Melissa Ferrick and many other women rocking out on stage. They will laugh it up with comedians Marga Gomez, Mimi Gonzalez, Julie Goldman, and Karen Williams before saying their final farewells on Sunday.
Legend
The Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival was co-founded by Lisa Vogel, her sister Kristie Vogel, and friend Mary Kindig in 1976.
It was the days of lesbian feminist separatism and creating women-only spaces. Olivia Records was launched only a few years before, women’s music festivals were popping up across the country, and they jumped on the wave. It was their idea to promote women’s music, especially openly lesbian musicians, and they were good at it.
In the 80s and 90s the festival grew adding other women performers and workshops, creating the model for many modern day smaller women’s music festivals, like Fabulosa Fest in Yosemite, California.
Through the decades, the festival retained its crunch granola mother earth vibe. It was an event that was completely built, staffed, run and attended by women.
However, there was one snag: transgender women. To let them into the festival or not?
Lisa decided, not to allow trans women into Michfest sticking to the festival’s policy only to allow “womyn-born-womyn” into the festival.
Activists’ protests against the policy grew from grumbles since 1991, when the first transgender woman Nancy Burkholder was booted out of the festival, to outrage with celebrities such as Antigone Rising, the Indigo Girls, and Lea DeLaria withdrawing from the festival. A formal petition signed by more than 1,400 people including the heads of major organizations, such as the National Center for Lesbian Rights and the National LGBTQ Task Force, circulated in 2014. These organizations later withdrew their names from the petition along with TransAdvocate, an online transgender magazine.
The organizations opted for an open dialogue, reported The Advocate Magazine.
Saying Farewell
In April, Lisa announced on Facebook.
“We have known in our hearts for some years that the life cycle of the Festival was coming to a time of closure. Too often in our culture, change is met only with fear, the true cycle of life is denied to avoid the grief of loss. But change is the ultimate truth of life,” Lisa wrote in the April 21 post on Facebook.
However, in the post she was hopeful that the baton to celebrate womyn’s music would be picked up by someone else in the future.
“Everything we have created together will feed the inspiration for what comes next. It’s possible that I will come back with something else, or that other sisters will take the inspiration of the Michigan community and create the next expression of our Amazon culture,” she wrote not stating who would take over or what would become of the land the festival happened on owned by the Michfest.
Lisa didn’t say why the festival was ending, but alluded to one of the festival’s biggest controversies, not allowing transgender women into the festival.
“There have been struggles; there is no doubt about that. This is part of our truth, but it is not–and never has been–our defining story,” she wrote.
However, faithful festival goers expressed profound sadness with the announcement of the end of the festival that for them is an end of an era and an end of safe spaces for all women to gather.
“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,” Playwrite Carolyn Gage told Curve Magazine.
Risa Poe expressed her loss of the festival and her commitment to returning to the woods one more time responding to the Facebook post, “This is where I reconnected with my love of art. This is where I learned to love myself. This is where I learned to accept my body. This is where I learned to love womyn unconditionally. This is where I healed. This is where I grieved. This is where I found strength. This is where I first felt pretty. This is where I feel whole. This is where I call home, the land that gave me so much, the womyn who taught me so much, the experience of a lifetime, I wouldn’t miss this last year for the world and can’t wait to come HOME!!!”
She was one of hundreds who responded similarly to the post.
Tickets range anywhere from $75 to $100 at the gate for a single day up to $750 for all six days.
To book your trip to Michigan, contact Heather Cassell at Girls That Roam Travel at Travel Advisors of Los Gatos at 408-354-6531at or .
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