Date: Fri, 16 Mar 2012
From: Michael Black
To: letters@ montrealgazette.com
Subject: Edgy Women Festival
Why does the Gazette continue to typecast the Edgy Women Festival as dance? It's as if someone sees that it's from Studio 303, and then dismisses anything else said. In the age when anyone has a printing press, old media's role must be to provide depth.
I remember the first Edgy Woman Show, in May of 1994. I couldn't see the point. It wasn't much different from the monthly dance shows at Studio 303, which was women, and Edgy was either dance or mostly dance. At that level, dance is a women's art. And those choreographers were pushing what dance was.
But Edgy Women slowly got bigger, moved to March, became a festival and was more than dance. Initially "edgy" seemed hyperbole, but slowly it became performance that was out of the mainstream. So Karen Bernard still had little words of dance that made me and the rest of the audience laugh, but there were drag kings (with dynamics different from drag queens) and a woman tossing beet juice around (to represent menstrual blood, the audience never saw the hard scrubbing needed to clean the floor afterwards, that should have been part of the performance). Nathalie Claude put a football helmet on one year, and careened around the stage, physical comedy that women seem hesitant to try. I seem to recall storytelling, and even standup comedy.
Power comes from speaking your own words, and that's what art is. Some of Edgy Women is deliberately feminist art, but for women to speak their own words is to take power, no matter what they are saying.
One year, seeing tables set up by various women's groups, I realized it was one consistent event to mark International Women's Day, even if it does come later in the month.
Four years ago with the Festival back at Studio 303 due to budget issues, one day coincided with a snowstorm that started in the afternoon and got worse as the evening progressed. That limited attendance, but the audience that did show up had a cozy experience, in part because the Studio was arranged like a living room, but amplified by the snowstorm outside. It wasn't the crowd that showed up for the dance shows at Studio 303, and clearly it serves an important purpose. That was the year of "Hot Hot Gossip", a live soap opera, which included multimedia that wasn't gratuitous. One young woman practiced her boxing moves while we put things away.
International Women's Day has radical roots, it's fitting that art that isn't mainstream appears in March. While it's not the origins of IWD, this year and month marks the 100th anniversary of the Lawrence textile strike, mostly women workers. An IWW strike, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, the Rebel Girl, was a key organizer. It's the alleged origins of "Bread and Roses", a poem turned into a song, but based on a placard carried by one of the strikers. Edgy Women is Bread and Roses, political but also just art.
Next year let's see the Edgy Women Festival treated as either a women's festival or an arts festival, but definitely more than dance.
Michael Black