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Machiko Saito’s Premenstrual Spotting. Photo courtesy of Machiko Saito.

Calling All Rebel Grrrls

Do It Yourself at Ladyfest Bay Area 2002

Say you’re putting on a festival of feminist music, arts, performance, film and workshops. Say it’s the latest progeny of the mother of all women’s art events: Ladyfest Bay Area.

Ladyfest is a genuine grassroots phenomenon. The first one was a Riot Grrrl-inspired festival in Olympia, Wash., that sprang up to raise money for a rape relief shelter and a women’s health fund. Featuring bands such as Sleater-Kinney and Le Tigre, it ended up getting mucho splashy coverage in Time magazine and other publications.

But without a powerful promoter or corporate sponsors, how do you get this offspring started from scratch, with zero dinero?

Find out what kind of cheap, easy resources (read: thrift stores and friends) are all around you. That’s what Laurie Koh, one of Ladyfest Bay Area’s core organizers and a solo acoustic performer at the event, did.

“Resources are a challenge,” she says, looking a little sad, biting into her toasted bagel outside of Dolores Café amid a dozen women eating breakfast in the sun. “In order to grow the festival, there are a lot of costs that you have to meet beforehand, deposit for some venues. So we’ve been doing benefits and things, and people have been generous and we got community support, but we’ve also learned how we can just use each other for resources.

Ladyfest Bay Area performers and organizers (left to right) Laurie Koh, Kirthi Nath, Pam Jost and Amy Squires. Photo courtesy of Ladyfest Bay Area.

And when Ladyfest Bay Area had to send out invitations to their press conference, they used another eye-catching, recycled medium: vinyl 45s with new labels glued to them. The song: “You’re Invited” by Miss D.I.Y.

Koh and organizer Kyla Schuller made them, gathering the singles from East Bay Depot for Creative Reuse, and hand-delivered almost all of them.

That’s the do-it-yourself spirit of Ladyfest. And ladies, wannabe ladies and former ladies throughout Northern California are invited to check out Ladyfest Bay Area’s music, art, film, spoken word, performance and workshop offerings when the event kicks off July 24 at various Mission district spaces in San Francisco.

This time, all profits from the festival will benefit Bay Area nonprofits GirlSource, the Center for Young Women’s Development and Serpent Source Foundation. Still, the main focus of the festival is female bonding, education and fun, with a less music-focused, more multidisciplinary arts perspective — and an emphasis on being as inclusive as possible when it comes to race, class and sexual preference.

“There was a real effort to include the trans community,” says Koh, between cell phone calls from fellow Ladyfesters. The festival is less than two weeks away and preparations are speeding up.

There are also a healthy handful of Asian Pacific American artists among the 30-plus music artists (which includes Bratmobile, the Donnas and Sisterz of the Underground), the more than 30 spoken word and performance artists (including Michelle Tea, Nomy Lamm and Loolwa Khazzoom), the 85-plus films (by Miranda July, Kristen Stoltmann and Jenny Stark), the four art exhibits (with works by Kelley Seda, Nicole Repack and Trina Robbins) and the 45-plus workshops (including “Hip Parenting,” “Fat as F—” and “Sex Toys 101”).

San Francisco organizer, filmmaker and educator Kirthi Nath — who will screen her films, give a spoken word performance and host a panel — was relieved other organizations felt that race was an important issue too. “It’s been really amazing because we decided we really wanted diversity on so many multiple levels,” she says. “It’s been amazing to feel a really shared sense of that mission and a trust, and it’s been amazing to work with a group where I don’t have to be the only person thinking about woman of color stuff, just because I’m a woman of color.”

Myra Vasquez’s Mother’s Blood. Photo courtesy of Myra Vasquez.

New York filmmaker Patty Chang will put the unagi to good use in her short film, Eels, which will screen at the opening night film program, “Looking is Better Than Feeling You,” curated by Asian film scholar/curator Astria Superak. Machiko Saito, who made the Ladyfest trailer and curated a program for the festival, will also show films and perform.

Elegant blog writer Mimi Nguyen and political poet Shailja Patel are among the APA spoken word performers, and APA visual artists include Grace Ku and Denise Kohatsu. Throughout the festival, several panels and workshops will focus on issues of race, such as Nath’s women of color filmmakers panel and “The Big Picture: Anti-Racist Feminism.”

Nath attended the original Ladyfest in Olympia, Wash., and knew she wanted to get involved in the Bay Area event when she moved here.

“It was such an inspiring and empowering experience, meeting people who had this idea for a radio station and went out and did one that would inspire someone else to go do something. So it was a lot of ‘do-it-yourself,’” she recalls of the August 2000 Ladyfest. “There were some women of color workshops and a racism workshop, which really kind of changed a lot of things for me and the ways that I sort of started to deal with race and think about race.”

Work on Ladyfest Bay Area began in October 2001 with messages traded on Craig’s List and a flyer or two. Since the first meeting in January, the core group has grown to more than 40, with multiple subcommittees that decide on specifics such as public relations or programming. Remarkably, few of the organizers have had experience doing anything like this — at least on this scale. And to make it more challenging, they’ve organized the festival in a nonhierarchical way, with consensus votes on the big issues.

All of which calls for a song, in honor of the Ladyfest Bay Area, which Koh is working on. Could it be titled “Ballad of a Ladyfest,” a la Sleater-Kinney’s track, “Ballad of a Ladyman”?

Koh laughs happily. “It’s called ‘Ladyfest Song.’ I think songwriting for me is stress release. Organizing is very stressful, and I wanted to write something that was kind of funny and captured the process of organizing the festival,” she says. “[When we made the 45 invitations,] I started to think of Miss D.I.Y. as a character that invites all her friends like Lady Workshop and Guerilla Filmmaker. But it’s not done yet.”

So for those of you who are impatient for an anthem, go write your own.

Ladyfest Bay Area runs from July 24 to 28 at various San Francisco venues. Three-day passes are $55 to $90 sliding scale, and five-day passes are $70 to $100 sliding scale, or buy three passes and get $10 off each one. For more information, call 415-820-1697 or visit www.ladyfestbayarea.org.