Festivals: Fear not the feminine
Three things you shouldn’t be afraid of at EstroFest (and one that maybe you should)
The hair of a Tehrani woman, hanging on the wall. All 26 letters of the alphabet, and a poet who knows how to use them. Swedish senior citizens, performing in the nude.
When you discover that these events (and many more) have been brought together by an organization called EstroFest for its annual Seen + Heard festival, it’s easy to imagine some sort of womyn-only estrogen encounter involving speculum parties and guileless recitations of Ani DiFranco lyrics. It sounds like the sort of event that would send proper Southern belles and all but the most John Stoltenberg-adoring men running to their TV sets to watch reruns of “Everybody Loves Raymond.”
Relax, folks, there’s nothing (much) to fear here. The most frantic of femiphobes might not belong, but this five-day festival of visual and performing arts is a wide-ranging celebration of artists from diverse political perspectives and aesthetic approaches, all presenting what interim artistic director Martha Donovan calls “women-positive” paintings, plays, poetry, performance art and music.
With more than 60 artists involved, there’s a lot of work to choose from, but here’s a sampling of three recommended events (and one you should approach at your own risk).
Hairy proposition
In Iran, she has to hide it, so painter Negar Tahsili displays hers in “Woman in Minimalism,” one of a series of montages she has created that integrates real hair into painted canvasses.
Looking closely at other artists’ paintings, Tahsili used to find brush hairs embedded in the paint. The sight at first disturbed her. Then one day, she writes in an e-mail from Tehran, “I saw my father trying to pull out a hair from his nose. We have an expression in Farsi: ‘He is a hair of the nose!’ This means he is disturbing me or he will not let me do my work. So I decided to paint my father’s nose.”
Soon after, she started her hair montages. “For me, the most important sense is seeing,” she says. “You will know the truth when you see something. But in my country, because of the Islamic Republic, all the women have to cover their hair ... so you cannot see truth ... I think I should show the truth of women in my art.”
Gallery opening Wed., April 14, at 7 p.m.
Alphabet soup
She won “Showtime at the Apollo’s” Amateur Night a record five weeks in a row, and she appeared twice on Russell Simmons’ Def Poetry Jam. She grew up in a Detroit ghetto and lived in Brooklyn for a while before moving to Atlanta. But sometimes poet jessica Care moore fears her ABCs are out to kill her.
That’s the premise of Alpha Phobia, a semi-autobiographical show she premiered at the 2002 National Black Arts Festival. For Seen + Heard, Care moore will perform selections from Alpha Phobia, as well as from The Alphabet Verses: The Ghetto, published last fall by Moore Black Press, Care moore’s publishing company dedicated to the work of black poets.
Care moore is plenty famous, but she doesn’t mention any of that in an interview. She wants to talk instead about T.S. Eliot and the integrity of poetry in the age of spoken word as a spectator sport. “You can get famous with juggling,” she says. “You can get famous doing porn. But what’s it going to mean in 30 years? Or 100 years, for that matter?”
Sat., April 17, at 7:30 p.m.Poetic acrobatics
They’ve lived in Atlanta for 34 years, but that’s less than half a lifetime for the seventysomething performing duo of Ronnog and Steven Seaberg, who are joined by Atlanta photographer and acrobat Mark Wolfe for their EstroFest show.
For the past several years, these multidisciplinary artists have been making a name for themselves as “acrobatic poets.” That’s not a metaphorical concept involving excessive diphthongs and iambic duodecameter. The Seabergs (and now Wolfe, too) create body sculptures with a series of interlocked acrobatic poses, while Ronnog recites her poems.
Often they perform in the nude. “We are very interested in the human body,” Ronnog says. “The human body at different generations is something worth considering and most real ... . To forbid the body is some sort of self-sacrifice.”
“Their poses are always really serene,” says Donovan, “but the words are intended to shake you up.” Words like, “I am here!/... I am a fossil/from residue in a tear./Longing for order and fear/of God, at least of a man/ordering peace into each peapod/policing by rod and ban.” This from “Integrity,” which the trio will perform along with “Life is a Joke.”
Fri., April 16, at 7:30 p.m.
Naughty bits
OK, and now for the one event that may be a bit scary — or might provoke trembling based on other emotions. Mortal Desires, a late-night fundraising party for the Fihankra Cultural Arts Center, is being billed as a “Studio 54 bohemian revival.” It’s an 18-and-over event that will include burlesque performers, dance music and “exotic stunts.” Donovan calls it an “erotica party,” so don’t forget your speculum.
Sat., April 17, at 11 p.m. $7.