The very accurately named Women Are Mint Festival is back in 2021! Curated by local star Martha Hill to shine a spotlight on female musical talent and to further opportunities and voices for women, the three-day May event goes livestream from Newcastle’s Cobalt Studios after an enforced hiatus in 2020. LANTA, Kay Greyson, Rotem, Georgia May and Lady Sanity will be among the performers, as well as many more.
Offering a versatile range of musical acts showcasing underground hip-hop, singer-songwriters and DJ acts as well as performance art, yoga from the North East’s Shanti Bee and educational workshops aiming to provide a practical boost to the trajectory of emerging female acts from the region and beyond, the festival is a timely tonic both for musicians at a time of difficulty and for women amidst a period of rising concern leavened with bold, insistent progressivism.
With a recent March week bookended by International Women’s Day and Mother’s Day instead seeing its news agenda dominated by the murder of Sarah Everard and the Met Police’s aggressive policing of the subsequent Clapham Vigil, the issue of equality has been pushed to the national forefront once again, albeit in the least welcome way. This only underlines the raft of musically-focused statistics which Hill created Women Are Mint in response to and which make the proactive platform necessary.
From 2012 to 2020, women made up 21.6% of all artists, 12.6% of all songwriters and a staggeringly low 2.6% of all producers, evidence of the particular fact that the fight to equalise the music industry is a battle for longevity. Although increasingly a feature of discourse around these topics, 50:50 festival bills, simultaneously a tool for change and an ultimate aim, remain tantalisingly out of reach for now and necessitate the grassroots activism of projects such as Women Are Mint since this is no top-down revolution.
Furthermore, the festival’s website observes that the same time-period evidenced a 180:1 ratio of white male producers to non-white female producers, displaying a refreshing awareness of intersectionality, and also extinguishes one of the great (and often wilful) mistakes around feminist activity by emphasising that the festival is pro-equality, not exclusionary of men or those identifying as non-binary.
All streams will also operate on a pay-what-you-feel basis in direct response to increased unemployment generated by the pandemic, Hill’s vision having imbued the festival with a sharply intelligent, empathetic spirit.
For further information, head to womenaremint.co.uk.
