How 5,000 Women learned to shtick together

Nine female artists will convene in Philly on Saturday for a night of performances. Days before the show, they reflected on the state of the arts in Philly — for women, audiences and everyone.

THEY'VE GOT HER BACK: 5,000 Women Festival creator Jennifer Blaine gets cozy with (L-R) Susan Windle, Kelly Jennings, Karen Getz, Jaquetta Colson and Sharon Geller.
Neal Santos

Inside the sunny Living Arts Dance Studio in Northern Liberties, an interview with six deeply creative artists pivots quickly into an impromptu, animated performance. 

A loud, teasing gasp escapes from Karen Getz when Sharon Geller says she’ll be performing alongside a man, her piano player, at Saturday’s 5,000 Women Festival. 

“Well, as long as he’s in drag,” Getz allows. 

There’s an explosion of laughter when Living Arts founder Jaquetta Colson says, quite seriously, that to her, the vulnerability of dancing on stage makes her feel naked — then adds, in jest, about the upcoming performance, “So, yeah, I’ll be naked.”    

That prompts the other women to proclaim that they, too, will be naked.

Every few minutes, someone switches into an British accent, a Sarah Palin impression, an imitation of two sleazy dudes from New York. When asked to pose for a photo, Jennifer Blaine, the 5,000 Women Festival creator, dives across the laps of the other five women, to cheers and mock catcalls. 

The small room is crackling with energy. 

One can only imagine what these women will do with a much bigger room.

Blaine, known in Philly for her sold-out run of Dirty Joke at last year’s Fringe Festival, has presented her 5,000 Women Festival twice before at Wesleyan University. Here, she pulled together eight other artists — across various disciplines and all but one from Philadelphia — to perform at the Ethical Humanist Society of Philadelphia. 

There’s Blaine and Geller, both comedic actresses; Col-son, a dancer; Getz, who partners with Kelly Jennings to perform as the duo “Cecily and Gwendolyn’s Fanstastical …”; Naomi Ekperigin, a standup comedienne from New York; Susan Windle, a poet; Joy Mariama Smith, a perfor-mance artist; and Susan Perti-Dunn, a pianist and vocalist. 

Each will perform an act Saturday, with Blaine doing her shtick in between. Ekperigin, Smith and Perti-Dunn spoke to City Paper on the phone; the others met at Living Arts. 

The arts-and-performance landscape in Philly, both for women and in general, is clearly on the minds of the women as the festival approaches (as if it ever isn’t). A prevailing sense among them is that the arts scene here isn’t diversified enough — though it’s getting there.

“We’re coming to the tipping point where artists are like, ‘We want variety. We have something to offer,’” Smith says. 

Colson agrees that the arts are “up and coming,” but not enough so. 

“There aren’t a lot of things besides the Fringe where people can get together and see all types of different work,” she says. 

Jennings, though, says she’s frustrated by the “up-and-coming” proclamations.

“That’s what we say every year. If [Philly] is a roller coaster, I feel like the car hasn’t even hit the crest yet,” she says. 

When she and Getz traveled to seven other Fringe festivals around the country, it opened their eyes to the flaws in their home city’s arts offerings, she says. 

“Other artists said, ‘I will never come to Philadelphia. It’s impossible to work in. It’s not friendly.’ That left us in this really weird place because, ‘Wow, that’s my home,’ but I couldn’t disagree,” Jennings says. 

Geller says she’d heard producers discuss the strangeness of Philly audiences, how it’s a struggle to get them to come to shows.

“When Philly is a major city, it’s amazing that we’re still talking about struggling to pull in an audience,” she says. 

Bringing in a diverse crowd and exposing people to several different mediums is a goal of the festival, says Blaine. 

“It’s about making a community rather than finding your community,” Getz adds. “Jen [Blaine] has always been amazing at finding a community of people that are connected by a particular look at the world.” 

The festival’s female focus brings up being a woman in the arts, and some of the accompanying challenges. 

Ekperigin says her standup experience in New York has landed her among mostly “a bunch of dudes.”

“Any people saying it’s ‘even’ in comedy … you’re probably a white dude. I do think all the conversations about needing more women in comedy have these flare-ups, and it just shines a light on all these people who have been working the whole time,” she says. 

Perti-Dunn has had similar experiences in music. 

“All my female musician friends talk about sexism. You wear a pretty cocktail dress to a bar to play piano, you get hit on, they make rude comments. You have to work extra hard to break those stereotypes,” she says. 

Smith has a unique take on the gender aspect of the festival. For her, it’s more about the work that’s being created than the gender of the creators. 

“I actually am gender nonconforming. I was a person who was female assigned at birth, but I am not lumping myself in that category,” says Smith, while adding that she’s cool with female pronouns for this article. She’s also “OK with the [festival] frame being ‘5,000 Women,’ but it’s also important to say, ‘How are you defining ‘women?’” 

The discussion among the comediennes at Colson’s studio turns to women and humor. 

“There’s a conversation,” says Jennings. “I’ve seen it go from ‘Women aren’t funny,’ to ‘Oh, yes, women are totally funny,’ to now there’s this sort of split. … There are a handful of people on the SNL cast who have said women aren’t funny, then there’s another chunk who say, ‘Are you freaking crazy? That’s not true.’”

“Why do we even engage in that conversation?” asks Getz. “It’s like, who fucking cares? We know that we’re funny. The more we engage in that conversation, [we] allow this divide to take off.”

What do these women hope the audience will take away from the festival?

“What I love is when people come up and say, ‘Wow, I didn’t know that was possible [with poetry],’” says Windle. “Sometimes we’re giving people something they need, but they don’t necessarily know they need.”

“It’s a real gift that all of us are able to move people in different ways,” says Geller.  The five other women in Colson’s studio nod silently, almost reverently, as Geller continues.

“It’s not so easy,” she says, “to do what we do.” 

And with that, Blaine leaps to her feet and wraps Geller in a bear hug. 

5,000 Women Festival, Sat., March 29, 8 p.m., $20. Ethical Humanist Society of Philadelphia, 1906 Rittenhouse Square, 267-882-6234, 5000women.com.