Art against the war

Madison musicians, poets, and actors wage peace

By Kenneth Burns   The Isthmus   3/14/2003

"I’ve been working forty to fifty hours a week, and my cat craves attention." Madison poet Yogesh Chawla is busy. Work and home demand time as always, but President Bush also has inconveniently chosen tax season to launch the diplomatic endgame that could lead to war in Iraq.

So Chawla squeezes another item onto his to-do list: dissent.

Chawla, who co-founded the Madison poetry journal Premiere Generation Ink, helped organize Metaphors, Not Wars!, a poetry and protest event hosted by Mother Fool’s February 12. More than 125 filled the small space to hear Wisconsin poet laureate Ellen Kort, Progressive publisher Matt Rothschild, Vietnam veteran Will Williams and 30 local poets.

"It went off great," says Chawla. "There are so many people who are just craving events like this."

Metaphors, Not Wars! joined a growing number of events Madison artists and entertainers are staging to express alarm at the trouble in the Middle East. At coffee houses and concert halls, poets, actors and musicians are taking the stage to say: We protest.

Not all these events are strictly local in scope. Many have taken place as branch operations of nationally and internationally organized protests. Metaphors, Not Wars! was one of more than 160 poetry readings held worldwide Feb. 12, the day First Lady Laura Bush was to have hosted a poetry symposium at the White House. She cancelled the meeting Jan. 30, and Chawla and other poets organized in response.

The theater world also has organized. On March 3, 1,031 groups in 59 countries staged readings of Aristophanes’ play Lysistrata. The comedy saw its Madison staging at the Bartell Theatre, where 23 actors delivered a ribald performance of the play. It concerns a group of peace-loving Athenian women who end war with Sparta by withholding sex from their soldier husbands. Double entendres abound.

Events like Lysistrata are fun, says local organizer Debra Nathans, but they also "raise awareness and get people to think about what they can do."

Across the Square at the Orpheum Theatre, the Wisconsin chapter of Not in Our Name, the group that buys newspaper ads protesting war, held an evening of performance and protest Jan. 28. Retired UW Shakespeare professor Robert Kimbrough organized the show, and he took inspiration from Not in Our Name’s Oct. 3 Evening of Conscience. That star-studded event took place at Cooper Union in New York City.

"I saw a rough cut of a tape" of the performance, says Kimbrough. "It inspired me to think we could do this in Madison."

Kimbrough worked with Jean and Charles Sweet, who organized Not in Our Name locally. The three assembled local politicians (Dave Cieslewicz, Paul Soglin), musicians (Lou and Peter Barryman, Ben Sidran) and actors to create a Madison version of the New York show. An overflow crowd of 2,000 attended.

Kimbrough recruited Madison musician Doug Brown to assemble a band for incidental music. Word got out that Brown was looking for performers, and he was stunned by the number of inquiries. "The Orpheum event had already gotten too long," Brown says, so he organized Peace Songs, a program of singer-songwriter performances protesting the war. "It was all original music," says Brown of the event, which took place Feb. 16 at a packed Unitarian Meeting House. "A lot of the songs expressed outrage, and a fair number expressed profound sadness."

Madison singer-songwriter Joy Dragland wrote a song for the occasion. She thinks musical events like Peace Songs are "an incredibly crucial element in times like this to keep hope alive, a way to unify people, a way to express fear and satirize what’s going on."

There was also music Feb. 23 at Singing Out for Peace, a sing-along the Wisconsin Network for Peace and Justice held at First United Methodist Church. Marques Bovre, Stuart Stotts and others performed for a crowd of 200.

Looking ahead, Harmonious Wail and Shauna Wells will play a benefit for the Madison Area Peace Coalition at Mother Fool’s on March 22. Otherwise, lingering uncertainty may keep local artists from scheduling more events.

Unless war breaks out. "If there is an attack, there’s going to be a demonstration at the Capitol that evening," says Chawla. "A lot of poets and artists will be participating."

Jean Sweet will do everything she can to keep that day from coming: "I'm determined that this war is not inevitable."