Team Dresch takes on Brazil and their 10th anniversary celebration of Ladyfest

Team Dresch rocking out in Santos, Brazil

Team Dresch has been the seminal dyke punk band since Donna Dresch, Kaia Wilson, Jody Bleyle and Marci Martinez first started rocking out in the Pacific Northwest’s thriving 90s rock scene. They’ve been through breakups, hiatuses, drummers, moves, solo projects, parenthood and more. And much has changed in both the music scenes and queer communities since then. What hasn’t changed is their ability to rock your socks off.

Rumors of a Team Dresch reunion swirled in 2006 and they promised more shows and new releases in 2007 and while we are still waiting for some of these super tight new releases in 2010 the ladies do continue to bring their widespread talents together for various shows around the world, the latest of which just took place at Brazil’s Ladyfest.

In this the 10^th anniversary of the inaugural Ladyfest in Team Dresch’s Olympia, Washington homeland, Brazil has taken up the mantel in a big way. Sao Paulo has a pretty big female band movement that has collaborated with feminist musicians stateside in the past including a queer split 7” with The Haggard in 2000.

This Ladyfest featured the sounds of Dominatrix (Sao Paulo), NoSkill (Joao Pessoa), Pump (Recife), and Stella Can (Porto Allegre). Also featuring films, workshops and more a loose (Google) translation of the Ladyfest Brasil site says of the festival:

In 2004, the first Brazilian edition took several spaces in the city of Sao Paulo…In each issue the public was growing up, always arriving in the thousands, and coverage of major and alternative media has also expanded.

Celebrating a scene of young women in search of equal means using DIY in the history of social movements in Brazil, a leftist revolutionary unprecedented cultural production, the Brazilian edition of the festival this year celebrates not only the creation of a movement against culture, but the maintenance of an ideal, either through attitudes, questioning or resistance screamed to the top of your lungs, in song lyrics, fanzines and street art.

The Brazil 2010 Ladyfest celebrates not only the political renewal that youth movements like the feminist riot grrrl punk scene brought to Brazil, but all women who, after or during a brief contact with the feminist cultural activism, led this ideal in a serious and eternal for their lives, keeping their current feminist discourse and intact, without making concessions.

Even though I have never seen Team Dresch on MTV in the states, these mega-headliners did grab some attention on Brazil’s MTV.

While the ladies of TD are mostly just excited to be performing halfway around the world Portuguese speakers can also hear what I can only imagine is fascinating commentary from some of the other bands participating in the fest.

Team Dresch was so excited they even made a special shirt for this “tour” which you can get from the Chainsaw catalog at Buy Olympia.

I’m really hoping that the label will soon include some of the promised new tracks. Get back in the studio girls! In the meantime you can enjoy some video of oldies but goodies from Santos below and for a ton of pictures from Brazil check out FemmeLiberte’s Flickr stream.