Coffeehouse hosts performances geared toward empowering women

The Harnwell College House rooftop lounge came alive with music, poetry and prose Wednesday night to celebrate women and the arts.

The event — Spotlight on the Arts Coffeehouse — came as part of Women’s Week 2011. Fruit, cake and coffee welcomed around 40 women and a handful of men.

Readings by members of The Penn Monologues, feminist magazine The F-Word and black student publication The Vision kicked off the night. Performances by a cappella groups The Inspiration, Atma and Quaker Notes, poetry from The Excelano Project, and skits from Penn’s female comedy troupe Bloomers followed.

A highlight for Graduate School of Education student Samantha Neugebauer was a performance by Middle Eastern dance company Y’alla, which was the “perfect combination of music and sensuality.” The night was about women’s “empowerment through our voices and our bodies,” she said.

Each performance concluded with cheers and applause from a smiling audience, who encouraged impromptu readings and “off-the-record” life stories from both students and staff. College freshman Odette Ponce said the night was “a powerful kind of get together. The message was really to be yourself, whatever your gender.”

For Wharton sophomore Lisa Erwin, it was interesting to see a variety of groups that she hadn’t had the chance to see before: “There were a lot of groups with a voice. They were all very different, but they all wanted to express themselves.”

Despite the relaxed nature of the event, each group had a message to deliver to the audience, whether about love, strength, honesty or forgiveness. The night had “a really cool combination of speaking out, activism and the arts,” said Nursing masters student Ellen Hansen.

The coffeehouse marked day three of Penn’s eighth annual Women’s Week, an event run by the Penn Consortium for Undergraduate Women. For Rebecca Duncan, a College sophomore and emcee for the night, the week is about more than simply recognizing the role of women on campus. “It’s about knowing there’s always room for progress, and we can do that by celebrating and supporting each other,” she said.

Organizers and audience members alike were quick to distinguish their message from radical feminism. “There are so many definitions of feminism,” said Hansen, who is also a member of Penn Feminists. “We want to educate people about feminism in every type of way.”

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