Video: Pop Star Mýa and More Rock Indy Pride Festival Stage

Spunk married sass and then bit into soul on the Indy Pride Festival’s stage on Saturday. Pop/R&B singer Mýa headlined, and an array of talents preceded her arrival on the main stage at what is officially known as the Circle City IN Pride Festival. About 85,000 attendees took in the day’s events, including the entertainment on three stages—DJs, drag queens, and song-and-dance acts. The week-long festival’s main day of events attracted about 15,000 more comers than in its previous two years, a sizable gain.
Mýa, a multi-hyphenate talent at age 33, has appeared in the movie musical Chicago and was featured on the “Lady Marmalade” remake for the film Moulin Rouge. She has her own cache of hits as well, including “Case of the Ex,” “Ghetto Supastar” (which samples the melody from Dolly Parton and Kenny Rogers’s “Islands in the Stream”), and “My Love Is Like…Wo.” The track “Love Is the Answer” that featured her vocals became the official theme of the NOH8 campaign. She tore through all of these songs, and more, over the course of a frenetic, tightly choreographed hour-long set that featured two costume changes, a live band, four toned backup dancers, and a DJ prone to barking encouragement to concert-goers (to clap and scream for Mýa) and to the singer (to continue being hot and talented). The woman is an exquisite, high-energy dancer, with the giggly smile to launch a thousand lithe, writing bodies into a frenzy.

Girl band CatFight (nee Dangerous Liaison) played two hours prior. Founding members Erica Sellers (vocals/guitar) and Angela Lese (drums) led the charge for this quartet, and the ladies did not disappoint with their repertoire of original and cover tunes. Drag queen Detox, a participant on RuPaul’s Drag Race reality TV contest, went on before Mýa and warmed up the crowd in various frocks as she breezed around the stage and struck poses left and right. And dancer/entertainer Pierre Extraordinairre got the booty-shaking masses ready for the main event, as he and his backup dancers performed a crisp take on Beyoncé‘s “Single Ladies.” See that clip here:

Earlier in the day, the Indianapolis Men’s Chorus performed ahead of this weekend’s concerts at the Indiana History Center, led at the end of its set by soloist Ryan Smith, a recent competitor on American Idol with the vocal runs to prove it.
The diversity of talents on hand mirrored the crowds on this day. Attendees at this free festival swarmed around more than 300 vendor booths, and the lines were peppered with people in gender-bending attire, tube-topped sorority girls, men in leather, men and women not wearing much at all, and the regularly dressed members of Indy’s LGBT community and their friends and allies, colleagues and family members.
Here are highlights from the videos that digital editor Jonathan Scott shot during the headliner’s set on Saturday. Be sure to scroll below to see photos of the main-stage entertainers:





 
Photos by Dawn Wolfe McPike, Eric Houghtalen, Josh Cox, and Jonathan Scott