Da Capo Conversations 2.0 with Dawn Norfleet and Juhi Bansal

For Good Measure, by Ensemble for These Times (E4TT)
Episode 191: Da Capo Conversations 2.0 with Dawn Norfleet and Juhi Bansal

Looking for a way to listen to diverse creators and to support equity in the arts? Tune in weekly to For Good Measure!

Today we revisit Dawn Norfleet’s and Juhi Bansal’s perspectives on their advocacy work. If you enjoyed today’s conversation and want to know more about Dawn Norfleet and Juhi Bansal, check them out here and here. Parts of this episode originally premiered in January 2022, click here, and February 2023, click here.

This podcast is made possible by grants from the California Arts Council, SF Arts Commission, Grants for the Arts, and generous donors like you. Want to support For Good Measure and E4TT? Make a tax-deductible donation or sign up for our newsletter, and subscribe to the podcast!

Intro music: “Trifolium” by Gabriela Ortiz, performed by E4TT (Ilana Blumberg, violin; Abigail Monroe, cello; Margaret Halbig, piano), as part of “Below the Surface: Music by Women Composers,” January 29, 2022
Outro music: “Lake Turkana” by Marcus Norris, performed by E4TT (Margaret Halbig, piano), as part of “Alchemy,” October 15, 2021

Transcription courtesy of Otter.ai.
Buzzsprout: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1903729/episodes/18518434

Co-Producer, Host, and E4TT co-founder: Nanette McGuinness
Co-Producer and Audio Engineer: Stephanie M. Neumann
Podcast Cover Art: Brennan Stokes
Interns: Renata Volchinskaya, Sam Mason, Christy Xu

Chapters

• 0:29 Today, we revisit Dawn Norfleet's and Juhi Bansal's perspectives on their advocacy work. Here's what Dawn Norfleet had to say.
• 4:10 Here's what Juhi Bansal had to say.

Transcript

Nanette McGuinness  00:00

[INTRO MUSIC] Welcome to For Good Measure, an interview series celebrating diverse composers and other creative artists. I'm Nanette McGuinness, Artistic Executive Director of Ensemble for These Times. In this week's episode, we continue our Da Capo Conversations, a mini-series where we'll be giving familiar segments a topical twist. [INTRO MUSIC ENDS] Today, we revisit Dawn Norfleet's and Juhi Bansal's perspectives on their advocacy work. Here's what Dawn Norfleet had to say.

Dawn Norfleet  00:39

Well, I guess, as an artistic person, sometimes we're very intuitive and very sensitive, or at least that's my excuse. And you get so self absorbed and, you know, wallowing in self pity. And there have been moments where I was just like, blah, you know, I'm not famous yet, and blah, and you know this isn't going my way. And and the message that I kept getting back to me was, well, if you're so stuck in yourself, why don't you come out of yourself and volunteer, do something. All right, do something to help someone else. And so finally, that opportunity came when, when I started working as as a working with the NAACP ACT-SO program. It stands for Afro-Academic, Cultural, Technological and Scientific Olympics. And it's actually a program that started in the 1970s and it was created to give high school students, African American specifically, but not exclusively, you know, a chance to excel and be mentored and to network with others and and I started doing that in, oh, maybe 2009 and I'm still doing it. Okay, I'm just, I'm just so busy I can't do it. And then I keep doing it. I make room and and, you know, the students, they give me life, they give me, you know, inspiration, and I learn from them. I always learn from them, and I'm in touch with with a lot of these students. Still I was working at a middle school, like directing music programs, and some of those people are now in their late 20s, and a lot of them are still doing music, and again, I'm in touch with them and and it's, it's, it's just a beautiful thing. Mentorship is something I didn't have growing up. I had to figure out a lot of things, even in college and grad school, I found mentors after that experience for the most part. So for that reason, I guess that was, I guess, not having had mentorship, and seeing the importance of mentorship, I wanted to offer that to students and so So I do see myself as a mentor, and I think it is very, very important.

Nanette McGuinness  04:10

Here's what Juhi Bansal had to say.Juhi Bansal  04:12

In a very, very broad sense, the like issues to do with women and girls and getting an education are things that have just always been really important to me for the obvious reasons. I think we should all be caring about it, frankly. But also, you know, thinking about like women in my family and even my mom wanting to study music when she was younger and she wasn't allowed to. And I've had cousins who are still in India and family members who wanted to pursue educations and weren't allowed to. So there's like, there is a personal element to it, as well as just the obvious, of course, all girls should be given an education and given those opportunities. So one of the volunteer projects I did this was a few years ago. There's a group with. It. They recently changed their name, which is why I'm hesitating. They used to be called the Bangladesh Girls Surf Club, then it became the Bangladesh Girls and Boys Surf Club. And I think just in the last couple of months, they've actually been adopted under a larger umbrella group as well. But this was a group I got to know about through some volunteering I was doing here locally in Southern California. And you know, this is fascinating story about this group of girls in Cox's Bazar in Bangladesh, which is one of the poorest parts of Bangladesh, which is already obviously such a such a property striking country. And this group of young girls, basically, they saw a lifeguard surfing on the beach one day, and they asked him to teach them how to surf. And what I loved about their story, and what I loved about kind of volunteering with the group afterwards, was that they built what started as just teaching the girls to surf turned into a school for the girls, so that they were, you know, given an education, and many of them had, until that point, never gone to school. Often, the girls in that community are married away at like 11 or 12 years old and much older men the club, because of donations, because of fundraising, because they were able to give food bags and aid to the families, kind of then enabled also. The girls were not married away that early. They actually had kind of bought them, literally, the years to be able to go to school and be able to learn and be able to graduate. So kind of, you know, as a group, I was volunteering with on and off for a couple of years, mostly through our work here in Southern California. But, you know, their stories really stuck with me, and I got to know the founders of the clubs, had a couple of Skype calls on tiny screens with the girls, and getting to hear their stories to the language barrier. And you know, I think that's led to a couple of things. One isn't just, in a very broad sense, wanting to push in every way possible for girls to have a voice, that's girls as composers, that's girls to have an education like in any way that we can talk about that and make that possible. I think I want to be doing that more kind of, I suppose, more specifically to your answer about how that's inspired my work, as well outside of, outside of speaking about it, and outside of kind of trying to fundraise for it, we also did a musical project and wanted to last year for the prototype festival that was also a little digital short about that same story, about the girls and about their experience, and about fighting to be able to make choices and get an education.

Nanette McGuinness  07:37

[OUTRO MUSIC] Thank you for listening to For Good Measure's Da Capo Conversations, and a special thank you to our guests for joining us today. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe to our podcast by clicking on the subscribe button and support us by sharing it with your friends, posting about it on social media and leaving us a rating and a review. To learn more about E4TT, our concert season online and in the Bay Area, or to make a tax-deductible donation, please visit us at www.E4TT.org. This podcast is made possible by grants from the California Arts Council, the San Francisco Arts Commission, Grants for the Arts, and generous donors like you. For Good Measure is produced by Nanette McGuinness and Ensemble for These Times, and design by Brennan Stokes, with special thanks to Co-producer and Audio Engineer Stephanie M. Neumann. Remember to keep supporting equity in the arts and tune in next week "for good measure." [OUTRO MUSIC ENDS]