- [Narrator] Production of "Applause" on Ideastream Public Media is made possible by funding by Cuyahoga County residents through Cuyahoga Arts and Culture.

- [Kabir] Coming up the voices of a Cleveland Chorus combined for a cause, technology and music collide at a guitar shop in Dayton.

And students from the Tri-C JazzFest hit the stage in Playhouse Square.

(upbeat jazz music) (vibrant music) Hello and welcome back, my friends to another round of "Applause".

Thanks for stopping by.

I am Ideastream Public Media's Kabir Bhatia.

45 years ago, a small group of women came together in Northeast Ohio to advocate for women's rights through music.

Today, with nearly 50 members, Windsong, Cleveland's Feminist Chorus, builds upon its legacy of inclusivity while evolving to meet the needs of the community.

♪ Keep marching on ♪ ♪ Keep marching on ♪ (gentle music) ♪ In the dark times ♪ ♪ In the dark times ♪ ♪ When fear ♪ ♪ When fear ♪ ♪ And confusion reign ♪ ♪ And confusion reign ♪ - This is the music that my soul needs and wants, but also I wanna shout it to the world.

I'm gonna sing about it and I want, you know, everybody to hear this music.

♪ A power play ♪ ♪ A power play ♪ - I think there's a lot of people who are looking for a place to direct their energy or their need for community and a place to put their desire for activism.

And this can be a really powerful place to put it.

♪ We rise ♪ ♪ We rise ♪ ♪ Together we rise ♪ ♪ Together we rise ♪ ♪ We the people ♪ ♪ We the people ♪ - This feminist choir blending with other feminist voices had a soul-touching effect for me because you're really blending the energy of who we are in our diversity, in our identities, in what we dared to say with each other and to our audiences because we were singing together.

♪ No fear ♪ ♪ No fear ♪ ♪ Refugees are welcome here ♪ ♪ Refugees are welcome here ♪ ♪ No walk, no bend ♪ ♪ No walk, no bend ♪ ♪ Yes, we still can ♪ ♪ Yes, we still can ♪ - I'm really excited to just say this is who we are, and this is what we believe, and here are the songs that we're gonna share with you at this point in American history, in American politics, in the American Experience.

♪ I'm gonna be the change ♪ ♪ I'm gonna be the change ♪ ♪ I wanna see in this land ♪ ♪ I wanna see in this land ♪ - Windsong is a community.

It is a community of people who genuinely care about advancing women's rights, advancing LGBTQ plus rights, people who genuinely care about social justice and want to create a better world.

And the way that we as a community have kind of come together to do all this is through song.

♪ Band together ♪ ♪ Band together ♪ (audience applauding) - When it was started back in 1979, it was a handful of people who wanted a safe space to sing and to sing about things that mattered to them.

And feminism has always been about pushing for equality and kind of giving voice to people who don't have a voice.

- So Windsong is the evolution of that, 45 years later.

We are a group that's made up of folks of all different ages, all different walks of life, people who have experienced feminism in their own unique way.

And it's cool because we all have so much that we can learn from each other, since we're coming from all of these different walks of life.

- So we have typically two concerts a year, and this current one is our 45th-anniversary concert at the Cleveland Museum of Art.

- So the title of our concert is Honor the Past, Inspire the Future.

A lot of these songs have a lot to do with matriarchs of the feminist movement.

♪ Sojourner Truth ♪ ♪ Sojourner Truth ♪ ♪ Eleanor Roosevelt ♪ ♪ Eleanor Roosevelt ♪ ♪ Katharine Hepburn ♪ ♪ Katharine Hepburn ♪ ♪ Sally Ride ♪ ♪ Sally Ride ♪ - The second half of the concert speaks to some of the evolution and growth that is happening within, I guess, the feminist movement in general as well as kind of in response to a lot of what is happening politically and socially in our country right now.

♪ The games will feel small ♪ ♪ The games will feel small ♪ ♪ And the losses to large ♪ ♪ And the losses to large ♪ ♪ Keep marching ♪ ♪ Keep marching ♪ ♪ Keep marching ♪ ♪ Keep marching ♪ ♪ You'll rarely agree ♪ ♪ You'll rarely agree ♪ - But even within that heaviness, there's kind of this constantly moving message of hope and holding each other up.

And hopefully, that will inspire, you know, continue to go on and inspire, you know, the next generation.

♪ Not guaranteed ♪ ♪ Not guaranteed ♪ ♪ It will only be made if we keep marching ♪ ♪ Keep marching on ♪ - Windsong is a non-audition community chorus, and we have members who cannot read music, who just sing, you know, in the car and in the shower.

And then we have members who have higher education with music who sing semi-professionally.

- And at least half of us are not musical, not people who read music.

- For me, it was the part about acceptance, accepting the fact that I couldn't read music, accepting the fact that maybe my voice is not the greatest, but giving me the opportunity to learn and grow and not be criticized.

- I have a very small voice and I'm very shy about singing, but I love to sing.

And over the years, through four wonderful teachers, I have developed a reasonably decent voice and self-confidence.

And with the, just the sisterhood of all these people in Windsong, the whole thing is just so, so important.

I can't say that enough.

- I came to Windsong at least 20 years ago.

And now, we're welcoming younger people who have grown up with completely different ideas of what it is to be a person in the world.

- So I'd like to think that us older people, you know, learn from the younger ones, we're like-minded but very diverse sometimes too.

But we're all going in the same direction, which is awesome.

- Right now, I think our youngest member is 25, not that long ago, just a few years ago, I was the youngest member at 37.

And so we've really shifted our demographics, which I think is important to really kind of have that next generation of Windsong.

- I think probably the best thing is the comradery through music.

- Yeah.

- [Caroline] And being with my daughter.

- We've got all these different people coming from different places, but we all are connected by the music and the stories we're telling.

(Windsong choir singing) - The sound of music now carries us to Dayton, where guitar making is studied as a science.

At Sinclair Community College, the STEM Guitar lab shows students and teachers alike the technology used to build electric guitars.

This story is part of our special series "Behind the Scenes, Art Across Ohio".

(upbeat music) - STEM Guitar is a program that started out as a National Science Foundation grant that allows us as a team to teach teachers how to use the electric guitar as a vehicle to teach STEM topics to high school, and middle school, and even elementary school students.

It allows us to take the knowledge that we teach the teachers during the week of this training and they could take it back to their school and use the kits that are produced here at Sinclair that are really high-quality kits.

So there's science, technology, engineering, mathematics, there's physics, there's so much stuff that can be kind of derived from this program.

- We're not here to train luthiers.

We're trying to get a sophomore in Bozeman, Montana to understand that Mrs. Johnson's fifth-grade geometry class has merit.

There's two components to the program.

There's an academic component that was funded under a National Science Foundation grant and that was the development of the curriculum.

And the curriculum can be scaled from middle school, high school, community colleges, as well as up to universities, just depending on what it is that the students are studying.

The STEM Guitar lab was formulated in order to supply guitar kits to the classes that are running those.

Sinclair has a unique place in the national STEM Guitar field because we are the production center for those kits.

We use the same curriculum to teach the class but we have the additional responsibility of making the kits and shipping them out all across the country.

(calming music) - STEM Guitar has shipped guitar kits to 48 states.

I think the only two states that we haven't hit yet is North and South Dakota.

They've even shipped some of the guitar kits overseas.

- We sell kits to schools all over the United States, including Pago Pago, American Samoa, Canada.

Our kits have gone down to Medellin, Columbia for outreach programs.

So without the Sinclair Guitar Lab, there would be no STEM Guitar.

- [James] Here at the wood shop part of our facility, it's just old-fashioned woodworking to be honest.

We will get a truckload of raw lumber and we take those pieces and we'll cut them into what we call billets.

And they're different links for different parts.

So if I'm building bodies, I will cut that board down into 22-inch long pieces and we'll stack 'em on the rack.

When that's complete, then we'll start to assemble a body and we'll pull pieces off of the rack.

And then we will plane them to thickness, and then we will joint those, which is, we will trim an edge so that it's at a 90-degree angle to the face that we just made so that when we glue them together, they're glued together at a 90-degree angle and you get a nice flatboard.

Those pieces are glued together.

We'll come back the next day, we take those pieces out, we will plane them to thickness again.

We will then sand them to a specific thickness.

And then we'll put those in a stack that will go over to the CNC lab across campus.

(machine whirring) (upbeat music) - From the builder's standpoint, in a workshop like this, the very first thing they'll do is they will pick their bodies, and their necks, and their fretboards, which is the playing surface on the front of the neck.

Shaping the guitar bodies would be second.

Attaching the fretboard to the neck, and shaping the neck, and getting the frets installed is another major milestone.

Getting the body all smoothed out and getting a clear finish applied to it to seal it and protect it is another major task.

(upbeat music) Soldering and joining the electronics components is another major phase of the project.

Joining the body and the neck together and then populating the body with all the hardware would be next after that.

And then, finally, stringing the instrument up and doing the final setup and intonation to actually get it to translate from looking like a guitar to playing and functioning as a guitar should.

I like to pick that up at the end when it's all done and to kind of give it a test drive and see how it plays.

(upbeat guitar music) - A lot of individuals think that, and it's a common misconception in the engineering field, in any field, that you must know how to use something or play something.

In this case, playing guitar.

A lot of individuals think that you must know how to do that in order to build it.

A common analogy that I like to use is the individuals that build the space shuttle, they don't know how to fly the space shuttle, but they can put the space shuttle together.

- The STEM Guitar Project is highly accessible at all levels and in terms of requisite academic knowledge, we'll take all comers.

So wherever you are, there are ways to make connections.

And so I wouldn't say you have to have had Physics 101 in order to be able to be successful at this course.

And that's the great thing about STEM Guitars it's scalable.

So whatever your audience is, you can take the materials that we provide and the process that we're showing and then make connections that are relevant to the students by saying, here's an example in the guitar of X, Y, Z topic that we need to cover in class this week.

- By having a little fall away means that the strings won't- We're talking about math, science, social studies.

We as educators have guidelines that we need to make sure students are, you know, hitting those guidelines at the end of the year.

But students have a hard time seeing those goals and those aspirations as that they need.

So it allowed me to build my other classes around this one model to make sure that students are understanding what they're learning.

When you see a student strum a guitar for the very first time that they built, like you couldn't wipe the smile at their face with a, you know, with a fire hydrant.

This is so amazing.

- I think we try to tell people that come through the program that play guitar is play with as many people as you can, get plugged into where you can.

If you move to a new town and you can play guitar, you can find friends really quick.

If you can fix a guitar, you can find friends double quick.

- And we're about 15 to 17 years into the project.

The goal here is to continue to teach teachers, no matter whether we're grant-funded or not, we want to allow people to keep this thing rolling and going down the line.

Because it's such a great thing.

It's not just in Ohio.

So if you're watching this from California or Florida, there's trainings potentially near you that you can come and take a part of.

- [Doug] I like knowing that my sphere of influence is larger than the small school that I'm at.

I like seeing the pride on people's faces when they complete at this week here at Sinclair as well as the students in my own classroom.

And in terms of the actual guitar process itself, I really like all the quieter aspects of it, like the fretwork and working on the necks and everything to get the guitar to go from looking like an instrument to actually working like one.

(guitar strumming) (machine whirring) (guitar builders chattering) - Building a guitar is not, it's not an everyday thing.

It's not, I don't wanna say it's not simple, but if you pay attention, if you ask questions, then you'll be okay.

Every class at the end of the day, if you walk in with 10 fingers, you walk out with 10 fingers, it's a good day.

(garage door clanking) - [Kabir] Oh hi.

If you are looking for things to do in Northeast Ohio with an arts and culture spin, why not sign up for our free weekly newsletter?

There's arts event ideas, profiles, and news all in one place.

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And now, it's on to Columbus, where docu-poet Ajanae Dawkins uses the written word to honor those she holds dear.

By transforming oral histories into poetry, Dawkins' work celebrates the black experience.

(mysterious music) - I always say that I use my poetry to archive my matrilineage.

And by that I mean I feel really responsible for preserving my family's history, for preserving the stories of women in my family.

I think about docu-poetics as kind of a spin on documentary work.

I think that you get to do a lot of really interesting things with poetry.

You get to not lie, but poetry is less about facts and more about what the overall truth is, right?

So maybe the room wasn't blue, maybe the song that was playing wasn't a specific song, but those kinds of details matter a little bit less.

And so I like playing with the idea of docu-poetics in archiving my matrilineage because I feel like it lets me reinterpret stories in a way that honors the women who came before me and in a way that maybe gives them some autonomy in their stories in the retelling.

I also think docu-poetics are really interesting because I see folks disrupting the idea of what a traditional documentary is and what it means to like archive something for historical record.

And I feel like that's really important.

There's been a lot of conversation around black women in the archive and what it means as a black person to come to all of these traditional archives and not see yourself in them because of historical literacy gaps, because of the way history was historically documented.

And so I'm not working oftentimes with traditional archives.

I'm working with embodied archives, I'm working with oral storytelling that's been passed down because that's what I have access to.

And so for me, part of docu-poetics is also taking really seriously these other forms of archival and that are also sometimes more fragile.

So even as I'm moving through or I've been moving through interview, I've had people who I'm trying to preserve their stories, who are like, who've died on me, and that is the end of that embodied archive.

And so my access to it was only present as long as that person was there, like housing it in their body.

So that's a lot of how I play with docu-poetics.

(upbeat music) I started my interviews with my great-grandmother when she was in an assisted living facility when she was terminally ill and I would just sit and ask her questions.

And that was the first of a series of interviews that I did.

And then I started that process with my mom as well as I was, I have a chatbook that's coming out called "Blood-Flex" that's about her.

And I realized everything about everything in the book was from my perspective.

And I did not feel like it was ethical for me to say that I'm giving my mother a voice when my mother has her own voice and has her own language to talk about and share stories.

So that is kind of how I crept up on the process of archiving.

(calming music) So usually, I do not know what to expect.

Something that has been very, very surprising for me has been how excited people are to talk to me.

And I guess not just excited but willing.

I think I always expected, or I guess maybe less expected, but I always feel very cautious because I never want my family to feel like, oh, I'm coming and encroaching and trying to make this grand story about you.

Or you know, do something that maybe feels like gross.

And not just unethical but voyeuristic I guess.

But seeing how open they are to talking to me is, I think for me been a really pleasant surprise.

Seeing the way the things they remember shape or shift different parts of a story.

Like I have an older cousin who I interviewed recently and in the stories he's telling, he told a story about him being younger.

He told a story about my grandmother, but from the perspective of a child and like with her as his aunt.

And like he told a story about how she told him that she was pregnant with my mother.

And I just kind of never think about my grandmother as an aunt or as a baby sister or you know, in these other roles.

(calming music) When I was first trying to do some of the archival work and I was writing, I did not want to write, I did not want to put my family members as characters on the page.

Mostly because I think that once somebody hits the page, they become two-dimensional and there's no way for somebody reading a text to know like all of the intricacies of someone.

So I started creating characters that were loosely based off of either different people or combinations of people.

And one of the characters I built was Alene, who was built off of a combination of different women that I knew in my family.

"I got grown and thought I'd be a woman forever.

Then I became a mother and a grandmother and people forgot at some point I was a girl.

Your body stew enough children, leak enough milk, have enough babies pressed to the titty, and people think that's all you've ever been.

A mother, a dutiful wife, and then widow.

A surgical blade across the abdomen for the third child and felt like a sharper one at my neck when my husband died."

- [Kabir] There's another round of "Applause" up ahead.

Cleveland's terminal tower shines brightly in a new painting from an artist with a passion for our city skylines.

On the next "Applause" meet painter, Ashley Sullivan, who grew up on a farm in Grafton.

- Growing up far from a city.

You know, you think of the romance and the drama of big-city living, and there's nothing that beats just going out in the city at night.

(dramatic music) - [Kabir] Plus, Diana Cohen leads a quartet in a percussive performance at ChamberFest Cleveland, all that and more on the next round of "Applause".

(dramatic music) Well, I hope you've enjoyed this round of "Applause".

I'm Ideastream Public Media's Kabir Bhatia.

As we say Goodbye, here's another impressive performance by the Student Jazz Ensemble known as Stix.

The group performed at the 2024 Tri-C Jazz Fest on the outdoor stage at Playhouse Square.

Here's a tune called Obstacles written by the band's keyboard player, Liam Speaks.

(upbeat jazz music) (upbeat jazz music) (upbeat jazz music) (gentle music) - [Narrator] Production of "Applause" on Ideastream Public Media is made possible by funding by Cuyahoga County residents through Cuyahoga Arts and Culture.