By Kat Wilson
Staff Writer
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| Women on the Move Trio perform a house concert in Lancaster /Photo by Will Lofgren |
She loved him, she wanted to stay married, but she knew it was impossible to protect herself or her children any longer.
It was Valentine’s Day when she finally did it.
There had been incidents in the past, so she told her husband she was going to drop the kids off at a babysitter’s “safe house” for the night, and left him to wait for her at a street corner.With him out of the house, she raced back home to pack a couple of suitcases and drove to another state with her two babies in the backseat.
“That … was weighing on me for a long time,” said singer-songwriter Joan Enguita after telling the story of her sister’s experience with domestic violence.
It was partly for this reason, and for women all over America who suffer from violent relationships, that the “Women on the Move Trio” came to be.
Enguita first met Trish Lester through a Craigslist ad with the help of a mutual friend, and they started singing as a duo. Later on, Linda Geleris bumped into Enguita’s husband while they were both organizing a CD table at a hotel showcase where Enguita was performing, and Geleris discovered she had the same producer as both Enguita and Lester.
“Sometimes songwriters think ‘it’s just the talent’ but no, you actually have to get to know the right people by networking,” Geleris said.
After releasing an album titled “Beautiful” featuring Enguita, Geleris, Lester and 11 other independent female artists on Sept. 22, 2007, it was only a few months before these three women combined their voices and songwriting talents into an acoustic harmony to help raise funds for domestic violence shelters.
Using guitars, a mandolin, a djembe drum, shakers, and a specially handcrafted mountain dulcimer, they compose and perform original “contemporary folk” songs based on both their own personal experiences and the stories of those they meet.
“It was Joan’s idea to call it ‘Women on the Move Trio,’” Lester said. “The idea of women getting out of a bad situation is the genesis of the name.”
“We really want young women to learn how to avoid domestic violence,” Enguita said, since “One in every four women has been in a violent relationship” in America and most of them are “college age.”
According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, “Women ages 20-24 are at the greatest risk of nonfatal intimate partner violence.”
“We [women] think we can change men, and that if they have a violent streak they’ll get over it because of us and how wonderful we are, but what happens is we can’t,” Enguita said. “At the first signs of him being too controlling … be very careful about getting into a serious relationship.”
Two of the local shelters the Women on the Move Trio support are the Valley Oasis family shelter in Lancaster and the Santa Clarita Valley shelter.
The Women on the Move Trio has been spreading their message of domestic violence awareness for years on tour in Oregon, Arizona and all over California. They’ve played in folk festivals, hotels, music stores, bars―all manner of venues, including radio shows such as KPFK in Los Angeles.
Every October for the past four years, the trio has done a show at College of the Canyons for National Domestic Violence Awareness month. Enguita said she’s wanted to do something similar at AVC as well.
“We’re willing to go anywhere it’s just a question of expense,” Lester said, and lately that means staying in southern California. These women are on the move all the time just to practice with each other since Enguita resides in Quartz Hill, Lester in Newhall and Geleris in Glendora.
Enguita, Geleris and Lester said they especially love the intimate nature of house concerts with smaller audiences.
“It’s a chance to get up close and personal,” Lester said. “If it’s small enough you can do without sound equipment and that’s very liberating, but we want to make sure that people get it and hear it.”
On Saturday, Feb. 25, the Women on the Move Trio were well received at a house concert they gave in Lancaster for an audience of 25 people.
Michael Hines works with Enguita as a representative for Aflac, but he had never heard the trio perform before attending the house concert. “The harmony is great … I didn’t know Joan could sing like that,” Hines said.
The Women on the Move Trio’s scheduled shows for the next couple of months are in Glendora, Hollywood, Canoga Park, Altadena, and Covina.
Later this semester at AVC, however, a play written by Enguita titled “By the Way”―also dealing with domestic violence issues―will be one of four plays performed by students on campus in the annual One-Act Festival.
