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Sarah Russo
Staff writer

Snarky Puppy is considered one of the major figures in the jazz world, but the group is anything but one thing. 

Rather, Snarky Puppy is a collective, rotating as many as 25 members, that represents a multitude of diverse backgrounds including Japanese, Canadian, Puerto Rican. What started as a group of friends at the University of North Texas’ Jazz Studies program in 2004, has become a five-time Grammy Award winning and globally recognized band. 

The group will make their Chautauqua Institution debut at 8:15 p.m. tonight in the Amphitheater. Currently, Snarky Puppy is on their world tour including stops in Belgium, Portugal, Italy, and France. Some members in the group include Micheal League on bass, Bill Laurance, Bobby Sparks II and Shaun Martin on keys, Justin Stanton on trumpet and keys, Bob Lanzetti, Mark Lettieri and Chris McQueen on guitar, and Nate Werth, Marcelo Woloski and Keita Ogawa on percussion. 

Bassist, primary composer and creator of Snarky Puppy, Michael League, said the group is unclassifiable and it’s evident on their 14 studio albums where they’ve incorporated a jazz-funk-R&B fusion.  

“People who have been with us after 16 years, the only thing they really want from us is to try new things,” League told the Rolling Stone in 2019. “That’s what they signed up for. If we had made three pop records after Culcha Vulcha, we would’ve lost all our fans. We have a history of jumping from one bizarre connection to another.”

And even though the group has received praise and awards for their past work, League said his creativity and work will continue to push the boundaries as a musician. 

“Most people think that once you win Grammys you have to start appealing to more people and keeping the audience happy,” League said. “I feel the opposite. Once we started getting attention, it gave us license to do whatever we wanted, knowing people will give it a chance. I’d rather do what I want to do than do what people would like me to do.”

And the creative process for songwriting is relatively straightforward as League explained. 

“Generally a song is conceived before it’s brought to rehearsal, at which point we realize the composition as​ ​the composer intended,” League said in an interview for It’s Psychedelic Baby Magazine in February. “Then the band begins to apply their own interpretation, at which point the music takes on a new identity. There always seems to be a group consensus​ ​that allows the band to collectively find its new clothes for a composition and it’s this diplomacy, lack of ego and openness of the individual members that enables the songs to bloom and take on a new life beyond what the composer may have originally intended.” 

Not only has League created a successful, one-of-a-kind band, he is also the founder of GroundUP Music, a full-service label with a roster of artists that spanned continents and genres. Formed in 2011, GroundUp was created with the purpose to “create a supportive environment where ensembles, like Snarky Puppy and its members, could release their music.” There’s even  an annual GroundUP Music Festival in Miami Beach, Florida, host to artists like Béla Fleck, Esperanza Spalding, Andrew Bird, The Wood Brothers, Terence Blanchard, Joshua Redman, Jacob Collier among many others. Now, members of Snarky Puppy have launched successful music careers of their own including Justin Stanton, Mark Lettieri, Bill Laurance, and Cory Henry.

Earlier this year, League and piano icon Bill Laurance released a duo album, ‘Where you Wish you Were.’ Where League is the bassist and band leader for Snarky Puppy, he takes on a very different role here. ‘Where you Wish you Were’ features League playing the oud and other acoustic string instruments. In an interview for It’s Psychedelic Baby Magazine, the duo explained their destined collaboration. 

“It was only a matter of time before we’d make a record by ourselves,” Laurance told It’s Psychedelic Baby Magazine in February. “We’ve been close friends for 20 years now and we’ve worked together in so many different capacities – with Snarky Puppy, my own band, and in collaboration with other artists so it just felt like it was a natural thing to do.”

Alton Northup
Staff writer

The friendship between Robert P. George and Cornel West began early in their tenure at Princeton University, where George noticed West was asking all the right questions.

George, a conservative, noted the progressive West’s questions did not always arrive at the right answers, yet were “questions of meaning and value.” The two discussed how these questions sustain their friendship despite their political divide with Chautauqua Institution President Michael E. Hill at 10:45 a.m. on Monday in the Amphitheater for the season’s first morning lecture and the first lecture of the Chautauqua Lecture Series Week One theme, “On Friendship.”

The pair’s origin can be traced back to a campus magazine at Princeton that asked professors to interview a colleague of their choice. To George’s surprise, West — now the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Chair at Union Theological Seminary and a recently declared third-party candidate for president of the United States — chose him for what should have been a two-hour interview.

“This was not an interview,” said George, Princeton University’s McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence and director of the James Madison Program. “This was a rocking and rolling discussion and debate on all the issues we’ve been talking about for years.”

There was no pulling the two from their conversation and, as the tape ran out, George said they realized they should get to know each other better. So, they planned for lunch and days later agreed to teach a freshman seminar together. 

“From the moment we started teaching together in the classroom, what some people call the chemistry – but that’s just too weak a word – the magic was there,” George said.

The two continued teaching together until West moved to Harvard University, deciding then to take their conversations on the road and share with audiences what George called one of the greatest joys of his life – not just his friendship, but his admiration for West’s ability to teach by example. A part of what he teaches is acceptance of all, simply because of their humanity.

“We are brothers in the deepest sense. It goes so far beyond political agreement,” West said. “I love him when he’s wrong; I love him when he’s right. I try to correct him; he tries to correct me. We revel in each other’s humanity even though we’re both cracked vessels.”

West said their friendship should not make them an odd couple; he reflected on a time when siblinghood in professionalism was the norm. Now, he said, that piece is missing – substituted instead with conformity, arrogance and condescension toward outsiders.

“What we have here is not because we’re so special. … (If) you don’t agree with members of your family politically, you still love them, you still connect with their humanity,” he said. “We’ve become so polarized it’s hard to be able to make that connection.” 

The two bridge this gap through their shared love of the truth. This does not mean they always arrive at the same conclusion – disagreements are frequent – but they are not opposed to changing their opinions. 

“The danger, and I think what has caused so much harm in our society, is people fall so deeply in love with their opinions. They become so identity-forming for people,” George said. “They wrap their emotions so tightly around their opinions that they love the opinions more than truth.” 

Creating space for your opinions to be challenged, George said, is the only hope for knowing if you are wrong. He shared a lesson the two learned from Plato: The person who causes you to rethink is not your enemy, but your friend. 

“We’re all fallible,” George said. “We know we can be wrong even about the deep, important questions.” 

It is through the proper currency of intellectual discourse – reason, evidence and arguments – that one can understand strongly held opinions. Those who circumvent this transaction, George argued, do not act in good faith. But those who do, should not be ignored.

Apprehension toward these transactions, West argued, comes from a lack of trust. Trust, he said, allows people to be vulnerable enough to disagree.

“We’re losing that, and no democracy can survive without it,” he said.

The two are often asked how someone can be both open-minded and a person of conviction. George’s answer is found in the liturgy of Yom Kippur, where congregants atone for sins that include stealing, cheating, lying and being zealots for bad causes.

“You don’t lie by mistake,” he said. “You can say something that’s not true by mistake, but if you believe it’s true, that’s not a lie.”

Simple as it may be, George compares the act of challenging one’s opinions to giving a cashier short change. If it was not done in bad faith, you correct it without issue; it should be the same with the opinions.

 George said it is the total conviction to one’s opinions that leads to dogmatists, ideologues and demagogues. 

On the topic of ideology, George was hesitant to endorse West’s candidacy for president but eager to endorse his integrity, his honesty, his compassion, his love of people, and his selflessness. West was equally hesitant to talk about his candidacy but wants to ensure his values are at the forefront of it.

“I am tied to a cause and a calling,” he said. “And that’s what brings Brother Robert and I together. You see, truth-seeking and justice-seeking is a calling.”

The presidency, he said, is secondary. It is just a vehicle for him to carry out his calling. And the calling he charges Chautauquans with is one of courage.

“Courage is the enabling virtue of all the other virtues. Courage is by example, with the body; you’ve got to put your body in it,” he said. “We in the Black tradition call that being a funk master because a funk master gets beyond the deodorized language and sanitized and sterilized discourse. In the funk is the freedom, and the love, and the pain, and the hurt, and the smile through tears. See, that’s what courage is and the only way you get it is to do something beyond language.”

It was through courage and examination of the self that their friendship began so many decades ago, and George encouraged Chautauquans to make friends with someone who they have serious disagreements with, too.

“Knowing is an activity,” he said. “There’s something noble and ennobling about truth seeking.”

Column by Mary Lee Talbot

“To say I am a friend of God is a bold statement. You mean it or you don’t,” said Bishop Latrelle Miller Easterling at the 9:15 a.m. Monday morning worship service in the Amphitheater. Continuing her series, “I am a Friend of God,” the title of her sermon was “You mean it or you don’t.” Her scripture text was 2 Corinthians 5: 17-19.

Easterling quoted lyrics from the song “Friend of God,” by Israel Houghton. “Who am I that You are mindful of me? / That You hear me when I call / Is it true that You are thinking of me? / How You love me it’s amazing.” The chorus goes: “I am a friend of God / I am a friend of God / I am a friend of God / He calls me friend.”

“It is a beautiful song with an encouraging message,” she said. “God does hear me when I call and loves me with an everlasting love. God will never leave or forsake me. But there is something missing: Friendship requires mutuality. What is required of me, my life, my walk with God? God always makes demands on the believer’s life.”

The Apostle Paul, in his letter to the Corinthians, wrote that a relationship with God requires a complete and permanent change in the believers. They had to change themselves and change the way they viewed others. 

“So if — there is that ‘if’ again — you are new in Christ, everything old has passed away,” Easterling said. 

Author James Baldwin was giving a lecture at the University of Massachusetts on Feb. 28, 1984. He told the audience that it was not enough to be a liberal, to have the right attitude, and to give money to the right causes. He told them they had to risk more, to know more. 

A student asked for clarification. If those attitudes were not enough, what was necessary? Baldwin said, “commitment.” 

“You mean it or you don’t,” Easterling said. “What is required is commitment.”

She continued: “If we are new, we can’t reclaim the old ways. We can’t shout on Sunday and backslide on Monday. The butterfly does not go back to being a caterpillar. The oak does not become an acorn again. And whether the chicken or the egg comes first, the chicken never goes back to being an egg.”

She told the congregation that if they are a new creation in Christ, they have died to their former selves. “You cannot resurrect your former selves. You have to live a life worthy of your call. You mean it or you don’t.”

Easterling and her husband, the Rev. Marion Easterling, would always ask their sons as they left the house: “Who do you represent?” 

“There was only one answer: God and the Miller-Easterling family,” she said. “They knew who, and whose, they were. We were instilling an ethic that they could not comport themselves one way in our presence and another way in our absence.”

St. John Chrysostom, Easterling noted, brought the concept of “preach, use words if you have to,” through his own life by embodying the love of God as the love of neighbor. As Patriarch of Constantinople during the 4th century, C.E., he taught the Christians in Constantinople that they could change lives by changing their lives.

“He gave an argument from action,” Easterling said. “He urged his followers to astound non-believers by their way of life, that what they did was a visible sacrament in the world.” 

She continued, “We are the only word some people will ever hear. You mean it or you don’t.”

Easterling asserted that Christians can live a Christ-centered life, or they can live by their own ego. She shared a story about an encounter with a family member whom she invited to leave her house by “the same means she had come in” if she did not like the arrangements at her house. 

“That Lent I decided to pray and fast for the 40 days,” she said. “God put on my heart that I needed to call that family member and apologize. I told God that I did not start the argument. Have you ever tried to talk back to God? I needed to be reminded that my arms are too short to box with God. I had to cast aside my ego and when I called we both felt release and relief.”

She continued, “We can’t live as a new creation if we don’t die to ourselves, if we don’t alter our certainty, if we don’t make amends.”

Writer Will Campbell was invited to speak to a group of bishops about inclusiveness. The group was made up of all white men. Campbell got up to speak, looked down at them and said, “How many of you are willing to resign your position today so that women and men of color can take these positions?” When no one raised their hand, he said, “Then it is no use me talking to you if you won’t,” and he sat down. 

“You mean it or you don’t,” Easterling said. 

Living life in this way is not easy as it is lived in a complex reality of risk and vulnerability. She shared a story from Bryan Stevenson, executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative. A small, Black woman was gathering dirt beside the road to take it to the National Memorial for Peace and Justice. As she was digging, a white man in a truck drove by, slowed down, and turned around and drove back.

He approached her and asked what she was doing. The woman was going to tell him she was gathering dirt for her garden but “something took hold of her and she told the truth: a man had been lynched there in the 1930s and she wanted to honor his life,” Easterling said. 

That truth-telling set them both free. The man stared for a while at the piece of paper with the name of the man who was lynched and then asked, “Excuse me, ma’am, may I help you dig?” She tried to give him a shovel but he dug with his bare hands. When they were finished, both of them had tears running down their faces. The woman asked, “are you alright?” He answered, “I am afraid my grandfather was there and participated in the lynching.”

“They were weeping together about that history, about this nation, weeping and wondering if reconciliation is possible,” Easterling said. “They went together to deliver the soil. This is what reconciliation requires. This is the beauty that happens when we reconcile.” 

Fr. Richard Rohr, writer and theologian, has written that Christians need to do everything with humility in surrendering to Jesus Christ.

“We are not perfect, but we have to remain committed. We have to reclaim our baptism and let go of our ego. With the help of God, all things are possible,” Easterling said. As an example of this commitment and the mutuality between God and believers, she cited John Wesley’s Covenant Prayer. Wesley was the founder of Methodism. 

“I am no longer my own, but yours. / Put me to what you will, place me with whom you will. / Put me to doing, put me to suffering. / Let me be put to work for you or set aside for you, / Praised for you or criticized for you. Let me be full, let me be empty. / Let me have all things, let me have nothing. / I freely and fully surrender all things to your glory and service. / And now, O wonderful and holy God, / Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer, / you are mine, and I am yours. So be it. / And the covenant which I have made on earth, / Let it also be made in heaven. Amen.”

Easterling concluded, saying, “Chautauquans, may the lives we live bring true reconciliation and hope. We are the ones we are waiting for to repair the breach. Mean it or you don’t. I pray you do; may it be so.” 

The Rt. Rev. Eugene T. Sutton, senior pastor of Chautauqua Institution, presided. The Rev. George Wirth, an associate in the Department of Religion, read the scripture. For the prelude and postlude, Nicholas Stigall, organ scholar, played “Élévation” from Heures mystiques by Léon Boëllman. The anthem, sung by the Chautauqua Choir, was “O for a closer walk with God,” music by Charles Villiers Stanford and words by William Cowper. Joshua Stafford, director of sacred music and Jared Jacobsen Chair for the Organist, directed the choir, which was accompanied by Stigall. Support for this week’s chaplaincy and preaching is provided by the J. Everett Hall Memorial Chaplaincy and the Geraldine M. and Frank E. McElree, Jr. Chaplaincy Fund.

Mariia Novoselia
Staff writer

If you decide to enter the grounds of Chautauqua from the lake, chances are a curious, colorful sculpture of a fish will catch your eye long before the anchor of your sailboat catches the bottom of the lake. Should you decide to walk down South Lake Drive upon your arrival, passing Palestine Park and multiple docks, you will soon run into Rufus the Triggerfish. 

Rufus the Triggerfish, striking, vibrant and full of character, has plastic fins sticking out of his bottle-cap-embellished body, and a coarse chunk of a green plastic basket decorates its pedestal. Rufus the Triggerfish is one of the 14 sculptures made of plastic ocean debris that are spread out across the grounds of Chautauqua this season as part of the “Washed Ashore —Art to Save the Sea” exhibit. 

The story of the initiative Washed Ashore goes back to 2010, when the idea to collect debris from the ocean and create sculptures using them was born. Since that time, “tens of thousands” of volunteers have been engaged in the project, said Katie Dougherty, executive director at Washed Ashore. 

Mark Wenzler, director of the Chautauqua Climate Change Initiative, said the process of getting Washed Ashore’s sculptures to Chautauqua started two years ago, after he had a conversation about the exhibit with Jane Batten, whose philanthropy has been critical to both the CCI and the “Washed Ashore” exhibit.  

“It became clear that this would be a really great thing to bring to Chautauqua,” Wenzler said.

Debris, which is the main source material for all the sculptures, is collected from the southern coast of Oregon, Dougherty said. Project volunteers clean these elements of future sculptures with a solution of vinegar and sort them by color. In some cases, debris is cut up into smaller pieces. Next, with the help of volunteers, artists design sculptures by creating a body of steel, layering it with recycled tires and then embellishing it with the debris. 

Since its beginning, Washed Ashore has collected over 32 tons of plastic from the ocean and created approximately 90 sculptures, Dougherty said. 

Judy Barie, Susan and John Turben director of Chautauqua Visual Art Galleries, said what appealed to her the most was the sheer size of the sculptures, which she described as impactful. 

Barie said her role in the project was to select spots around the Institution for the sculptures. 

“It is just like staging a show — everything is intentional,” she said.  

The process of establishing the placement of each sculpture took place in April, and the installation only took a couple of days, including Barie’s favorite: Nora the Salmon. 

“She is pretty gorgeous,” she said, noting the artwork’s movement.

Nora is made of toilet seats, sunglasses, shovels, boots and bottle caps; her nose, Barie pointed out, is a remote control. 

Dougherty said some of the most common items that volunteers find as they are sorting the debris are plastic bottles, lids, lighters, buoys and nets. More surprising finds include a hot tub and the front end of a car. 

The most extraordinary item that ended up in a sculpture on the grounds of Chautauqua, in Barie’s opinion, is a tire that serves as the core element of Eli the Eel. Barie said she was “surprised by all of it and upset by all of it,” but what stood out to her the most was the  absurd fact that “somebody would actually, physically throw a tire into the ocean.”

Eli the Eel is located inside the Smith Memorial Library over the grand central staircase. Dozens of yellow lighters, bottle caps, cans and beach toys adorn the eel’s otherwise black body of a tire, creating a signature pattern. 

Scott Ekstrom, library director, said he wanted a sculpture that would hang from the ceiling, keeping in mind accessibility and the library’s limited floor space. 

Ekstrom said he and his team were delighted to have Eli the Eel keeping them company and he hopes the project will generate a new audience for the library, as the sculptures attract both kids and adults.

If you’d rather enter Chautauqua from the mainland, you’ll still see the sculptures within your first minutes at the Institution. Three artworks are located at the Main Gate Welcome Center. 

As Chautauquans are lining up to get their gate passes, over 20 jellyfish — of many different colors and with a varied selection of objects in substitution for their tentacles, like a purple Crocs shoe or an orange toothbrush — are hanging from the ceiling. 

Alison Barry, director of patron experience, ticketing, and group sales, said the public’s reception of the sculptures has been positive. She said children especially like looking at all the works at the Welcome Center. 

Barry said the scale of the pieces attracts attention from afar, and when people get closer, they learn what the sculptures are made of, which is eye-opening.  

“I love the idea of transforming something negative into something positive, or at least into something that creates awareness,” Barry said.

Awareness, along with mindfulness, are among the main goals that Dougherty highlighted when talking about Washed Ashore’s work.  

Wenzler particularly likes that the project “brings attention to things that we can have an impact on in our daily lives,” and it makes him feel “empowered to get rid of plastic in (his) life and make a difference.”

“I love the fact that ‘Washed Ashore’ opens a conversation. It lets people understand that there is a problem, but it does so in a way that is not intimidating or threatening. It’s inspiring,” Wenzler said. “It gives every single person a role to play in solving the problem.”

The exhibition will be up at Chautauqua until Oct. 31.

Sara Toth
editor

When Karol Jackowski entered the Catholic Sisterhood in 1964, nuns were prescribed a litany of rules to follow — even ones related to friendship.

“They shall carefully avoid any friendship contrary to community spirit, such a close union with one person being a formal separation from the rest,” read one.

But another: “They shall love one another sincerely, never entertaining feelings of aversion. They shall pray for one another; they shall help and serve one another. They shall strive to banish from their minds every thought of jealously and to rejoice in the success of their sisters as their own.”

Jackowski — who has since left the Sisters of the Holy Cross — is now part of the Sisters for Christian Community, an independent, self-governing sisterhood. She opens the 2023 Interfaith Lecture Series, and its Week One theme of “Holy Friendship: Source of Strength and Challenge” at 2 p.m. today in the Hall of Philosophy. Her lecture title is “Friends: The Holy Family That We Choose.”

In her memoir, Forever and Ever, Amen: Becoming a Nun in the Sixties, Jackowski details how she first came to her religious vocation; the idea of becoming a nun grew serious in the middle of her senior year, “the proverbial eleventh hour,” she wrote.

“I loved high school because of the friends and fun I found there; it was my first taste of what I now know as sisterhood,” she wrote in Forever and Ever, Amen.

In 2007, Jackowski told Reuters that she decided to write her memoir — her fourth book as a full-time writer — because she found that the life of a nun is largely a mystery to many outside the faith. The lives of the nuns themselves, she said, were shrouded in mystery, and she wanted to lift the veil.

“Writing or any of the arts were never encouraged or supported in religious life. The sense of individuality or the idea of expressing your own experiences was sort of suppressed. I think there are only a handful of nuns writing anything,” she told Belinda Goldsmith of Reuters Life! “Lots of parts of convent life were very difficult and people don’t want to reveal that side. It’s like a dysfunctional family.”

That family, she told Goldsmith, taught her “how to live with people you don’t like, you disagree with, and you would never anticipate being your friend.”

In the years since, Jacowski has earned a PhD from New York University, become a full-time writer (her most recent book is 2021’s Sister Karol’s Book of Spells, Blessings, and Folk Magic), a self-taught painter of religious folk art, and a faculty member in Bay Path University’s MFA in creative nonfiction. 

Since Jackowski’s been considering this concept since she was a young nun, she brings a spiritual creativity to open the week that Melissa Spas, vice president of religion, finds exciting.

“Sister Karol has a breadth of experience in thinking and sharing with others the power and limits of friendship as part of spiritual practice,” Spas said. “It sets the tone and creates space for others to talk more particularly about their own friendships and the nurturing of friendship as a spiritual value.”

Kaitlyn Finchler
Staff writer

One of the more interesting — and politically conflicting — duos of the century will join Chautauquans to open a week on friendship as they discuss how they maintain theirs, why they do, and why people shouldn’t take friendships for granted.

Robert P. George, Princeton University’s McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence and director of the James Madison Program, returns to Chautauqua to open the season of morning lectures at 10:45 a.m. today in the Amphitheater. He is joined by someone he considers a brother: Cornel West, the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Chair at Union Theological Seminary

Arguably two of the foremost public intellectuals in American life, from two different schools of thought, George and West maintain their friendship through learning and conversation.

“They have taken this show on the road before so we knew they were a good pair,” said Jordan Steves, interim Emily and Richard Smucker Chair for Education. “We thought it was a particularly appropriate note. … you have these two men who are best friends but come from very different ideological points on the spectrum.”

And on Sunday, Steves said, the two literally took their show on the road; after George and West’s flight was canceled, they rented a car to make the trip to Chatuauqua together.

When planning the week, Steves said the programming department asked the two to demonstrate this dynamic through tips and advice on how to navigate relationships that may have been or are becoming difficult as the national mood has “soured” politically.

“We can learn from each other because we don’t go into it convinced that we absolutely know the truth infallibly,” George told the Daily in 2022. “I learn from Cornel all the time, and he says he learns from me all the time.”

George, who spoke on the Interfaith Lecture Series platform last summer, has long disliked labels, particularly in the political sphere — liberal, conservative, socialist, etc.

“If we have to have these broad categories, certainly (West) is more on the progressive (and) I’m more on the conservative (side),” George told the Daily last summer. “He is the honorary co-chairman of Democratic Socialists of America. I’m a critic of socialism.”

The two men are certainly “in different places,” George said in his 2022 interview, and yet “I recognize and honor him and he recognizes and honors things as true truths. That is more fundamental than any difference of politics between us.”

Both truth-seeking individuals, George said they “agree 100%” when it comes to freedom of speech and freedom of thought.

“Here you find two guys, (from) different places on the political spectrum, both arguing strenuously for very robust conceptions of free speech,” George said in a 2022 interview with the Daily, “for the sake of both academic learning in colleges and universities, and for the health of the democratic republic.”

George and West joined “The Gloria Purvis Podcast” February of this year to discuss Black history, resistance and joy during Black History Month. In that conversation, George told the story of when he was sworn in as chairman of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom. He asked West if he would hold the Bible for him.

“He kindly agreed to come along to the ceremony and hold the Bible for me,” George said on the podcast. “But I wanted there to be a special Bible, a Bible associated with the noble cause of human rights.”

A great admirer of Harriet Tubman, George reached out to the Harriet Tubman House and asked to borrow Tubman’s Bible. 

“The lady on the other end of the phone said, ‘Well, we do have that Bible.’ And I detected just a little hesitance in her voice,” George said on the podcast. “And I can understand — sending a relic like that down in the mail to somebody you don’t even know.”

He then mentioned West would be the person holding the Bible and “she immediately said, ‘Oh yes, we’d be very happy to send that Bible there.’ ”

In a March 2023 Fox News interview, West said George isn’t just a friend, he’s a member of the family — and sometimes “family can be wrong and you still love them and I’m wrong about some things.”

“The world needs to know that you’re looking at two brothers who have a deep love of each other, even as there’s disagreement on certain political and policy issues,” West told Fox News.

Julia Weber
Staff writer

Chautauqua’s first dance performance of the 2023 season will welcome visiting company BalletX to the Institution. The Philadelphia-based dance group pride themselves on contemporary, inclusive and innovative dance experiences, and they’re slated to take the stage at 8:15 p.m. tonight in the Amphitheater.

“Chautauqua’s historical. It’s legendary. So, it’s such an honor to bring my company up there and share in the arts with a passionate community who appreciates and values the impact of the arts,” said Christine Cox, BalletX’s co-founder and artistic and executive director. 

“We’re really excited about this adventure and bringing this beautiful company of dancers who are actually from all over the world — America, Philippines, Canada.
I think our similarities are significant. At the heart of our similarities is our passion for community and the arts and what the arts can do for our hearts and our minds — and, particularly, our soul.”

This evening is BalletX’s Chautauqua debut, and Laura Savia is excited to introduce the contemporary ballet company to the community.

“I have been hearing from many Chautauquans who live in Philadelphia, as well as from my colleagues in the dance world, that BalletX is the not-to-be-missed company on the scene right now,” said Savia, vice president of performing and visual arts.

Cox co-founded the company with Matthew Neenan in 2005 as a way to continue dancing and creating throughout the summer, and it eventually evolved into the company that it is now.

Cox attributes the importance of BalletX to the role that it plays in allowing freedom for artists and giving creatives ample space to experiment and create. She emphasizes the value of allowing artists to visualize their work through the dancers and other aspects of BalletX in order to realize and advance ballet as a medium.

“We’re creating opportunities for artists to continue dreaming, to feel safe experimenting with their own voice, but using the beautiful artists and dancers of the company to visualize that work with them and create something that’s never been done before,” she said.

The day begins with “Morning Stretch with BalletX” at 10:15 a.m. on Bestor Plaza, and the Chautauqua Dance Circle is hosting a pre-performance lecture starting at 7 p.m. tonight in Smith Wilkes Hall. When BalletX takes the Amp stage after, Savia said that “Chautauqua can expect to see a joyful, energetic performance. The company members of BalletX dance with abandon.”

Cox hopes to take the audience on a journey throughout the performance. She finds that BalletX’s work “resonates with the soul,” and even finds herself being taken back into her own memories as she’s watching a performance.

“I think the audience will be awed by the physicality of the dancers, the commitment of the dancers, and the beautiful approach that they have to these vastly different works,” she said.

More than awe, Cox hopes viewers experience a sense of joy tonight, and a sense of “love and connection, a sense of gratitude for life.”

“These moments in time and art can bring people together, so I hope that they’re sitting with someone that they love and that watching the beautiful dancers of BalletX sparks this chemistry of love in the air and we can bring joy and positive energy into Chautauqua,” Cox said.

Kaitlyn Finchler
Staff Writer

Molecular biology, writing and queer theory don’t necessarily always go hand in hand, but Joseph Osmundson contains multitudes; when he delivered this year’s Writers’ Festival keynote last Thursday evening for attendees in the Athenaeum Hotel Parlor and lobby, he mined the depths of publishing, writing and exploration within the queer identity.

“I feel a little silly to be up here in front of everyone,” he said. “What I felt this entire week has so far — and we’re only halfway through — is such a network. … We’re all working together and that’s one of the things I want to talk about tonight.”

Osmundson’s keynote took place on the second day of the festival, which at that point had included an introductory session, welcome address, workshops and a craft panel where all attendees were in a collaborative space. Osmundson was as much a participant as he was a guide for the writers in attendance.

Osmundson — not a morning person, he said — likes to start his day around 10 to 11 a.m., cup of coffee in hand. He’ll sit out on the balcony in the shade and appreciate where he’s at in life through mindfulness and meditation. Then, he recognizes the current state of the world. As an example, one morning he received a text from one of his friends that simply said “THE BREEZE.” So he started to think about the breeze.

“On this day, this Saturday, the temperature of our planet has risen nearly two degrees Celsius and it’s still going up,” Osmundson said. “Last year, it was the hottest year on record.”

Osmundson listed other disasters, both political and natural, in the world. The land war in Europe, a headline in 2018 tying the U.S. to civilian deaths in a “not-so-civil civil war.” The Mpox virus “that could have been contained in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Nigeria, instead became deadly worldwide.”

Next, 90% of deaths in America are from advanced HIV; then 263 mass shootings in America so far in 2023 — almost two mass shootings a day. He then went on to mention the 30 million Americans, nearly 10% of the population, who don’t have health insurance.

“Things are not going great, and we have news and social media cycles that actually profit off of this constantly,” Osumundson said. “Yet, for many of us in this room, we sit on evenings or on Saturdays, we’re overworking and being underpaid, exhausted by the world around us.”

Osmundson said writing is a way to light the fire people have inside them, and attempting to be published is not inherently better than journaling.

“We sit down in a world on fire and write,” he said. “I want a positive act of hope and belief in the world, and then we can actually change it.”

Osmundson introduced to his audience the two-way gravity interaction metaphor, how the amount of gravity exerted depends on the mass. Consider Earth’s massive mass, and one develops a much more massive view.

“Can we all collectively exert that gravity in the same direction that actually changes the course of how we write?” Osmundson said. “In a way, we have not given up. The world’s really depressed. … I’m depressed because I’m hopeful, because I do believe that the world can be materially better.”

Next, he asked a series of questions, with participants keeping their hands raised in the affirmative. “Raise your hand if you make art.” “Keep them raised if part of that art is writing.” “Keep them raised if part of that art you think about publishing.” Hands started to lower.

“Keep them raised if you write because of the desire to impact not just yourself, but the world around you.” Everyone’s hands were raised. 

“We are collective in our belief that our writing can be gravity that exists for some person,” Osmundson said. 

Art can change the world, and he knows this because “art has changed my world.” He borrowed an explanation from his day job as a molecular biologist to reinforce the point of things being necessary and also sufficient.

“It is possible for something to be necessary but not sufficient,” Osmundson said. “Art may be necessary to change the world, but without activism … it is not going to do that.”

He encourages people to think about art as part of their individual and collective work to change the world.

“I do believe that time to take in and make art should be a human right,” Osmundson said. “We are humans with messy connections and desires and experiences. We are not simply workers or cogs in the machines of capitalism.”

People should let the messiness show, he said, and connect with others in solidarity of creation and community. 

“We can plug this in as a piece of the puzzle to making the world fundamentally different,” Osmundson said.

The possibility of what can be is large, he said, and for him that was the “homosexual possibility.”

“When I was younger, I literally didn’t know that I was possible,” said Osmundson, who grew up in the early ‘90s in a small, western logging town. He didn’t know what it meant to be a scientist, or that people spent their lives experimenting. 

“Doctors and writers were old and white and straight and dead,” Osmundson said. “At that time, Dickens and Austen saved my life. I couldn’t imagine being a writer was a possibility for me.”

In high school, Osmundson said he loved Sophocles’ Antigone so much he asked his sophomore English teacher if he could assign it to the class himself and give a lesson “on the uses of symbols and foreshadowing and its assignment of moral planning — I was not exactly what you would call popular.”

In his sophomore year of college, he read The Lover, by Marguerite Duras, about an illicit affair between a teenage French girl and a wealthy, older Chinese man, in which the girl discovers her sexual desire for both men and women.

“She identifies as ‘queer,’ but she sees love and hate and pleasure and disgust overlap,” Osmundson said. “She expressed my sexual desire without any identity; this such sexuality is not mentioned.”

This book and this character, he said, unlocked something for him.

“It unlocked the possibility that I could be attracted to more than one gender,” he said, and he proceeded to read an excerpt from the book.

“(The character) wants to create a scene where her male lover and her small crush come together and enact a desire that is forbidden,” Osmundson said. “This was among my first steps into the possibility of queerness.”

While he always loved women, he said if he had not read this book, he never would have had the opportunity to question, observe and reject heteronormativity.

“(Authors’) confrontation with their empty pages in the 1980s helped me be clear in a way that I love about myself three decades later, and God bless them,” Osmundson said. 

The writings of various theorists have made his understanding of gender and sexuality much clearer, like Judith Butler’s notion of gender as performance, and natural gendered behaviors. Queer gender is just as performative as normative gender, he said. It’s just that “normative gender gets to name itself as nonperformance,” he said. “These men driving around with gun racks in the back of their trucks” are performing gender as much as any queer person.

American academic Jose Esteban Munoz put forth a notion of queerness as a utopia — not that queer people are without struggle, Osmundson said, but the queer life now is a utopia compared to the life of queer people in the ‘80s and ‘90s.

“Language created us,” he said. “Language has done to us, before we do language. We have to recognize that we must learn to manipulate language, perhaps in ways that destabilize how we learn language so young.”

By creating new language in front of the world, writers can remake that world.

“There is hope in this — that art, and hearing, and writing, can make the world different for those who make and consume it,” Osmundson said. 

But hope isn’t always enough. Osmundson recalled a conversation with his friend Julian Watkins, a Black, gay doctor who specializes in sexual health. Watkins pointed out that queer people now are living their predecessors’ utopia, and while there is new hope for the trans and queer community, that hope — without action — can lead to a failure of empathy.

“Empathy alone is not enough to, obviously, just feel bad about racism or sexism or homophobia,” Osmundson said. “Empathy has to be an initiative that acts to something. That’s the difference between solidarity and empathy.”

Writing, he said, is a nucleation point for empathy, and the way people interact with books and community can build the solidarity needed for action — “the desire not just to understand, but to do, to walk towards a world-leading utopia where queer people aren’t treated as they were in Giovanni’s Room,” he said. In James Baldwin’s book, the only possibilities for queer people were “straightness and misery or queerness and death.”

From Antigone to The Lover to Giovanni’s Room, “these books show the full sweep of humanity and build the validation for solidarity that insists on maximizing pleasure and safety and minimizing violence,” he said. “All because humans deserve pleasure and safety.”

Editor’s Note: These are the prepared remarks for Chautauqua Institution President Michael E. Hill’s annual Three Taps of the Gavel Address, delivered prior to Sunday’s Service of Worship and Sermon in the Amphitheater.

Good morning, and welcome home to Chautauqua. 

First, let me extend special greetings to those in this audience who are visiting or experiencing Chautauqua for the first time today. It is my sincere hope that you feel the warmth and sense of collective purpose that has drawn people to these hallowed grounds for 150 years. Many in the audience are part of generational Chautauqua families dating back to 1874, and many others have begun their journey here much more recently. All of you — all of you — are essential to the celebration and stewardship of democratic society that Chautauqua and its mission have represented since its founding. The presence this morning of those from all manner of backgrounds, with deep history here and otherwise, affirms that we continue to live into that mission — and we especially want to welcome those of you taking those first steps on your Chautauqua journey. Welcome. We are so glad you are here. 

This summer marks Chautauqua’s 150th season. Our founders Lewis Miller and Bishop John Heyl Vincent came to these shores during the Reconstruction era. Our nation had emerged from the Civil War just nine years prior, and the country remained deeply divided about issues of race, economic class, participation in government, and headlines of a disputed presidential election just a half-year earlier. Does this sound eerily familiar? 

In many ways, Reconstruction was intended to heal the wounds of that long period of civil strife, and Chautauqua emerged toward the last years of the era with a similar goal of bringing people together to learn and to make the world a better place. This season we are on the dawn of our sesquicentennial, and we are called to explore anew why the fabric of our society appears to be unraveling in ways not felt for a generation. We also begin our Summer Assembly Season with concerns about artificial intelligence, questions of whether democratic norms can hold and whether we have truly emerged from several years of a pandemic and what might come next. 

So what is Chautauqua to do with that lineup of issues? What do we have in store for all those enter our gates or who frequent our exploration through CHQ Assembly?  

We start this week off with an exploration of “friendship.” That may seem odd or somewhat light to some, but we think it gets at the heart of what’s missing in too many places: how to get along in a deeply polarized world. I’m so excited that we begin tomorrow with Robert George and Cornel West, because I believe their friendship serves as a potent reminder that we are called to engage with one another, especially when we disagree. Drs. George and West are two of the foremost public intellectuals in American life but come from very different schools of thought. They will share with us how such civic friendships, woven across divides, can do more than just strengthen our social fabric but can also help to preserve and strengthen American democracy itself. 

As we travel through the next nine weeks, Chautauqua will endeavor to tease out the tools we might consider through looking at moments of joy and consternation. Whether it’s understanding how we connect in community though games or asking the provocative question of “Can the Center Hold?,” our summer together invites us all to consider ways we might play a role in reducing the heat of this moment. 

We have spent the last several years talking about the role we have to play in society if our nation’s grand experiment with democracy has a chance to survive. Much of our summer will be spent asking us to consider the very notion of freedom of speech and freedom of expression, and I believe that starts with us here at Chautauqua as we explore so many topics this summer. Each year when we announce our speakers, preachers and artists, through social media, letters or phone calls, those who are about to engage with Chautauqua let us know what they think about our choices almost immediately. I have been struck lately by the deep desire to instantly label individuals who we invite to animate our summer series. We have become quick to weaponize our language, whether that be assigning anything seen as liberal as “woke” or anything conservative as “extreme MAGA.” Perhaps even more sad, while we use those labels so frequently, few can define what either means other than it being the opposite of what they believe. 

The democratic norm of dialogue which seeks a definition of the common good seems to get thrown out the window too quickly and too often. A columnist in The Washington Post recently noted that expressions of intolerance and bigotry that once were relegated to the fringes are migrating to the center, at the cost of common ground and the common good. It’s as if the very notion that there might be a common ground or a common good is something we’ve decided we shouldn’t work toward unless that common ground or common good is our definition of those two phrases. 

We recently lost Dr. Robert Zimmer, the long-time president of the University of Chicago, who was a tireless advocate of freedom of speech and freedom of expression. I am reminded of something he said just a few years ago. He noted of this time, “Fundamentally, people are very comfortable with free expression for those that they agree with. And for those they find disagreeable or wrong, they’re not that eager to have people hear from them (at all).” 

Oftentimes when we talk about issues of dialogue here, people ask for examples we can hold up where this is done well or could be followed. I am not usually one to point to popular culture for those examples, and my colleagues will tell you that any attempt at using a sports metaphor usually fails in execution, but I’ll make an exception because of a hit television series that just concluded. How many “Ted Lasso” fans do we have out there? 

For those who haven’t watched “Ted Lasso” yet, it tells the story of an American college football coach who is hired to coach an English team — but who knows nothing about that kind of football! The setup is outlandish enough, but the reason Ted is chosen is because the club’s owner wants to embarrass and harm her ex-husband by having the thing he loves most — the football club she now owns after the divorce — fail. I won’t give away too much of the plotline, and if you’re still in Season 3, I won’t spoil the ending, but I’m drawn to the ways that Ted Lasso as a character provides us a blueprint for how we might engage with one another this summer. 

Be Curious, Not Judgmental 

In one of the earlier episodes in the series, Ted describes how all through his growing up years, he was underestimated, and he didn’t understand why. He concludes that the self-assured feel no need to ask questions, and he suggests to his antagonist that perhaps we should be curious and not judgmental. I think that is such a wonderful prescription for us as we begin this season. Invariably and by design, we are all going to encounter a presentation on one of our stages that we disagree with — or perhaps it will be an encounter with one another. 

Our Chautauqua season can be all the richer if our response is not first to judge but rather to ask a question, to be curious: of our participants, of one another, to get to the heart of why someone feels the way they feel. I also hope our curiosity shows up in the ways that we engage as audiences this summer, choosing not to boo what we disagree with or clap at what delights us, but rather that we make a very serious effort to lean in to try to understand what our invited guests are trying to tell us. We can and should recognize that claps or boos can do much to telegraph to the person sitting next to us that we do not care about their thoughts if they disagree with our response. As a group that values community, I know this is never our intent, and the path toward compassionate curiosity is an easy one if we are intentional. 

A reporter recently asked me to articulate why we believed that our lectures promoted dialogue among those who may disagree. I shared that I don’t believe our lecturers do that, I believe Chautauquans do this when they take what they heard and try to understand it in community. That’s our power and the invitation in front of us should we accept it. That’s why we are here: not to judge based on perceptions but truly to get to know one another, to dig deep behind the obvious story, and to choose to do it together. 

We Should Care 

In a scene in Season 3 of “Ted Lasso,” one of the main soccer players comes out as gay to his teammates. His teammates all try to find ways to say that this new fact doesn’t bother them, and in affirmation, they say, “I don’t care” about that. There’s a beat. And then Ted steps in to say, in his way, Wait! “I care. We should care.” That is a perfect reminder for us as we start our summer together. We should care about what is lifting up or weighing on the people around us, what they are carrying with them into the world each day. We should care and appreciate that we are different from our neighbors. And we should value that difference as a strength to be celebrated and not one to be tackled. We should care about each other’s opinions. We should want to understand, because what separates Chautauqua from any other place of inquiry is that we conduct that inquiry in community. It’s an acknowledgement that each of us has a role to play in creating this beloved community, and it acknowledges that each voice, regardless of background and personal circumstances, whether we agree or disagree, needs to be included in the process. 

As we start our Summer Assembly together, we can make a choice to be an example of a place where vigorous dialogue around issues is attainable because we have proactively chosen to live into one of Chautauqua’s core values: the dignity and contributions of all people. What sets Chautauqua apart is the love of community. That doesn’t mean we have to agree with one another — it would be boring if we did — but rather we should care to understand why someone holds an alternate opinion or sees the world a different way. Whether you accept this challenge quietly to yourself or actively engage with others on the grounds, creating a reflex of asking a question versus shutting others down with words that suppress dialogue or understanding, your choice can establish Chautauqua as a place that preserves and strengthen the very notion of American democracy itself. 

If we wish to uphold democracy, then we must engage with big and small everyday democratic practices. Dialogue across difference is key to democratic practice, and I would argue that we have increasingly lost the ability to be in dialogue with others. If you are seeking opportunities for that one-on-one dialogue, we hope that you will participate in our pilot ‘Red Bench’ project. The idea is simple — for Chautauquans to sit on the red benches as an open invitation for others to come and sit with them and be in dialogue about the themes and ideas presented on our stages. We hope that you will not only engage with this pilot program, but that you will find it rewarding — and perhaps even make a new friend.

“Ted Lasso” invites us to dip our wootsies in the water of understanding one another. We have the potential to model a different way, to celebrate the reason Chautauqua was created, and to demonstrate to the nation that we can emerge from this heated era of disagreement by valuing community-led learning. As we start our 150th season, the invitation has been presented to us. We only need the courage to accept it.

For those who are new to Chautauqua, there is a tradition that declares that the Summer Assembly is not officially convened until the three taps from this historic gavel. May our summer of being curious, our summer of honesty, open hearts and minds, begin anew after the echo of the third tap, and may our efforts be just the beginning of proving that history need not repeat itself, if only we have the courage to accept the charge. 

I tap the gavel three times. 

Chautauqua 2023 has begun. 

Column by Mary Lee Talbot

Bishop LaTrelle Miller Easterling loves to worship.

“I have always loved worship; although, if my parents were still here, they might recount it differently,” Easterling said at the 10:45 a.m. Sunday morning worship service in the Amphitheater. “Even after I left for college, when many young people run away from church, I continued to go for the music, the singing, the preaching and the occasional silence. But I might not have if I had understood the danger.”

The title of Easterling’s sermon was “I am a Friend of God: A Bold and Dangerous Call to Worship.” The scripture reading was Psalm 100. 

Easterling told the congregation, “I am not fond of danger and fear, but when we enter the courts of praise, we are vulnerable. We have no pretense, we relinquish control and lay ourselves bare. This is the posture of real worship, the posture of a child of God.”

Psalm 100 is the first of the enthronement psalms and is the inspiration for the doxology sung in Christian worship. The psalm, said Easterling, is a call to worship and a call to orient our lives to God. 

“It is a call to a cruciform life, a life not for ourselves but for service, for transformation of the world,” she said.

She told the congregation that God’s still, small voice can still be heard, saying: “I made the heavens and the earth and I led you to freedom to be a holy nation. If you are my friends, you will live by my will, not your will.” 

“If we are friends of God, we are proclaiming that our lives begin and end with God,” she said. “We have a Western notion of privilege and being catered to and entertained, even in worship. If we don’t like what’s playing, we change the channel.” 

Author Paul J. Wadell, in his book Becoming Friends: Worship, Justice, and the Practice of Christian Friendship, wrote that Western Christians act as if they believe that everyone, including God, has an obligation to please them.

“We have convinced ourselves that our world view is beyond reproach,” Easterling told the congregation. “In Christian nationalism, it is not faith that impacts politics, but politics that impact faith. We reject preaching that convicts us; we have a preference for a liturgy of ease.”

She continued, “In John 15, Jesus said, ‘You are my friends if you do what I command you.’ Abraham did what God commanded and was God’s friend. Jesus did what God commanded. If we are friends of God, we have to show some sign; we have to bring our whole selves to the sanctuary.” 

The old stories in scripture are told as modern moral tales in worship. “We bring our biased, ‘not in my back yard,’ closed-borders selves into the place where our selfishness meets God’s righteousness,” Easterling said. 

“We do not come to worship to be entertained, but to be changed. Worship is never safe,” she said. “We allow God to renew us, to sanctify us, to make us new creatures in God.”

She told a story of theologian Stanley Hauwerwas, who was at a conference studying a statement from Roman Catholic bishops on the challenge of peace. Hauwerwas told the gathering he regretted that the bishops did not ask more of American Catholics to make pacifism more integral to their faith. 

When the bishops talked about how hard that would be, Hauerwas said, “Catholics go to mass all the time. What does it do for you?” 

“Let me be clear and ask us all: How many times have we been to worship and it had no effect on us, prayed and we still had the same preferences, kept our same hatreds even after we have received the host?” Easterling said.

She noted that 11 a.m. on Sunday is still the most segregated hour in our country. “We have to orient ourselves to God’s way of unconditional love. Worship could lead to the dangerous exorcism of our democracy that is riddled with damnation. The dangerous call to worship could remove the barriers to real intimacy.”

Psalm 100 shows humans what it is to be clothed in our right mind. “We are friends of God when we allow ourselves to be ambassadors for God’s message that God has plans for us to prosper,” she said.

Easterling urged the congregation to overcome the fear of change, to be “born anew in the crucible of true worship, to become more like God and to have the mind of Christ.” She illustrated that thought with the hymn “Have Thine Own Way, Lord.” She quoted the hymn, saying, “‘Have Thine own way, Lord, / Have Thine own way; Thou art the Potter,/  I am the clay. / Mould me and make me / After Thy will, / While I am waiting, /  Yielded and still.’”

She asked the congregation to begin this work. 

“Take me God, heal me, quiz me, remove the hurtful words, make me new inside and out,” she said. “Then we will be declared friends of God. May it be so.”

The Rt. Rev. Eugene Taylor Sutton, senior pastor of Chautauqua, presided. Candace Littell Maxwell, chair of the Chautauqua Institution Board of Trustees, read the scripture. Nicholas Stigall, returning for his second season as the organ scholar, played “Phoenix Processional” by Dan Locklair for the prelude. Under the direction of Joshua Stafford, director of sacred music and Jared Jacobsen Chair for the Organist, and accompanied by Stigall, the Chautauqua Choir sang “Ubi Caritas,” music by Zachary Wadsworth and words from eighth century Northern Italy or Burgundy. “Taps” was played by Music School Festival Orchestra members Jeremy Bryant and Fiona Shonik. Written during the Peninsula Campaign of the Civil War by Captain David Butterfield of the 83rd Pennsylvania Regiment out of Erie, Pennsylvania, it was first played by Oliver Wilcox Norton. Norton Memorial Hall was given by his wife, Lucy Coit Fanning Norton, in his memory and that of their daughter Ruth. The offertory anthem, sung by the Chautauqua Choir under the direction of Stafford and accompanied by Stigall, was “Psalm 122,” with music by David Hurd. The postlude was “Final,” from Symphony No. 1, by Louis Vierne, played by Stafford. Support for this week’s chaplaincy and preaching is provided by the J. Everett Hall Memorial Chaplaincy and the Geraldine M. and Frank E. McElree, Jr. Chaplaincy Fund. 

Arden Ryan
contributing writer

Much has changed at Chautauqua Institution since the opening of the Summer Assembly Season in 2022. While work had already begun in interviewing candidates for the new position of Director of Safety & Security and building out broader strategic safety policies and plans, the Aug. 12, 2022, attack on author and free speech advocate Salman Rushdie brought immediate changes to security measures in the waning days of the season.

The attack that took place on the Amphitheater stage shook a community to its core, and as that community and Chautauqua employees processed the events and trauma of Aug. 12, part of that processing meant a great deal of work for Wade Haubert and his colleagues. The quickly-implemented measures at the end of 2022 have developed into a robust new security platform, under Haubert’s leadership.

Haubert joined Chautauqua’s year-round staff last fall, and has been busy ever since. With a wealth of experience in law enforcement, military service, and emergency management, Haubert has helped craft policy, conducted high-level trainings, reviewed safety plans, worked closely with local law enforcement, and has conducted emergency response exercises with Institution administration and industry professionals.

Haubert said all of those trainings and policies have been undertaken with a careful approach, trying to strike a perfect balance between security and Chautauqua’s culture of openness, trust and dialogue. The hope, he said, is implementing best practices to keep the community safe, while honoring and maintaining the essence of the Chautauqua experience.

Chautauquans can look for a “refinement and enhancement of the procedures they saw being implemented late last season,” Haubert said, with new initiatives that respond to modern safety needs, but also protect the culture of the Institution. 

Last summer, the only bags allowed inside the Amp after Aug. 12 had to be 4.5 inches by 6.5 inches or smaller — the size of a typical clutch purse. That regulation has evolved; now, any bag larger than that must be clear to be allowed inside the venue as part of the Institution’s clear container policy at all performance venues, including the Amp (and mesh bags do not count as see-through). Haubert said this policy will enable swifter visual screening and quicker, more efficient movement of audience members — avoiding bottlenecks at Amp gates, for example.

Haubert pointed out that Institution policy already prohibited firearms on the grounds, and weapons are prohibited in all venues.  Here is where he said the balance between safety and culture comes into play — as an example, knitting needles are not considered weapons, and are allowed in the venues. So are umbrellas, empty seat cushions, and clear water bottles. Haubert is hopeful that the Chautauqua community will regulate itself in adhering to venue rules without Amp ushers needing to intercede.

Haubert’s also introduced a new emergency notification system, Everbridge. This software will enable both community members and staff to stay aware of emergencies on grounds, should they arise — Chautauquans are encouraged to sign up for the alerts by texting CHQ2023 to 333111, which will be used only for emergency purposes, and people can opt out at any time.

Employees will receive immediate messages with Everbridge if a crisis occurs, enabling staff to quickly act and assist as needed. Events in the Amp and in other venues will also begin with safety announcements, a move Haubert implemented to increase communication.

In Haubert’s new-formed role on the organizational side of campus safety, his responsibility is to “review and develop all policies and protocols for emergency preparedness,” he said. Designing training programs, creating safety plans, and establishing standard procedures are all part of his half of the responsibility, once held by a single safety director.

Billy Leone, Chief of Campus Safety & Security, takes on the operational half, and is charged with the “day-to-day operations of the campus safety staff,” he said, hiring, supervising, and implementing procedures.

Haubert’s role of strategic planning and Leone’s role of administration are “naturally different jobs, requiring different skill sets,” said Shannon Rozner, Chautauqua’s Senior Vice President of Community Relations.

“Such important work was beyond what one person could reasonably handle,” she said, making the transition to two positions a logical one. This change was being planned well before the end of last season, to meet the Institution’s expanding security needs and navigate changes Leone’s and Haubert’s department have undergone in recent years.

Haubert’s goal is to “instill process, training, and standards across the board” at Chautauqua, he said, with an “all-hazards approach to planning” for any possible incident, be it severe weather or a public safety emergency.

“The principles of emergency preparedness are the same no matter what the details of the situation,” Haubert said.

His job is to “institute industry best practices” for campus security, preparing the staff with the tools to face any and all emergencies. With proper training, Haubert said, comes the confidence to address any circumstance.

His department has a risk assessment model for vetting all events to determine their individual risk profile, which vary by performer, therefore requiring varying levels of security. For particular events in the Amp, his staff will set up an expanded secure perimeter around Odland Plaza, which may be equipped with weapons detection systems, handheld metal detectors, and other safety measures. But, he stressed, this will not be for all events.

The goals of this temporary perimeter are crowd management and for security officers to make a good-faith effort to provide extra security as needed — specifically, by “removing the line of sight from outside the gates to the performer,” Haubert said, and while it is a visible change, the crowd control system is a new best practice observing typical security protocols at many metropolitan venues.

Although specific performers or speakers may have special requests for the security staff, “we base our security plans on our risk assessment model,” Haubert said. His staff will not decrease those plans at the behest of individuals.

“When you come to the Institution, it’s our responsibility to uphold our safety plans” and provide a safe place for patrons to enjoy Chautauqua’s wealth of experiences.

The security presence on the grounds will be more visible — the Department of Safety & Security has approximately doubled the size of its staff, Leone said. Visitors can expect to see more safety officers in mustard-yellow shirts patrolling the grounds. Campus security has also added four additional armed officers for the summer, who will assist in implementing policy and maintaining security.

The community can also anticipate “more uniformed officers on the grounds as our regional partners strive for more engagement with the Institution,” Rozner said. County law enforcement is expected to incorporate regular patrols of the Institution grounds, making regular drive throughs and stops for coffee.

A final transformation to note, all gate attendants will now be under the umbrella of the Institution’s security department — which means they spent the days before the season training with a safety-first focus while staying true to the friendly and welcoming nature of traditional gate personnel.

“Our goal is to build a secure front to the Institution, while maintaining the same level of customer service,” Leone said.

In its greater numbers, security staff will be “more outward facing” this summer, Haubert said, and more engaged with the community. Safety & Security will be hosting regular outreach events, including an information tent each Sunday in Bestor Plaza at the Community Activity Fair. Campus Security officers will be present and ready to answer questions and address concerns.

In another opportunity for Chautauquans to interact with Institution administration, Rozner will be running a twice-weekly community engagement tent on the plaza. She and a rotating set of guests will be available to converse with community members regarding new and long-standing safety policies, or any subject on their minds. Hours of operation are 3-5 p.m Wednesdays and 11 a.m.- 1 p.m. Thursdays.

One of Haubert’s highest goals for the season is to ensure there are no barriers between the community and staff, so that Chautauquans feel comfortable enough to bring safety concerns to the attention of security officers. Under Haubert’s direction, Institution security officers have become official adherents to the national “If You See Something, Say Something” campaign organized by the Department of Homeland Security, and encourage all Chautauquans to use common sense in reporting suspicious activity.

“Enjoy what Chautauqua has to offer but be realistic” when it comes to standard safety measures, Haubert said, as vigilance combined with practicality is key. The office of Campus Safety and its officers have a consistent open-door policy, and Haubert himself will be out and about all summer long, either on foot or atop his mountain bike. He said he greatly enjoys meeting community members and answering questions and is there to help when needed.

“It’s status quo for us,” Leone said. “We’ve always had open doors and will continue to be open to the community.”

Mary Lee Talbot
Staff writer

“When people comment to me about my preaching, they say, ‘If people are looking for warm, cozy, feel-good preaching, that is not you,’ ”said Bishop LaTrelle Easterling. “I am never hellfire and brimstone; I believe that we as church leaders are responsible to lean into the prophetic tradition.”

Easterling is the episcopal leader of the Baltimore-Washington and Peninsula-Delaware Conferences of the United Methodist Church and is the preacher for Week One. She opens her week of preaching at the morning worship service at 11 a.m. Sunday in the Amphitheater. Her theme for her sermon series is “I am a Friend of God.” 

“When the worship team invited me to Chautauqua, they shared the theme for the week and said I did not have to follow it, but I thought, ‘Why not?’ I did not want to be disconnected from the other speakers and classes,” she said.

The series begins with “A Bold and Dangerous Call to Worship” on Sunday. During worship at 9:15 a.m. Monday through Friday in the Amp, she will explore “You Mean It or You Don’t,” “Not a Greeting Card Kind of Love,” “As I have been Forgiven,” “Practicing Resurrection” and “Being the Beloved Community.”

“The phrase ‘You mean it or you don’t’ comes from a book by James Baldwin. He was talking to a young student who called himself a liberal, but Baldwin told him that was not enough. 

Baldwin told him that what is required is commitment,” Easterling said. “Ibraham Kendi says it is not enough to say ‘I am not racist.’ 

He says we have to put the sweat equity, the real commitment, into that which we profess. I am tired of the ‘I’m OK, you’re OK; style of preaching. We have to mean it (our faith) or we don’t.”

The preached word, she said, “cuts both ways. I am preaching to myself and to others who are grounded in the word.”

Easterling was assigned to serve the Baltimore-Washington Conference in September 2016, becoming the first woman to lead the historic conference. She became bishop of Pen-Del in September 2021, when the two conferences were affiliated. Prior to being elected, she served as superintendent of The Boston Metro District, where she was also selected to serve as Dean of the Cabinet. Easterling was elected a delegate to General and Jurisdictional Conferences in 2012 and 2016.

Easterling was ordained an Elder in 1997, serving churches in Massachusetts including Union UMC in Boston’s historic South End, becoming the first woman to lead that church in its 190-year history. A strong proponent of education, Easterling received a bachelor’s degree in telecommunications and political science from Indiana University and a doctor of jurisprudence from Indiana University School of Law. She earned her Master of Divinity from Boston University School of Theology, where in 2020 she was named a Distinguished Alumna for her work in justice and advocacy, as well as her leadership within The United Methodist Church.

Easterling currently serves as chair of The Council of Bishop’s Anti-racism Leadership Team, President of the National Plan for Hispanic and Latino Ministries, and President of the Northeastern Jurisdiction College of Bishops. 

Among several other leadership roles, Easterling is a member of The Boston University School of Theology Dean’s Advisory Board and the Anna Howard Shaw Center Board. Upon arriving in the Baltimore-Washington Conference, she founded the Seeds of Security ministry, or SOS, which benefits people in crisis who are seeking to leave abusive relationships. Among her awards and recognitions is the 2017 Rainbow Push Trombone Award for Faith in Action, presented by the Rev. Jesse Jackson.

Kaitlyn Finchler
Staff writer

Just like that, it’s the first weekend of the 2023 summer at Chautauqua. And after months of the comparatively quiet off-season, American blues singer and guitarist Bonnie Raitt will turn the volume up for opening night with her “Just Like That … Tour 2023” at 7:30 p.m. Saturday in the Amphitheater.

Raitt first hopped into the industry in 1971 with her self-titled debut album. With 20 years as a cult favorite, she broke through to the top in the early ‘90s with her Grammy Award-winning albums Nick of Time and Luck of the Draw, which featured hit songs such as “Something to Talk About” and “I Can’t Make You Love Me.”

In a New York Times interview about “Just Like That” garnering Raitt her first nomination as a songwriter, she said she “was never expecting the song of the year nomination.”

“But I was very proud of the song, especially since it was so inspired by John Prine, and we lost him,” Raitt told the Times. “I put my heart and soul into every record, and I never know which ones are going to resonate. But I can tell people are really moved, looking out there in the audience.”

Raitt’s many accolades — 13 Grammy Awards and a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award among them — is excitement enough for opening night, said Senior Vice President and Chief Program Officer Deborah Sunya Moore, but more than that, “Bonnie is an artist that continues to connect us to life and each other.”

“Just Like That is such a perfect example of art that matters. Imagining a mother donating her child’s heart and meeting the recipient is storytelling that is heart-wrenching and inspirational,” Moore said. “At Chautauqua, we are not only about the art — we are about the story and the connections. Joining together through song reminds us that we gather together under one roof to share an experience — regardless of our perspectives, beliefs and life experiences. We will all take inspiration from opening night 2023.”

As artmaking continues to become more expensive in the years of COVID-19, Moore said, the Institution has adopted a new approach: working with “peer festivals” on making offers to artists of note and coordinating routing in ways that make sense from festival to festival on an artist’s tour.

“Chautauqua is stronger for recognizing that festivals outside of our immediate radius are not competitors — they are peers,” she said. “Our intent is to continue this path of collaboration to bring our patrons artists that inspire.”

Artists, in short, like Raitt, a 2000 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inductee and one of Rolling Stone’s “100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time.” She’s joined on tour by songwriter and guitarist Chris Smither, who will be her opening act. For more than 50 years, Smither’s work has encompassed country, blues and rock, and has earned him numerous accolades.

Also in Raitt’s wheelhouse is a lifelong commitment to social activism. She’s long been involved with the environmental movement, performing concerts around oil, nuclear power, mining, water and forest protection since the mid-’70s.

A founding member of Musicians United for Safe Energy, which helps produce historic concerts and the album and movie “NO NUKES,” Raitt advocates for safe energy issues — in addition to environmental protection, social justice and human rights, as well as creator’s rights and music education.

Although a prominent social activist, Raitt told the Times she tries to avoid creating political music because it can sometimes be “insufferable.”

“I try to be really careful about not preaching my politics onstage because I know there’s a lot of people that may not agree with me, and they’re there to hear the music,” she said. “So we have a table out there in the hall, and we tithe a dollar of every ticket.”

Although she doesn’t cater to it, Raitt does have two songs, “Hell to Pay” and “The Comin’ Round Is Going Through,” she said are political.

“I couldn’t wait anymore,” Raitt told the Times. “But the politics between people, and love relationships, are just as thorny and important to lift up and write from interesting points of view.”

Kaitlyn Finchler
Staff writer

Imagine this: someone is reading a book about nothing, another person is reading a book about a 100-year-old Holocaust survivor, another is reading classic literature. 

On the bench next to them is someone reading about racial disparities in healthcare, while beside them is a reader exploring a fictional perspective on the nonfiction topic of climate change.

Next, imagine a person learning about disease outbreaks, right next to someone traveling the first transcontinental highway. After that, the readers might creep into darkness with the inability to embrace each other during wartime. 

A little bit further down in this imaginary space, they’ll encounter a family who will sacrifice everything to further each person’s life. However, it ends with the unruly tenderness of human nature.

All of these people are reading Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle authors, whose work will present varied perspectives for their audience to consider and apply in their own lives. To frame these perspectives, the CLSC vertical theme for 2023 is “Imagination.”

“We were thinking about the importance of imagination right now, not only for writers and readers, but for us as a society,” said Sony Ton-Aime, the Michael I. Rudell Director of Literary Arts at Chautauqua Institution. “We are very much in an unprecedented situation for us right now.”

In 2021, literary arts programming was virtual and authors taught from a Zoom screen. In 2022, they broke out of the pandemic with the theme “Home.” Now, Ton-Aime wants readers to come out of the pandemic with imagination.

“The CLSC this year is asking us ‘How do we use our imagination?’ (and) ‘How do we use our creativity to bring about solutions that will give us answers?’” Ton-Aime said.

When everyone’s ideas and questions are included, Ton-Aime said their solutions and answers should be included as well. 

The purpose of a vertical theme is to combine with the Chautauqua Lecture Series and Interfaith Lecture Series themes, and present an overarching theme for the season’s reading materials.

“(Selecting books is) very much work that is done in tandem with the Interfaith Lecture Series and the Chautauqua Lecture Series,” Ton-Aime said. “We’re always in conversation with each other and continuing the work that we’re doing or adding to the work that we each have a story.”

The CLSC authors are chosen based on books that will always have some aspect to do with the theme.

This idea can be exemplified by Week One’s CLSC author Michael Frank and his book One Hundred Saturdays, where he paints his picture of six years’-worth of conversations and a budding friendship with Judeo-Spanish Holocaust survivor Stella Levi.

Ton-Aime said the CLSC is “very lucky” to have the caliber of writers coming in this summer — even writers of different stripes, like Kate Hamill, who presented a stage adaptation of Pride and Prejudice.

Inspired by the original era, the play faces new-day challenges, perspectives and ideals. The main character, Lizzy Bennet, is determined to never marry despite societal pressure. The adaptation will be put on by Chautauqua Theater Company.

Also in Week Six is the CLSC graduation, one of the most anticipated events for the CLSC, which Ton-Aime said he is “always excited” for.

“We have a vibrant community group with the CLSC Alumni Association and they are putting on some great events to celebrate the graduates this year,” Ton-Aime said.

Looking beyond the season, the Institution is planning the Forum on Democracy put on by the CLSC with “contemporary authors, thinkers and scholars,” Oct. 20 to 22 at the Athenaeum Hotel.

Speakers for the event include Sayu Bhojwani, David Blight, Suzanne Nossel, Michael Waldman, Michele Bratcher Goodwin and more to be announced at a later date.

“It’s a continuation of the season, especially for folks who will stay until October or folks who will go home and then we’ll return and be in conversation with the thought leaders when it comes to democracy here on the grounds,” Ton-Aime said. 

The forum is in partnership with the Brennan Center for Justice, The Authors Guild Foundation, PEN America and Ideos Institute working to make sure the importance of imagination is implemented at the end of the forum. 

The forum would serve as a pilot to determine the feasibility and potential for a similar annual CLSC program, as part of year-round engagement via the CLSC Beyond initiative.

“Here is the importance of imagination at the end of this forum; every participant will come together in a brainstorming session,” Ton-Aime said. “They come up with solutions, not for Chautauqua, but for a solution that this country can use to help save democracy or to maintain democracy.”

Julia Weber
Staff writer

Sasha Janes has been coming to Chautauqua since 2001, and this summer he makes his return as the School of Dance’s newest artistic director. The renowned dancer and choreographer originally joined the dance community as a member of the Chautauqua Festival Ballet. Now, he’s excited to advance the dance program and continue the department’s long-lasting legacy.

Born and raised in Australia where he received his ballet training, Janes began his career with the Australian Ballet, performing with the company in the United States. Later, he joined the Hong Kong Ballet and eventually moved to New York City. Janes met his future wife in Dayton, Ohio, and he joined the Chautauqua Festival Ballet as a dancer. 

Janes has long been involved in the dance and arts communities within Chautauqua in a number of different professional capacities — he’s been a choreographer, artistic adviser, and director of contemporary studies. Since Jean-Pierre Bonnefoux’s retirement in 2021 after nearly four decades in the role, Janes has served as interim director of the School of Dance. Over the years, he has become “really a part of the fabric of the artistic community at Chautauqua,” said Vice President of Performing and Visual Arts Laura Savia, and now he is “building on an already wonderful and nationally recognized program and making it his own.”

Focused, driven and ambitious, Janes has no shortage of ideas for the future of Chautauqua’s prestigious dance program.

One of Janes’ primary goals in his new role is to pull from the myriad vibrant arts circles in Chautauqua and continue to incorporate visual and performing arts into the dance curriculum. 

“I feel like this (program) is unique in where it’s positioned in Chautauqua,” he said, noting the program’s geographic proximity to the Institution’s other arts programs and schools. “So, you have visual arts right there, you have opera over there, you have the theater company; you have all these cultural things, different performances to see every single night.” 

By building other mediums like theater, voice and visual arts into the daily schedules in the dance program, Janes hopes to help dancers develop an appreciation and understanding of other mediums and, in turn, use those mediums to find inspiration and hone their craft.

Having a variety of dance faculty in the program — including dancers who are relatable to current students — is key as well, he said, in order to give students a varied, dynamic dance education. 

“It’s good to have one teacher, but I think it’s good to just be exposed to different things and things that you may be uncomfortable being exposed to,” he said.

Beyond enhancing the experiences of students at the School of Dance, Janes sees an opportunity to welcome even more young dancers into that environment.

“I think there’s opportunity here to make this a really equitable place,” he said. “Hopefully, going forward, we can make it a place where anyone with any amount of means, or lack thereof, can get here, and we can get them here and they can have the same training that other people have, and there’s a lot of support for that.”

He cited the All-Star Dance Gala, an annual performance that welcomes alumni from the summer dance program back to the grounds of Chautauqua. This summer, the Chautauqua Dance Circle is working to create a fundraiser coinciding with this year’s Gala, with the aim to raise money to support student scholarships, pointe shoes and other necessary materials for the dancers at Chautauqua.

Janes said he’s perhaps most excited about both the first and last student performances of the season — he enjoys observing the progress that students make throughout the summer in advancing their technical skills and overall craft, as he has seen year after year.

“We are already benefiting from his acumen, his grace and his deep commitment to the educational instruction of early career ballet dancers,” Savia said.

Among the most compelling aspects of the dance program, and the primary reason he returns every summer, is the safe and welcoming nature of Chautauqua’s arts communities.

“It’s always been a really safe place. It’s a safe place to fail and I think that’s super important,” Janes said. “… You can really push yourself, and I think it’s important to know that it’s OK to fail. And generally speaking, if you know that, you don’t.”

Janes first came to Chautauqua as a performer with his wife. As young adults, they saw Chautauqua through “one set of eyes. Now we see it through our kids’ eyes. … We’ve seen them grow up, and they’ve just gained this confidence every summer when they come up here.” That joy and the support of the dance community, he said, is “what’s kept us coming back over and over.”

Mariia Novoselia
Staff writer

The third annual Chautauqua Lake Water Quality Conference on June 17 in the Athenaeum Hotel parlor was dedicated to bringing the community up to speed on multifaceted research carried out on the lake and outlining plans for future scientific ventures. 

Eight speakers with different academic and professional backgrounds shared their expertise on topics like algae, Chautauqua Lake’s importance in the region, and the community’s involvement in lake health and ecology. Two of the speakers, whose work falls primarily outside Chautauqua Lake — namely, the Finger Lakes and Lake Erie — presented their perspectives on similarities between the bodies of water, as well as common challenges and potential ways to overcome them. 

Chautauqua Institution President Michael E. Hill said that the Institution has so far invested almost $5 million in lake research,

“I am really thrilled that we have been joined this year by the county adding another $1.25 million,” Hill said. 

Chautauqua Lake is considered “impaired” by the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation; in April, the Chautauqua County Legislature approved an additional investment of $1 million to continue research done by The Jefferson Project. 

The Jefferson Project does research with the “ultimate goal” of learning “how to mitigate problems like harmful algal blooms or road salt (pollution)”, said Tobias Shepherd, lake project manager at Chautauqua Institution.

The Jefferson Project is a partnership between Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, IBM Research and the Lake George Association.  

“We enter year three of having the Jefferson Project here in Chautauqua County, and I couldn’t be more happy that that third year coincides with our third year of hosting this conference,” Hill said.  

Kevin Rose, Allison Hrycik, and Harry Kolar outlined the project’s work. 

Kolar, an IBM fellow, said this season Chautauqua Lake will be surveyed with “the newest generation” of vertical profilers. 

Vertical profilers are installed on the lake every summer and are used to take a wide variety of measurements, including water temperature, conductivity, pH levels and more, said Rose, acting director at the Darrin Fresh Water Institute at RPI and the Jefferson Project. 

The new profilers have several advantages over their predecessors, including additional sensors that will be able to provide scholars with a 3D view of currents, improved battery capacity, stability and safety, Kolar said. 

“These are state of the art; no one else has anything like that,” he said.

The new profilers will be installed during the week of July 17. 

Hrycik, research scientist at Darrin Fresh Water Institute at RPI, spoke about a new survey that was launched earlier this year. The survey will look into attached algae, which is algae that grows on sediment or rocks, Hrycik said. 

Tiles at 11 docks across Chautauqua Lake were installed on June 19. As those tiles accumulate samples for the research team, they’ll help determine what species exist in the attached algae community and how they interact with surface algae, Hrycik said. 

Rose, who joined the conference from Switzerland via Zoom, encouraged the audience to think of Chautauqua Lake as “a complex system of systems.” 

“When we think about the harmful algal blooms and the drivers causing them, we tend to think of nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorus that get into the lake from either external sources or sediments, plus warm temperatures and sun — equals harmful algal blooms; the reality is … it’s not that simple.”

Rose said a lot of factors play a part when it comes to HABs, including internal waves, or “physical mixing processes,” different levels of water density, and so on. 

Associate Professor of Biology at State University of New York at Fredonia Courtney Wigdahl-Perry also provided updates on her research on HABs and summarized her team’s plan for the near future. 

Wigdahl-Perry’s research involves installing temperature sensors at five spots, or “lines,” across the lake. Two lines are in place already, she said. 

The sensors take readings of temperature every five minutes. Wigdahl-Perry’s team has been deploying these sensors across the lake since 2019. Two years ago, Wigdahl-Perry said, there were six lines spread across the South basin of Chautauqua Lake, and a year before that, there were two lines in the North basin. 

“This has proven to be a very valuable tool for us in understanding what’s happening below the water surface,” Wigdahl-Perry said. 

This year, the plan is to have two lines in the North basin, two lines in the South basin and one line in the middle, in Bemus Point. Wigdahl-Perry said data collected with the sensors will help her understand if and how the two basins influence and interact with each other. 

Wigdahl-Perry’s team is also expanding their research to assess the effect of road salt on zooplankton. Special attention will be paid to Daphnia, Wigdahl-Perry said. Daphnia are capable of quickly clearing algae cells from the lake by eating them.

Further, drones can help scholars learn how algae blooms “originate, move and disperse,” Wigdahl-Perry said.

After the conference, she elaborated on the advantages that drones have over satellites, which were used previously. 

“With drones, we can fly below clouds, and we can control the timing of those passes,” she said. Satellite images, on the other hand, “have the advantage of getting to see the whole lake at once.”

As part of this ongoing project, aerial images from drones and satellites are combined with more traditional water sampling. 

“This is very exciting but also very challenging because it gives us a lot of data that we then have to break down,” Wigdahl-Perry said. 

She said her team has been using this method of data collection since 2019 and has been doing so in collaboration with Finger Lakes Institute. 

Lisa Cleckner, director of Finger Lakes Institute, who also presented at the conference, said afterwards that besides using drones to study HABs, what Chautauqua Lake and the Finger Lakes have in common is “the engagement of partners that need to be present to address water issues.”

Jeanette Schnars, executive director of the regional science consortium at Presque Isle, also shared insights about lake concerns outside Chautauqua Institution, specifically Lake Erie, which also deals with HABs.  

Schnars said that for dogs, an interaction with cyanotoxins can result in vomiting, having seizures and, in some instances, dying. 

Dogs are more vulnerable to the exposure to HABs than humans, Shepherd said, because they are smaller in size. They also ingest the toxins in concentrated doses, Shepherd said, when they are licking themselves dry after swimming, for example. 

Each presentation was followed by a Q-and-A. Those who did not get their questions answered due to time constraints were promised to get a follow-up after the conference.

Randall Perry, executive director of the Chautauqua Lake & Watershed Management Alliance, spoke to the audience about the importance of the lake, emphasizing that it is a “major component of county property and sales tax bases,” as well as a “highly productive and sought-after fishery” among other virtues. 

Julie Barrett-O’Neill, Region 9 director of the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, spoke about the roles that her department, the state, and the local community play in the quest to sustain Chautauqua Lake. 

“New Yorkers care about the environment, and this makes my job feasible,” Barrett-O’Neill said.  

Community member Julie Danielson said she has been to all past Chautauqua Lake conferences, and what brings her back every year is “the importance of the lake” and understanding “how critical the health of the lake is to the whole county.”

Mark Wenzler, director of the Chautauqua Climate Initiative, said about 100 people attended the event. 

“It shows that Chautauquans care deeply about the lake,” Wenzler said.

Wenzler said he hopes the conference helps members of the community see that “we all have a role to play in the long-term health of Chautauqua Lake.” 

“It takes all of us for those solutions to succeed,” he said.