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The Rt. Rev. Eugene Sutton, bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Maryland, delivered the season’s final edition in the new Interfaith Friday Series in the Hall of Philosophy, in conversation with the Rt. Rev. V. Gene Robinson, vice president of religion on Aug. 24.

To conclude the nine-week series, which has seen interfaith advocates from numerous faith traditions, Sutton represented progressive Christianity.

“A progressive religion has a bit of humility,” Sutton said.

After opening with a moment of silent reflection, Sutton quoted Theodore Roosevelt: “A great democracy has got to be progressive, or it will cease to be great and it will cease to be a democracy.”

“The same with religion. A great religion must be progressive,” Sutton said. “It has to be progressive or it will cease to be great. And it may find it ceases to be a religion. And by progressive, I don’t mean liberal in the sense that we talk about today. To be progressive means you prioritize, you privilege, individuals over institutions. Persons over programs or pronouncements. Justice over judgements. Humility over hubris. And theos over theology.”

Sutton described some of his faith journey through multiple Christian denominations. He was raised attending Baptist church in Washington, D.C., but as he reached his teen years, struggled to reconcile his understanding of God with the racism he experienced in the late 1960s.

“If God is so good, why are God’s people so bad?” Sutton said.

He was atheist before coming back to evangelical Christianity through the YoungLife youth program at age 17, but struggled with the image of a vengeful God.

“It bothers me when we assign the worst characteristics of humanity to God,” Sutton said. “God must weep if that’s the way we think of God.”

He described progressive Christianity as a source of freedom — freedom to love and freedom to reason.

“We don’t believe, as progressive Christians, that we have to check our minds at the door as soon as you enter the doors of the church,” he said. “But rather, we can use our God-given abilities of observation, cognition, in order to know some things about this world, some things that were not known 10,000 years ago, or 2,000 years ago.”

Sutton also suggested a progressive church must look outward.

“The purpose of Christianity is not about you and getting you to heaven,” he said. “I can’t think of a more self-centered, narcissistic form of faith than ‘It’s all about me and Jesus.’”

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What follows is an abridged version of Sutton’s conversation Friday, Aug. 24, in the Hall of Philosophy. Sutton and Robinson’s remarks have been condensed for clarity.

From where you sit in your tradition, why should we be moving in an interfaith direction either here at Chautauqua or in the world?

We live in a diverse, interfaith world. If you don’t like diversity, you can’t possibly like God. It’s not about uniformity and building towers. It’s about bringing down towers and dealing with diversity. Living in an interfaith world, it’s not a question of “Will you do interfaith work or not?” You are doing interfaith work. The only real question is, “Are you going to do it well, or are you going to do it poorly?”

When you come to the metaphorical interfaith table, what gifts do you bring as an progressive Christian to that table?

We know how to borrow. We’ve borrowed since the beginning. It’s at least possible that our Lord Jesus, before he began his ministry, actually went to the East and learned from other traditions as well. But also, (Christianity) is adaptable to local customs. You could walk into an Episcopal church for a eucharist, and it’s very similar to a Roman Catholic mass. But then go to a Church of God in Christ, a largely black Pentecostal church, and you’d say, “My gosh, is that Christianity, too?”

It is an incredible gift, (The Lord’s) Prayer. It begins, “Our Father,” not “The Christian God,” not “The Hindu God.” Our Father.

If it’s possible that Jesus went to the East, to learn gifts of other traditions, then what gifts do you see in other religions that might benefit Christians?

In other traditions, there are expectations of prayer that in the Christian tradition, we’ve assigned, really too much, to only the monastics. We’re too busy, we can’t pray, we can’t order our day with prayer as you do. I encourage all Christians: find yourself a monastery or convent and visit. Bathe yourself in the rhythms of prayer. I feel sometimes like progressive Christians, sometimes they’re embarrassed of Christianity. I wish sometimes more and more Christians would take a minute. Even one minute, several times a day and say, “I’m gonna pause. I’m gonna pray.”

So, do we have texts that tell us that ours is the one true religion?

Yes. Our dogs get in the way. It’s not my dog, or my dogma. It’s your dog. Our dogma gets in the way of conversation. We’re trying to visit each other, but our dogma is barking and trying to call attention to itself, but it gets in the way. Jesus says, “I am the way, the truth and the light.” It’s the way of devotion to God. Love is the way to truth that leads us to light.

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Robinson concluded the interview with the same final question he had asked all previous Interfaith Friday speakers, with a humorous slant.

“Is Christianity the only religion free of extremists?” Robinson asked.

“Yes,” Sutton bantered back.

“OK,” Robinson said with a laugh. “Now we’re ready for question and answer.”

“No,” Sutton answered Robinson’s original question, in seriousness. “Lord, deliver us from fundamentalists everywhere. We are free to make choices. Help us to make better ones.”

Dan Habib has produced award-winning documentaries and garnered Emmy nominations, but he might have never become a filmmaker if not for his son Samuel Habib’s disability. When Samuel was born with a mitochondrial disease that led to cerebral palsy, Habib began making films that deal with disability advocacy.

“All my films, every day of my life — it’s all somehow motivated by Samuel in terms of the work that I do around disability rights and filmmaking.”

– Dan Habib, Director, “Including Samuel” 

It was Samuel’s doctor that urged Habib — an accomplished photojournalist  — to document his own family’s experience of disability through photography. Shortly afterwards, a group of teenagers convinced Habib that video would be a more powerful medium for the Habib family’s story. He turned the project into a documentary and has been making films about disability ever since.

At 2 p.m. Thursday, Aug. 23, in the Hall of Philosophy, Habib delivered his lecture “Disabling Segregation.” Habib drew on research, personal experience and his son’s life to argue that children with disabilities can and should experience regular developmental environments instead of being sequestered in programs like “special education.”

Habib, now with the University of New Hampshire’s Institute on Disability, has been involved with social justice since his days as an undergraduate at the University of Michigan. There, he said, he was a photographer for the school newspaper and participated in anti-apartheid and anti-racist movements — but not in any disability rights movements.

“I never heard the words ‘disability rights’ or ‘disability advocacy’ or ‘inclusive education’ in all the human rights and social justice issues of the time, back in ‘83 through ‘87,” Habib said. “I never heard about disability, and I almost never saw people with at least visual disabilities on campus.”

Habib said his current involvement in disability rights is mostly due to his son’s condition, but he also pointed to the country’s historically negative treatment of those with disabilities as a motivating factor. For example, from the 1920s until the 1970s, he said, the eugenics movement led to the forced sterilization of 60,000 people in the United States.

“I think that historical context is important, because it’s like the Black Lives Matter movement — if you don’t know that we’re a country with a history of racism and slavery, you don’t really get why that movement exists.”

Habib’s first film, “Including Samuel,” depicts the Habib family as they work to include Samuel — who uses a wheelchair to move and a speech device to communicate — in their lives and community.

Habib said they thought it was particularly important to make sure Samuel felt included in school, where enormous emotional and social growth takes place for American children. According to Habib, the efforts to include Samuel were not trivial — they were critical in his journey toward independence and adulthood.

“We know through 30 years of research that kids with disabilities who are included in regular education end up with better communication skills, higher academic achievement, wider social networks, fewer behavioral problems, more opportunity for higher education and more meaningful employment as adults,” he said.

Habib held up his son as evidence that inclusion leads to a better life. Samuel is now 18, freshly graduated from high school. He had a weekly sports segment on the school’s TV news, went to prom, and will be attending college this fall.

At many steps along Samuel’s journey, his community came together to make him feel like he belonged, Habib said. In one anecdote, Habib described Samuel’s involvement in his school’s production of Guys and Dolls.

“He was able to knock the dice off of his lap and say his lines using his communication device, Habib said. “Nobody batted an eye, because that’s just the way Sam would roll. In fact, the stage at the time was not wheelchair-accessible, so Sam and another girl named Hannah who also used a wheelchair had to enter the back of the stage using an old lift.”

Unfortunately, the lift made a squeaking noise that would interrupt the play.

“So,” Habib said, “the community came together, and they decided to build two ramps on either side of the front of the stage so that Samuel and Hannah could come up in front.”

Through that and other acts of community support, Samuel was able to participate in activities from baseball to Boy Scouts. According to Habib, Samuel grew up feeling a sense of belonging in his community.

If the research is any guide, that sense of belonging has contributed to Samuel’s present successes. But it’s not just Samuel who benefited from having the community, Habib said — the community also benefited from having a person with disabilities in its ranks.

For example, Habib said the ramps in Guys and Dolls let Samuel and Hannah get on stage, but other actors also used those access points, adding another dimension to the play’s staging. And when a refugee who didn’t speak English joined Samuel’s class in elementary school, his teacher said the students were better able to welcome her because they already had practice dealing with Samuel’s disabilities.

Research supports that conclusion, too. Habib said a study from a researcher at Vanderbilt University compared groups of students without disabilities to integrated groups made of students both with and without disabilities.

The study found that the able-bodied students who were in the integrated groups consistently scored higher than the students who were in the groups without students with disabilities. Habib explained that this was because the able-bodied students in the integrated groups would help the students with disabilities. By reteaching the material to those with disabilities, the able-bodied students were learning it more thoroughly.

Unfortunately, Habib said, not all educational environments are integrated like Samuel’s was. In the early ‘90s, Habib reported a photo story on a boy in their community named Todd. Todd, too, had a disability.

“Todd, through elementary school, which happened to be the same elementary school that Samuel went to, was fully included in a regular education. And he loved it,” Habib said. “He was so excited to go to school, and I know this because we were neighbors with this family as well.”

But in middle school, Todd was sequestered in a separate classroom for all of the students with disabilities. At the time, Todd didn’t have access to communication technology like Samuel had. Todd couldn’t communicate or express himself effectively until he was 21, when he did finally get a communication device.

“The first thing (Todd) said, he typed out, ‘F— you,’ ” Habib said.

According to Habib, Todd went on to say how angry he was for being deprived a sense of belonging in his community and not being able to participate in the regular educational community.

“That’s the flip side of Samuel’s experience,” Habib said. “And I know because I know this man to this day. Todd has had a really hard time adjusting to adulthood — no work, no higher education — because he never had that experience. And unfortunately, Todd’s experience is more representative of what we know about this country than Samuel’s.”

Habib went on to say that 56 percent of American kids with intellectual disabilities are segregated in schools, and only 17 percent of kids with those disabilities are “meaningfully included in regular education.” That’s despite the research that suggests that these students would do better if they were included, Habib said.

In addition to “Including Samuel,” Habib has also produced other films about disability such as “Who Cares about Kelsey?” and “Mr. Connolly Has ALS,” the latter of which features the story of Gene Connolly — the principal of Samuel’s high school — and his battle with ALS. Connolly died on Aug. 19.

Habib said his newest project, “Intelligent Lives,” explores perceptions of intelligence and follows three young people with disabilities in high school, college, and the workforce. “Intelligent Lives” will be released in September 2018.

Oscar-nominated documentary filmmaker Rebecca Cammisa spoke to the process and impact of her latest film, “Atomic Homefront” at Thursday’s 10:45 a.m. morning lecture on Aug. 23. She was joined on the Amphitheater stage by film critic Ann Hornaday in a conversation for Week Nine’s theme, “Documentary Film as Facilitator: Storytelling, Influence and Civil Discourse.”

“Atomic Homefront” confronts the effects of radioactive, Manhattan Project-era waste dumped in West Lake Landfill in St. Louis County, Missouri, which drained into the nearby natural water supply; the film chronicles concerned residents of the two affected areas of St. Louis’ suburbs — those along Coldwater Creek and Bridgeton — and the negligence of governmental bodies, including the Environmental Protection Agency. The film is now streaming on HBO.

This was Cammisa’s sixth film; her first film, “Sister Helen,” won the 2002 Sundance Film Festival’s Documentary Directing Award, as well as an Emmy Award for Outstanding Cultural and Artistic Programming, and was nominated for an Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Documentary Film Award by the Directors Guild of America.

Her 2010 film, “Which Way Home,” was nominated for an Independent Spirit Award for Best Documentary, received four Emmy nominations, and went on to win a News & Documentary Emmy Award for Outstanding Informational Programming and the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Awards Grand Prize. For her work on the film, Cammisa received a Fulbright Fellowship for Filmmaking. In 2011, Cammisa directed and produced “God is the Bigger Elvis,” which received an Oscar nomination for Best Documentary Short Subject.

Hornaday, who lectured Wednesday, Aug. 22, about role of the audience in film, opened the conversation by asking how Cammisa stumbled upon this story, or if the story came to her.

“The film I set out to tell was about how journalism was under threat,” Cammisa said. “There’s always going to be a Washington Post and a New York Times, but my concern was communities out in this country that are in … small towns whose newspapers are folding, where journalists are being fired — the downsizing.”

However, she ran into trouble; newsrooms aren’t accessible, she said. Thus, she turned her attention to finding a “big story” and then documenting how reporters and publications in that area handled the news. It was a friend that turned Cammisa toward the radioactive waste in Missouri. Again, she ran into difficulties trying to reach the press, scrapping her original plan and dedicating the film solely to the radioactive waste.

“That’s sometimes what happens with doc filmmaking: You have a very specific idea in mind and then you’re somehow moved by some weird, spiritual force that places you where you need to be to tell a story properly.”

-Rebecca Cammisa, Director, “Atomic Homefront”

Cammisa’s methodology for the film was to jump in and try to understand what was happening, she said. In the case of “Atomic Homefront,” the story became the conflicting testimony between the EPA and the community. Cammisa’s job: finding the truth. She and her crew lived in St. Louis for six months on-and-off, followed by three months of filming on-and-off.

In the first day of filming, Cammisa shot a clip played for the audience. In it: a meeting between the local first responders’ unit and the Missouri National Guard, and an interview from a concerned resident. After the conclusion of the clip, Hornaday asked if filming that meeting was difficult. Cammisa said the first responders were receptive; for the National Guard, however, “we figured, ‘Shoot first, ask permission during.’ ”

The clip also featured graphics of radioactive particles emerging from the ground and spreading. For Cammisa, the graphics became a necessity because the subject of the film — radioactivity — is invisible. As for human dispositions, Cammisa looked for passion when casting interviewees.

“To me, I don’t really care if a person looks good. I don’t really care if they’re charismatic,” she said. “To me, what’s charismatic to me is the fight, the struggle. … In the films I make, I just show up. So my casting is who’s there, but also who’s working. It’s more about the throughline — how can we follow the arc of what people are doing?”

One of those fighting, struggling characters is Dan Norris, a clip of whom Cammisa and Hornaday shared with the audience. Norris worked for the West Lake Landfill and initially threw the story at the public with an open letter to the press. In the letter, he writes about the “cozy relationship between the state regulators and (the landfill) company,” corruption and silencing; he became a whistleblower.

What made Norris more powerful, Cammisa said, was that he had photographs — photographs of the cracks in the landfill seeping radioactive material and photographs of off-the-chart radium readings.

The relationship built between Cammisa and Norris was a mutual understanding of the story’s importance, she said.

“Dan — he worked hard, he did his job and what was so lovely about him is he just cared about transparency from a scientific standpoint,” Cammisa said. “He just knows his data, and data sets you free. … When the news was bad, the governor’s office wanted the news to be good. Where have we heard that before? I spoke his language and he understood we were not going to use his interview to do a certain stance or bias.”

Hornaday asked about Cammisa’s approach to the story — did she script scenes or edit before production was finished?

“My films are unscripted,” she said, “because I’m usually going into worlds that I know nothing about or have researched heavily. … So usually jumping into the deep end is what I do. So I go into a world, I’m in it, and then I start to see ‘this is what’s going on.’ But then as things happen … (and) anything I would script — forget about it.”

From there, Hornaday transitioned to the third — and final — clip of the morning, featuring radiochemist Michael K. Schultz, who performed tests on the soil around the original dump site; his tests revealed the levels of radiation were grossly higher than the legal limit. After the conclusion of the scene, Hornaday asked if Schultz was paid to perform those tests — an ethical question of transparency she had addressed in her Wednesday lecture. Cammisa said Schultz was not paid to perform the tests, but was compensated for providing the results and running the tests an additional two times.

Because of their extensive research, inquiry and interviews, Hornaday asked Cammisa if she considered documentarians as journalists — again, a point Hornaday addressed Wednesday.

“I don’t think all of them are,” Cammisa said. “I don’t say I am. If I had gone to journalism school, and really was a professional in the methodology of journalism and had a degree in it, I would call myself a journalist. I don’t. But … when I do a story, I want to adhere to journalistic principles. I want to get everyone’s side of the story; I don’t go in with a bias; I’m really there to try and find out what has really happened.”

As “Atomic Homefront” and the mishandling of radioactive material has garnered attention, Hornaday asked what impact the film has had and how Cammisa has managed its reverberations.

Cammisa said that after the release of the film, a group of St. Louis County citizens held a meeting with Scott Pruitt, who was EPA administrator at the time, at which they played the film. Days later, she said, Pruitt ranked West Lake Landfill as one of his Top 10 Superfund sites; 11 days before the premiere of the film on HBO, the EPA announced its cleanup plan.

“The film helped get traction in terms of the EPA and that’s exactly what we wanted to get to,” she said.

After the conclusion of Hornaday and Cammisa’s interview, Chief of Staff Matt Ewalt opened the Q-and-A by asking for Cammisa to elaborate on how she funds her projects.

Despite being an award-winning filmmaker, Cammisa said applying for funding can be difficult as there is a large community of artists vying for the same grants. Depending on the subject matter, she said, it can be even more cumbersome and Cammisa has “a knack for picking stories that aren’t sexy.”

Ewalt turned to the audience for questions; one attendee asked if since starting this project, Cammisa has turned into an advocate.

“I’m a person,” Cammisa said. “I’m from the Hudson Valley. I grew up swimming in the Hudson with the PCPs. … We’re all tainted or affected somehow by something. And what I’d like to see done is justice and a pure environment. And after experiencing and seeing what these people have been through, it’s really important. So while I’m not an activist, … the film itself just shows you what age this is, what has happened here, and can this help educate and inform other communities? … You know what this film is about?

“Telling the truth.”

With few “Endless Summer Nights” left, Chautauquans can find comfort in the fact that the grounds will be “Right Here Waiting” for them next summer.

Singer-songwriter Richard Marx will give the penultimate popular entertainment evening performance at 8:15 p.m. Friday, Aug. 24, in the Amphitheater.

Marx has earned five Grammy nominations, and won Song of the Year in 2004 for “Dance With My Father.” Marx has nine top-10 hits on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart. Three of those songs peaked at No. 1: “Hold On To The Nights,” “Right Here Waiting” and “Satisfied.”

In his 30-year career, Marx has released 11 studio albums. Marx’s self-titled debut album peaked at No. 8 on Billboard’s Hot 200 chart, and his second album, Repeat Offender, earned him his first No. 1.

“I could certainly fake it,” Marx told Rolling Stone in 2014. “I hadn’t done enough living to write songs that were void of tremendous clichés, but I’d listened to enough songs and I’d had enough fantasy — and maybe a little heartbreak, too — to get by.”

Marx has written and produced for many other artists, including Kenny Rogers, Natalie Cole, Josh Groban, Michael Bolton and Keith Urban.

Marx’s latest album, Beautiful Goodbye, was released in 2014. The album featured a tracklist of all-new songs — a first for him since 2008’s Sundown. Upon the release of Beautiful Goodbye, Marx said its contents were “sexy.”

“I find the melodies in trance music … so sexy. They sound like soundtracks to the sexiest movie,” Marx told ABC News in 2014. “I thought it would be kind of fun to create an atmosphere that sounds (like that) and apply my songwriting and create a hybrid.”

Even in the midst of the current pop landscape, Timothy Yap said in a review that the album highlights Marx’s ’80s-centric voice.

“Instead of chasing trends and competing with whippersnappers such as Ed Sheeran and Robin Thicke, Marx has stuck to what he does best,” Yap wrote. “Just like many of his previous offerings, the songs here move in the friendlier landscape of adult contemporary where ballads are at the fore, which are also Marx’s strongest forte. While the subject matter of these paeans either showcases Marx as a hopeless romantic or a man who thinks of romance as hopeless.”

As a documentary filmmaker, Grace Lee often talks about who should get to tell what stories.

White men make up the largest demographic of filmmakers, but documentary films are usually about communities of color, Lee said.

“As somebody who is a person of color and a woman and whose work is often immersed in these worlds,” Lee said, “that is something that has been a challenge as a documentary filmmaker in terms of finding funding.”

Ann Hornaday, film critic for The Washington Post, will lead a conversation with Lee at 10:45 a.m. Friday, Aug. 24, in the Amphitheater to conclude the Week Nine theme, “Documentary Film as Facilitator: Storytelling, Influence and Civil Discourse.”

Lee’s body of work includes short-and feature-length films, as well as documentary and narrative storytelling. Her film topics typically derive from her life as an Asian-American.

The first documentary feature she made was called “The Grace Lee Project,” a 2005 film in which she interviewed people with the same name as her. In telling that story, Lee said her challenge was to not come off as self-indulgent, but she believes a filmmaker’s personal story allows audiences to connect with the subject matter.

“For me, ‘The Grace Lee Project’ wasn’t about me wanting to be in a film,” Lee said. “It was about exploring the issues behind having one of the most common Asian-American names and exploring stereotypes of Asian-American women.”

One of the women she interviewed for “The Grace Lee Project” became the subject of “American Revolutionary: The Evolution of Grace Lee Boggs,” which will be shown at 12:30 p.m. Friday, Aug. 24, at Chautauqua Cinema. A talkback with Lee will follow.

Grace Lee Boggs was a civil rights activist from Michigan. Lee had studied history in college but had never heard of Boggs. When she met Boggs, Lee said it was a “no-brainer” to tell her story.

“I’d never met another Asian-American woman from the Midwest who devoted her life to radical politics and philosophy,” Lee said. “There were just so many questions as to how this, at the time, 80-something Chinese-American woman had devoted her life to the black struggle in America.”

“American Revolutionary” has some funny moments in it, Lee said, and humor is a common thread in all of her films. Documentaries can be dark and depressing sometimes, so Lee likes to lighten the mood and look for humorous moments.

“I think if you can disarm people by making them laugh, or making them laugh at you or with you, I feel like there’s an openness,” Lee said. “If you can laugh at the same things, you can maybe approach difficult topics. It opens a door for greater dialogue.”

Lee’s most recent project is a “deconstructed documentary” about the Los Angeles riots of 1992, and it’s a film people can watch for free online.

“K-Town ’92” is an interactive documentary where users can click through interviews and archival footage about the riots, the beating of Rodney King at the hands of police officers, who were later acquitted of all charges at their trial.

When the 25th anniversary of the riots approached, many big studios were working on films.

“Nobody had commissioned me to make one of those films,” said Lee, who lives in Koreatown, Los Angeles. “I knew that there were many stories from this neighborhood that were completely off the radar for so many people and from the mainstream media, so I decided to make something using limited resources and just decided to put it on the internet for everyone to see.”

Lee did not want to narrow the scope of the story. Even in documentary filmmaking, there is a clear point of view. It was different with the 1992 riots, Lee said, because there were so many stories that were lost and forgotten. Lee didn’t want to dictate the narrative. Instead, she left that up to the viewers.

“If you’re questioning who gets to tell the story, then there’s not going to be one monolithic view of what happens,” Lee said. “The audience member themselves can approach it in different ways.”

As bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Maryland, the Rt. Rev. Eugene Sutton leads a large community — one that includes more than 100 congregations and 23 schools — on a journey to find faith and inner peace. Sutton, a co-founder of Contemplative Outreach of Metropolitan Washington, uses his role as a spiritual leader to influence social change nationwide.

But Sutton knows fighting problems like racism and violence is not easy, even with faith as a driving force.

“Those of us who regularly attend an Episcopal church renew our baptismal vows several times a year,” he said in a 2015 statement following the death of Freddie Gray. “At the renewal, the presider asks this question: ‘Will you strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being?’… That’s one of the most difficult vows for all of us to keep in a nation that has struggled with the sin of racism since its inception.”

At 2 p.m. Friday, Aug. 24, in the Hall of Philosophy, Sutton will represent progressive Christianity during the Institution’s ninth and final Interfaith Friday of the season. Sutton will engage in interfaith dialogue with the Rt. Rev. V. Gene Robinson, Chautauqua’s vice president of religion.

In 2014, Sutton was named one of 14 Faith Leaders to Watch by the Center for American Progress. This recognition was in response to Sutton’s opposition toward gun violence, which included faith-based protests.

At the core of his activism, Sutton said he is motivated by God.

“My brothers and sisters, don’t expect me or anybody else to be the savior of this situation we find ourselves in today,” he said in the 2015 statement. “I am not a savior … but I serve a Savior.  My Savior is not afraid to weep, not afraid to get angry, not afraid to say and do the right thing because it’s hard, not afraid of anyone or any neighborhood — and not afraid of fear.”

As an African-American, Sutton has spoken in favor of the Black Lives Matter movement and has commented on police violence. But he also acknowledges that large social movements, like those against gun and police violence, encompass many communities.

“People of goodwill of all races across our nation are outraged that black lives still seem to matter less than other lives in our communities,” he wrote in a column titled “Fighting an Unholy Trinity of Racism, Poverty and Violence.”

Sutton, who contributed to the book Reclaiming the Gospel of Peace: Challenging the Epidemic of Gun Violence, said the nation has significant strides to make in order to create complete racial equality.

“More than our political affiliation, our educational achievement or our religion, studies indicate that the color of our skin is a bigger factor in how we each view the state of racism, poverty and violence in America,” he wrote in “Fighting an Unholy Trinity.”

Despite the long road ahead, Sutton said he has faith that Episcopalians — coupled with all courageous advocates — will build a better future.

“In spite of our weariness of still dealing with race issues that should have been put behind us long ago, I’m gratified that so many of my fellow Episcopalians are willing to have the difficult conversations about racism, do the work of justice, work to eradicate poverty and violence, and to seek reconciliation within their communities,” he wrote in the column. “I am heartened when I see my white brothers and sisters hold up signs at rallies and other public events that say, ‘BLACK LIVES MATTER.’ ”

Veronica Swift was 10 years old when she first appeared at the Telluride Jazz Festival. In 2016, a little over a decade later, she was back — this time as a headliner.

Swift will perform with prolific jazz pianist Benny Green and his trio at 8:15 p.m. Wed., Aug. 22, in the Amphitheater.

Swift was first introduced to Chautauqua last year when she performed alongside trumpeter Chris Botti, according to Deborah Sunya Moore, vice president of performing and visual arts.

“She really brought the Chautauqua audience to their feet,” Moore said.

Swift joined Botti on his tour after he heard her sing at The Django in Tribeca, according to Mercury News, who also reported that Swift almost missed her chance meeting with Botti because she was feeling low.

“Now I tell young musicians, always go out, even if you’re sad,” she told the paper.

Swift studied jazz voice at the Frost School of Music at the University of Miami. In 2015, she released her album Lonely Woman, which featured a variety of guests, including Emmet Cohen and Benny Bennack III.

Swift is no stranger to musical partnerships; her newest album is also a collaboration, as it features the Benny Green Trio.

When asked about Swift’s passion and talent, Green told Mercury News that she is “the greatest straight-ahead jazz talent I’ve seen emerge this century.”

“She is without doubt a pioneer for this and the generations to follow,” Green said, “speaking the language of bebop with a fire and authenticity I’d never dreamed I’d encounter with a leader who’s 31 years my junior.”

Swift enjoys performing a variety of tunes, ranging from Great American Songbook favorites to bebop and vocalese classics. According to her website, she is also “a passionate devotee” of Roaring Twenties and 1930s music.

Last January, Moore said she saw Swift perform at Birdland in New York City, where Swift is a regular.

“She is the real deal — she sings classics like an old soul but pours her youthful passion into every song,” Moore said. “Put her with the well-loved Benny Green Trio, and it’s sure to be a great night.”

Behind the scenes, Geoffrey C. Ward and Dayton Duncan work to bring the written word to life — with the occasional on-screen, or onstage, appearance.

The two filmmakers, scriptwriters and authors discussed processes and their bodies of work at Tuesday’s 10:45 a.m. morning lecture on Aug. 20 in the Amphitheater, a continuation of Monday’s “The Filmmaker as Collaborator” conversation with director and filmmaker Ken Burns.

Burns was not able to participate in the morning’s conversation, but he prepared a video message with opening remarks, in which he assured the Amp audience they were in good hands. If they enjoyed Burns’ films, he said, it was thanks to Duncan and Ward’s writing — if the audience did not, it was all Burns’ fault.

Duncan and Ward have worked extensively with Burns; Ward has collaborated with him since 1984. He was the sole or principal writer for “The Civil War,” “Baseball,” “Jazz,” “Mark Twain,” “The Roosevelts: An Intimate History” and “The Vietnam War.” An award-winning author, Ward has written various companion volumes for Burns’ series. His book A First-Class Temperament: The Emergence of Franklin Roosevelt was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

He won two Writers’ Guild Awards, seven Christopher Awards and five Emmy Awards. In 2018, Ward was awarded the Writers Guild’s Ian McLellan Hunter Award for Career Achievement.

Duncan has worked alongside Ward on films including “The Civil War” and “Mark Twain”; he worked with Burns on films like “Lewis & Clark: The Journey of the Corps of Discovery” and “The National Parks: America’s Best Idea,” which won him two Emmy Awards. “The Dust Bowl,” which he wrote, won a Spur Award and was nominated for two Emmys.

Prior to his work in documentary films, Duncan served as chief of staff to former New Hampshire Gov. Hugh Gallen; Walter Mondale’s deputy press secretary during his 1984 presidential campaign; national press secretary for Michael Dukakis’ 1988 presidential campaign; and as chair of the American Heritage Rivers Advisory Committee.

The men were joined on stage by Chautauqua Institution President Michael E. Hill, who moderated the conversation as part of Week Nine’s theme, “Documentary Film as Facilitator: Storytelling, Influence and Civil Discourse.”

Hill opened the conversation by asking the writers to describe their writing processes.

“I don’t quite think of it as a process,” Ward said. “What we do is we get interested in a subject. There is no subject that isn’t interesting, it seems to me. I wrote the history of baseball, to which I could care less. And during the year and half it took to write it, I was fascinated by it. I lost interest right after that.”

Ward said much of his process is dedicated to reading; he reads dozens of books on a topic, carefully dissecting each word. Eventually, it’s guilt — and the deadline — that forces him into writing.

“There’s a point in which you just say to yourself, ‘They’re not paying me to read; I really, really have to get started,’ ” he said. “I start with the prologue; I’m sort of simple-minded that way. I want to get the first scene set, and then everything else trails from that. I guess if there are any rules for me, (it’s) chronology is God.”

While Ward is copiously reading and scarcely writing, Burns and producers, like Duncan, are conducting interviews, which are then sliced and diced and pieced together into the script.

“The story is what we do,” Duncan said. “We tell stories that happen to have a place. We tell stories that try to put you as much as we can into that moment of history, of the contingency of history.”

Duncan, who oscillates between producer and writer, also immerses himself joyfully into literature when working on a film — something the former reporter loves doing, he said. His timeline for writing is deadline-driven, often looking over his own shoulder as a producer to nudge his writer-self along. Unlike Ward, Duncan starts writing at the first narrated scene; the prologue comes later in the process.

Eventually, the men collaborate in the editing stages, which Hill asked about next: Does collaborating on texts change their  processes?

The two writers initially collaborated by accident, when Ward fell gravely behind schedule on “The West” and Duncan swooped in to help. Since then, the men have co-written and worked on several films seamlessly. Duncan attributes this to having similar narrative voices that mesh their writing styles.

Aside from being nose-deep in a book or hunched over a keyboard, Duncan and Ward have both managed to be featured on screen — outside of the credits — in Burns’ films. Duncan made his debut in a film on what he called a captivating subject: “The National Parks: America’s Best Idea.”

“This was something very much a part of something that I felt was an important topic to do, and I wanted for us to approach it as not just a travel log or a nature film — which it has a little bit of — but (as) a story of an idea,” he said. “It is the Declaration of Independence applied to a landscape, saying that the most majestic places and sacred places in our land are available to everyone — everyone.”

They played a clip from the six-episode series featuring the story of John Muir, whose activism helped preserve what is now Yosemite National Park. In it, Duncan spoke to Muir’s quirky nature.

Ward appeared in the 2014 documentary film “The Roosevelts: An Intimate History,” which he also wrote. He has written extensively about the Roosevelts in his aforementioned book A First-Class Temperament, as well as in Closest Companion: The Unknown Story of the Intimate Friendship Between Franklin D. Roosevelt and Margaret Suckley and Before the Trumpet: Young Franklin Roosevelt.

A scene played from “The Roosevelts” centered around President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s battle with polio. Ward was featured discussing Roosevelt’s prognosis, while dismantling the belief that “polio didn’t bother him.” After the clip, Ward commented on this history’s modern-day relevance:

“Sadly, though we a have far more civilized and intelligent view of people who are disabled, I think in this era no one as badly handicapped as Franklin Roosevelt could ever be elected president of the United States. … I think that’s a tragedy, but I think that is true.”

To close the morning, Hill asked the screenwriters and authors how writing for film differs from writing a book.

“I like them both,” Ward said. “I like the collaborative process of making films. The plus of writing a book is, it is all your own book, and hell to anybody else.”

A book cannot capture the emotion of hearing a story told through thrilling narration, Duncan said.

“When it works, it is magic,” he said.

After the conclusion of their conversation, Hill switched from the chair to the podium for the Q-and-A portion of the morning. Piggybacking off of Monday’s lecture, Hill asked: “What’s next?”

Duncan is amid production of “Country Music” — which the Amp audience previewed Monday — a documentary chronicling the history of the “uniquely American art form.” Duncan said “Country Music” will be the last documentary he will produce. He has also been commissioned to write the script for Burns’ film about Benjamin Franklin and American buffalo.

Ward is writing Burns’ upcoming documentaries on the American Revolution and President  Lyndon Johnson.

Hill then turned to the audience for questions. One attendee asked how the filmmakers, as white men, give a voice to minorities in their films.

“I am not responsible for my gender or my race,” Duncan said. “I am responsible for how I can or how I tell what I think are important stories of America in this experiment of democracy on this continent — and it still is an experiment. … (In) my storytelling, I try as hard as I can — within the limits of (being a) white kid from a small town in Iowa — to try to embrace that tapestry and the rich stories that are there and the importance of that. It’s unfinished business, and all I can be responsible for is doing my damnedest to tell that right.” 

As senior vice president for prophetic and creative leadership at Auburn Seminary, and as an award-winning filmmaker, Macky Alston believes faith and film have a powerful connection.

But this connection, he said, has not been utilized in 21st-century filmmaking.

“I’m a documentary filmmaker,” he wrote in his blog. “I have seen the power of documentary film to transform lives. I am also an organizer for justice in communities of faith. I have seen the power of communities of faith to transform lives. What I yearn to see is the full power of documentary films in communities of faith to transform lives.”

At 2 p.m. Wed., Aug. 22, in the Hall of Philosophy, Alston will discuss faith and film in his lecture, “Playing (with) God: Revelations from the Filmmaking Front about God, Good Storytelling and How to Do Right by Each Other as We Make Sense of Life.” Alston’s lecture is part of the Week Nine interfaith theme, “The Intersection of Cinema and Religious Values.”

Alston premiered his first film, “Family Name,” in 1997 at the Sundance Film Festival. The film followed Alston’s journey to uncover the history of his last name, a pursuit that led him from New York to Alabama. Along the way, Alston meets several African-American families with the same last name, all of which have a different story to tell. The film received Sundance’s Freedom of Expression Award.

Since “Family Name,” Alston has directed four more films, which have explored topics like economic inequality and LGBTQ+  issues like same-sex marriage.

“I have learned some lessons in my own work at the intersection of faith-rooted justice work and documentary filmmaking,” he wrote on his website.

Alston’s most recent film, “Love Free or Die,” tells the story of the Rt. Rev. V. Gene Robinson, Chautauqua’s vice president of religion and the first openly gay bishop in the Episcopal Church.

“The last film I directed, ‘Love Free or Die,’ told the story of the church putting its life on the line for LGBTQ justice, following Gene Robinson, the first openly gay person to be elected bishop in the high church traditions of Christendom, and the movement he was a part of that changed policy and culture in church and state in the U.S. and abroad,” Alston’s website reads.

The film was released in 2012, before the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on marriage equality. Alston wrote in a blog post that before film production, he had worked on research at Auburn Seminary on how to shift the mindset Christian voters who were conflicted on the issue of same-sex marriage. He said the research focused on teaching people to support LGBTQ+ rights because they were Christian, and not in spite of it.

“During the year of our screenings, we used that research to equip those who attended the 400 screenings to engage their conflicted Christian friends and family in conversation to help them vote on the right side of history,” he wrote on his website. “We also worked with the state campaigns, in partnership with national LGBTQ justice organizations, to train leaders of faith to make the moral case for equality in public and in the press.”

Alston described this experience as enlightening and wrote that it showed him the influence — and responsibility — he has as a filmmaker to engage the public in pressing social, political and economic conflicts.

“Key to movement work, to faith traditions and to documentary film is (the)  right relationship,” he wrote. “Creating a practice and a world in which the full humanity of all is honored and the conditions needed for all to flourish exist.”

In 2017, the top-grossing documentaries were Disney’s “Born in China” and Raoul Peck’s “I Am Not Your Negro,” earning more than $13 million and $7 million in the United States, respectively, according to The Numbers.

But those numbers have already been surpassed in 2018. The documentary “Won’t You Be My Neighbor” has grossed more than $22 million, and “RBG” is the second-highest documentary, having earned more than $13 million at the box office, according to The Numbers. While the dollar amounts for the 2017 year have been finalized, these box office numbers for 2018 come before the second-run push most movies make during Oscar season.

“Won’t You Be My Neighbor” and “RBG” have been some of the most-talked about movies of the year, and Chautauqua’s Week Nine theme, “Documentary Film as Facilitator: Storytelling, Influence and Civil Discourse” has come at a ripe time, said Ann Hornaday, film critic for The Washington Post.

“The timing could not be more perfect to be talking about documentaries at Chautauqua this summer,” Hornaday said.

During her lecture at 10:45 a.m. Wed., Aug. 22, in the Amphitheater, Hornaday will speak about documentary filmmaking and how it has evolved to its current form and how people should watch the genre.

“By that time in the week, people will have heard from Ken Burns,” Hornaday said. “They will have had full-body immersion into documentaries, and especially Ken Burns’ approach to documentary filmmaking. So what I would like to do on Wednesday is kind of pull the lens back a little bit.”

In 2009, Hornaday embarked on a journey to explore what makes a movie good or bad through the eyes of the audience. The Washington Post series was titled “How to Watch a Movie,” thus giving her a launching pad for her 2017 book, Talking Pictures: How to Watch Movies. 

In the how-to guide, Hornaday breaks down a movie production into seven subsets: screenplay, acting, production design, cinematography, editing, sound and music, and directing. In each chapter, she poses questions viewers should be asking and provides insight into the filmmaking process. Hornaday draws on the copious interviews she has done with industry leaders in her career spanning four decades.

One chapter of the appendix focuses on documentaries and fact-based dramas, such as biographical pictures. In her lecture, Hornaday hopes to explore that area more.

When it comes to documentaries and biographical pictures, Hornaday said people should be wary of taking the content at face value.

“Everything is mediated,” Hornaday said. “The filmmaker is choosing what to film; the filmmaker is choosing what to leave out; the filmmaker might be scrambling chronology in a way that we might not be aware of.”

There are certain components Hornaday is looking for when she watches documentaries, and one of them is transparency.

Sarah Polley’s “Stories We Tell” is a good example of being transparent, Hornaday said. In the autobiographical documentary, Polley uses footage that appears to be archival and home videos. She later reveals those scenes were staged.

“She let (viewers) fall under the spell of the movie, then she very gracefully and kind of gently eases out of that at the end,” Hornaday said. “She kind of shows her hand, like, ‘Here’s what I did.’ I just think it’s such an elegant way to do that transparency I was talking about, and not at all compromise the emotional power of the movie.”

The inception of director’s commentary on DVDs and Wikipedia pages with innumerable facts has given way to a more active audience, Hornaday said. When viewers watch a documentary or a biopic, they can research the real-life events the film is based on.

Though audiences are engaging with the material more, Hornaday believes people need to think more critically and question what they’re watching on screen.

“When (filmmakers) fudge facts, if they’re doing so for whatever reason — to make a smoother narrative or a more dramatic narrative — I would like to see a little more transparency on their end,” Hornaday said. “But I do think it’s ultimately incumbent on the viewer to just be skeptical and just remember, even in the case of a documentary, and surely in the case of a biopic, that this is not the ‘truth.’ This is storytelling; this is somebody’s point-of-view on events. We can value it, and we can derive meaning from it, but that’s different than taking it as the ungarnished truth.”

On the screen and in the Amphitheater, Ken Burns — augmented with clips of his works — discussed storytelling, collaboration and process at Mon., Aug. 20’s 10:45 a.m. morning lecture.

Burns was joined in conversation by documentarian Dayton Duncan and scriptwriter Geoffrey C. Ward.

An acclaimed producer, director and filmmaker, Burns’ array of work has garnered 15 Emmy Awards and two Oscar nominations. He was honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award by the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences at the 2008 News & Documentary Emmy Awards. Burns’ work includes “The Civil War,” “Baseball,” “Jazz” and “The Vietnam War,” a PBS documentary series co-directed by Burns and written by Ward.

Ward has collaborated with Burns since 1984; he has been the sole or principal scriptwriter for almost 20 films. He is an award-winning author whose books include Pulitzer Prize finalist A First-Class Temperament: The Emergence of Franklin Roosevelt. Ward also wrote and co-wrote companion volumes for eight of Burns’ documentary series. Prior to his work in documentary films, Ward served as editor of American Heritage.

Duncan has also written several companion books to Burns’ films, in addition to writing and producing the PBS television series “Lewis & Clark: The Journey of the Corps of Discovery,” “Mark Twain,” and “The National Parks: America’s Best Idea,” which won him two Emmy Awards; he has served as a consultant or consulting producer on all of Burns’ other documentaries, beginning with “The Civil War.”

Chautauqua Institution President Michael E. Hill moderated the group’s discussion, which kick-started Week Nine’s theme, “Documentary Film as Facilitator: Storytelling, Influence and Civil Discourse.”

Hill opened the conversation by touching on the “storytelling” portion of the week’s theme, asking why words are essential to documentaries, especially when people are consumed by visuals.

“As I don’t need to tell anyone at Chautauqua, in the beginning (was) the word,” Burns said.

Films begin as words, he said — as an exploration of the power of words and literature, which then become a layer of documentary storytelling, alongside imagery and music. Burns stressed the importance of storytelling, and paraphrased Richard Powers: “The best ideas in the world will not change a single mind. The only thing that can do that is a good story.”

The problem, Burns said, is people have forgotten how to tell stories; documentarians fill that gap by voicing authentic, complex stories, equipped with nuances and subtext — a feat which Ward and Duncan have executed in each of their films, Burns said.

“That honor of the written word and the spoken word is what keeps me going,” Duncan said.

But the editing process leaves prose on the cutting room floor, Ward said. Often the turn of phrase a writer spends a day artfully crafting — with a beautiful beginning and a perfect ending — doesn’t make the final cut, and the final cut ends up being better than anticipated.

With that, Hill turned to a subject the three men know intimately: Mark Twain. Hill paraphrased Ernest Hemingway, who said all of American literature began with Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Hill proceeded to ask, “Why?”

Burns said Twain wrote as if he invented literature, paraphrasing Twain: “the difference between the right word and almost the right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug.” Twain’s masterful prose was captured in Burns, Ward and Duncan’s film, “Mark Twain”; they shared a clip with Amp attendees that Burns described as “one of the most important scenes we have ever put together.”

“Mark Twain” is a biographical film about the public and private persona of Samuel Clemens, featuring narration by Keith David and voice performances by Kevin Conway. The film was released in 2001 and aired on PBS in 2002. Ward and Duncan co-wrote the script.

The clip closed with the poignant line from the moral climax of Huckleberry Finn, with the shift of Finn’s perspective on slavery and society’s hypocritical, cruel principles. He rips up a letter to Jim’s slave owner, declaring he’d rather be damned than defy his gut instinct; “I’ll go to hell,” he said. With that, the clip ended.

“The great tease of our conversation,” Hill said. “You just want to keep (watching).”

Hill asked how the process of telling a historical narrative — like that of Mark Twain — begins.

“We cast our net as wide as we can,” Burns said. “We want as many stories, as many sources, as much an expertise to bear the story and triangulate it in so many ways. … This distillation process is the whittling down to what the story seems to need to want.”

In the context of “Mark Twain,” Duncan said they tried to let Twain’s voice seep into the documentary. For a literary giant that isn’t too difficult — “He did pretty good,” Duncan said.

“I think that we have this innate tension, which is how to communicate … the biographical details … but also feel that we have room to play with the appreciation of their work and to let the work just speak for itself,” Burns said.

That is not an easy balance, he said. Too often, stories tilt the scales toward an antiseptic appreciation or to a scandalous, dramatized peep-show, but Burns tries to marry the two sides: the complex personal life and the equally complex public life.

Hill then asked how texts translate into film. Burns’ work frequently features frames of newspapers or live images of documents, like in PBS’s “The Vietnam War.”

“Part of it is trying to understand the power — the graphic power of words. … Another element is the sheer force of words,” Burns said. “I need only say to you, ‘We the people’ or ‘John Hancock’ for you to know that there is a graphic intensity to just simple words, … yet every one of you in this room has an image and an emotion attached to those words. So our job … (is) trying to appreciate what cold type on a page means.”

He turned to a scene from an episode of “The Vietnam War” about “the document drop of stolen, classified material into the public sphere that is destabilizing the political conversation — so deep in the past,” he said facetiously, followed by laughter and murmurs from the audience. Burns then played a clip from the 18-hour, 10-part series.

Like the 1970s — which are routinely encapsulated by President Richard Nixon’s administration, as well as the Vietnam War — decades are boiled down to the presidents and wars, Hill said, but Burns’ and Duncan’s forthcoming documentary switches gears, focusing on pop culture, specifically the undercurrent of country music in America.

Burns offered the Amp an exclusive look at a rough cut of his upcoming documentary on the genre, scheduled to be released in 2019; the footage was etched with watermarks and time stamps.

Although the film is set to be a broad, overarching history of the “uniquely American art form,” the clip played for the Amp chronicled the work of Kris Kristofferson. Kristofferson is a singer-songwriter who wrote and recorded songs like “Help Me Make It Through the Night” and “Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down,” which became a No. 1 hit for Johnny Cash.

Kristofferson’s songs accompany photographs and 101 interviews recorded for the film. Music is a critical aspect of the collaboration between editors and writers, Duncan said. The music guides the story, provides emotional context clues, and flows clips together.

Coming full circle, Hill asked for the panelists to reflect on the “influence and civil discourse” portion of the week’s theme.

“We are subscribers to something bigger: the idea that the past may be the greatest teacher we have, that we … find ourselves between the two-letter, plural pronoun ‘us’ and its enlarged, capitalized ‘U.S.,’ ” Burns said. “That’s where we find ourselves. … We are always looking not to speak, as so many documentaries are, to the political congregation that has the most interest, but to everyone. That’s our audience — everyone.”

When inclusivity is achieved, he said, that is when civil discourse is possible.

“What he said,” Ward said.

After the conclusion of the conversation, Hill changed hats from conversation moderator to Q-and-A moderator. He asked what was next for the filmmakers.

Burns is booked until 2029. He listed his projects: films about country music, the Mayo Clinic, the East Lake Meadows housing project in Atlanta, the prison system called “college behind bars,” President Lyndon Johnson and the civil rights movement, Reconstruction, the United States and the Holocaust, and the American Revolution, as well as biographies on Ernest Hemingway, Benjamin Franklin and Muhammad Ali. Burns’ filmmaking collective has also embarked on its first non-American topic: Leonardo da Vinci.

The Chautauqua Symphony Orchestra has been on tour through Southern Europe this August, from the impressionist salons in Paris to the Galician countryside to the opera houses in Italy. Tonight, its musical travels come to an end with the sounds of Spain.

At 8:15 p.m. Tues., Aug. 21, in the Amphitheater, Rossen Milanov and the CSO will give this year’s final concert, featuring an all-Spanish program. Flamenco dancer Griset Damas-Roche and the Flamenco Company of Columbus will also perform, both with the CSO and on their own.

Flamenco dance, according to Damas-Roche, has its roots in Spain’s long, multicultural history, drawing on the country’s Arab invasion, discrimination against gypsies and influence from India. Damas-Roche came to flamenco in her native Cuba, where she was trained by Spanish teachers.

Damas-Roche will join the orchestra for two selections of zarzuela, La Revoltosa (The Troublemaker) and Las Bodas De Luis Alonso (The Wedding of Luis Alonso). Zarzuela is a form of Spanish drama similar to Viennese operettas or American musical theater, Milanov said.

Flamenco dance can have many facets — for example, in one of the zarzuelas, Damas-Roche will perform with castanets, and in another she will be using her abanico, or hand fan. These additions make preparation a long and arduous process, according to Damas-Roche.

“For La Revoltosa, I isolated myself in my studio, changed my summer routine and listened to it hundreds of times before creating the choreography because I wanted to do it with my abanico,” she said. “I also wanted to pay homage to one of my teachers, who was one of the great choreographers of zarzuela in Cuba and who died a few months ago.”

Damas-Roche will also perform a selection with her dance company, which will involve a guitar player, a vocalist and a percussionist. The first section of the piece will be a form of flamenco known as cante jondo, or “deep song.”

Cante jondo, Damas-Roche said, is the most serious of the flamenco genres, and has its origins in “pain, deep sentiments, darkness and the intensity of the human being, and the hardness of life.” The second part of her choreography will retain the deep sense of emotion, but will be more festive.

The orchestra will also be performing Emmanuel Chabrier’s España, Manuel de Falla’s “The Three Cornered Hat” Suites No. 1 and No. 2 and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s Capriccio Espagnol, op. 34.

España and Capriccio Espagnol are two of the most often performed works of Spanish music, despite the fact that their composers were not Spanish (Chabrier was French; Rimsky-Korsakov was Russian). According to Milanov, that’s somewhat of a trend — people often joke that the best Spanish music was written by foreigners.

The ballet “The Three Cornered Hat,” however, was written by a Spaniard. De Falla received his education in France, though, and used the musical language of the great impressionists like Debussy and Ravel to capture the culture of his native Spain.

The ballet was premiered by Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, the legendary ballet company responsible for premiering famous early-20th century works like Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring” and Ravel’s “Daphnis et Chloe.” It was a landmark moment for Spanish music and culture, according to Milanov.

“(‘The Three Cornered Hat’ is) one of the most famous scores of Spanish music, and when it was presented in Paris, it was a sensation,” Milanov said. “It was not danced with the accustomed classical style of ballet, but with Spanish folk dance instead and a lot of pantomime. You can only imagine how that looked with the original sets by Pablo Picasso on stage. So it’s very innovative because it takes Spanish tradition and includes it as part of European cultural history and presents it in a light which is pretty authentic.”

Staff writer Lexie Erdos contributed to this report.