Welcome to Week Eight of Chautauqua’s Sesquicentennial Season! What a wonderful blessing it is that we get to pursue our explorations of “Water: Crisis, Beauty and Necessity and Water as a Metaphor for Life” with our longtime partners National Geographic. We offer a very special welcome to the NatGeo Explorers and other experts and advocates who will lead our conversations this week.
As a lakeside community, water is ever-present in the minds of Chautauquans, particularly as we work in partnership with The Jefferson Project to better understand what is happening in Chautauqua Lake. This partnership is both helping us create knowledge to inform conservation-related decision making for Chautauqua Lake and to serve as a model for other communities facing the same or similar challenges with their life-giving freshwater bodies. There may be no more critical imperative for this community and region, and beyond.
Protecting and saving our freshwater systems is work that requires an “all-in” commitment among our nation’s and world’s citizenry — as is required for humans to address all of the world’s intractable problems. This week, we’ll be pointed not only to problems and solutions, but methods of problem solving and engagement. It strikes me that these methods and models may likely be applicable to other problems we face in this and our other “home communities.” I look forward to thinking specifically about water this week, and more broadly about problem solving in general.
We see Chautauqua as a place to practice the attitudes and behaviors of citizenship. While some have suggested that Chautauqua is a retreat or a “safe haven” from the world’s problems, I’d argue that misses the point entirely. Chautauqua may, indeed, be a retreat, but one that more resembles a training camp than an escape from reality. My hope is our patrons come here to recharge and refuel by learning and honing skills, dispositions and abilities so we can bring our best selves to the world, for a world that needs Chautauquans.
Alongside our lecture programs, masterclasses and Special Studies offerings this week, we also see Chautauqua Theater Company’s world premiere of acclaimed playwright Kate Hamill’s The Light and The Dark: (the life and times of Artemisia Gentileschi). This play is unique at Chautauqua because it represents CTC’s first world premiere of a play that also traces its beginnings to Chautauqua. I encourage you to visit CTC’s website (theater.chq.org) for a summary of the “Journey of a New Play,” which outlines how new play works happen, including through the financial support of benefactors such as Roe Green, who funds Chautauqua’s New Play Workshops. Don’t miss this opportunity to see this work while you are with us this week.
May this be a week of new and deepening understandings, leading us to take positive steps toward addressing problems big and small.
