Wynton Marsalis, Kate Hamill and the Rev. Otis Moss III join in conversation to conclude the 2024 Chautauqua Lecture Series Friday in the Amphitheater.
The final three panelists of this anniversary Chautauqua season took to the Amphitheater stage Friday for a capstone conversation about the power of art to unite. While this was each speaker’s first time sharing the platform together, individually, they are no strangers to the Chautauqua stage. In fact, each speaker has been working double duty this week — performing, lecturing, preaching and acting — highlighting this trio’s multidisciplinary talents and commitment to cultural advocacy.
The first of the panelists, Wynton Marsalis, is a world-renowned musician, composer, bandleader and educator — and the first jazz musician to win the Pulitzer Prize for Music, awarded to his 1997 oratorio, Blood on the Fields. Chautauquans had the opportunity to hear Marsalis perform and speak throughout the week, themed “Rising Together: Our Century of Creativity and Collaboration with Wynton Marsalis and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra.”
Joining him in conversation was Kate Hamill, celebrated actor and one of the most produced playwrights in the country, known for her female-centric adaptations of works like Pride and Prejudice. Her latest play, The Light and The Dark: (the Life and Times of Artemisia Gentileschi), which she wrote and starred in (alongside her husband), concluded its world premiere run Friday in Bratton Theater, produced by Chautauqua Theater Company.
And finally, Chautauqua favorite Rev. Otis Moss III, third-generation civil and human rights activist and this week’s chaplain-in-residence, rounded out the panel. A leading practitioner of Black Theology, Moss is senior pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago.
Institution President Michael E. Hill moderated, and opened by asking Marsalis to reflect on All Rise, which celebrates its 25th anniversary this year, and has been performed across the world, including twice this week in Chautauqua with the Buffalo Philharmonic Chorus and Music School Festival Orchestra.
“Every time we play, it creates a feeling,” Marsalis said. The band, orchestra, and choir must work separately and in unison. “… We all come together.”
For Marsalis, it’s the choirs, especially — usually comprised of volunteers — that bring a “special community feel” to each performance. Marsalis and the JLCO have an intimate knowledge of the piece from playing it together over the years. But for the young people who join him, All Rise resonates easily. That is because, he said, it is about universal humanism, that thread that connects us all.
“To play something difficult, and to look across and see (the choir) and experience collegiality, trying to achieve very difficult things,” Marsalis said, “we were all filled with nothing but love in the orchestra.”
This magical, mystical collective experience is why Hamill said she will never quit theater, which she likened in temporality to a sand mandala.
“I’m addicted to the cathartic experience that theater is,” Hamill said. “It’s different every time and it’s ephemeral, and it will be gone — and it is formed by the people in the room together.”
Studies have even shown that audiences’ heartbeats begin to sync when united by a shared experience like theater or jazz.
“The art is never complete without the audience,” Hamill said. “That is the last cast member and the last collaborator, and it is different every single time you do it.”
As she workshops The Light and The Dark this fall following its Chautauqua run to prepare for its off-Broadway debut in New York, Hamill said that the very DNA of Chautauqua audiences will be etched into the final iteration of the play, because the viewers “taught us what (the play) is and what it should be.”
Communal experience is at the heart of Moss’ work. The Black Church Tradition at its best, Moss said, is unique and powerful in how it frames knowledge of other traditions in order to be effective, how it studies and draws on other philosophies — European, West African, Caribbean, and so forth — to craft its ideology.
Moss shared a story his parents told him, from 1963, when Martin Luther King Jr. stood on the National Mall in Washington D.C. and improvised some of the most famous lines in American history, using philosophical “gumbo.”
As Moss told it, King — like any great DJ or jazz musician — read his audience, even incorporating their participation into his speaking in real time. That’s the genesis of his famous, world-changing, improvised lines in his “I Have a Dream” speech. But from there, he quotes not scripture, but the U.S. Constitution.
“(King) is coming out of a tradition that says it’s not possible for me to be fully who I am located solely within the silo of my community,” Moss said, “that being Black means that I’m global in nature, and local in what I draw from, local and global at the same time.”
So scripture, anecdote and Constitution can belong in the same breath.
“That’s what happens when we bring the best of our tradition, but we are unafraid of other traditions,” he said. “All of a sudden, something is merged and something new is created in the process. That’s what I believe that the faith community at its best does, … when it refuses to hide in the fear of fundamentalism but stands up tall in the broadness of God’s possibilities.”
Hill asked how family and lineage plays a role in the panelists’ work and beliefs.
“It’s a requirement I learned from my parents that you don’t do the work that we do … for ourselves,” Moss said. “It’s for a generation that’s not yet born.”
Moss shared a story about his grandfather, a sharecropper in Georgia, who in the 1940s tried to vote white supremacist Eugene Talmadge — who ran on a platform of denying African Americans the right to vote — out of office. His grandfather undertook a risky trek across rural Georgia, walking 20 miles only to be illegally denied his voting rights at multiple polling stations. He would eventually pass away without ever getting the chance to cast a ballot.
More than half a century later, Moss’ own son cast a vote in Atlanta for Sen. Raphael Warnock, who now holds the seat Talmadge once did.
“Sometimes,” Moss said, “the arc of God’s movement is not in our generation, but will be three, four generations ahead of us.”
Marsalis also shared a story of intergenerational triumph, one involving the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee.
“We struggle as human beings with paradox,” Marsalis said. “We want to be right and we want you to be wrong. To create space for other people who don’t think like you requires a macro understanding, and to actually create the mechanics of that space requires a micro understanding.”
This is exhibited in King’s teachings, Hamill’s playwriting, Moss’ preaching, and Marsalis’ composing.
“If you write a score, you think about all of these people sitting on stage for an hour and a half, and you have to account graphically for everything everybody will do,” Marsalis said.
Oboes, cellos, percussion; every group must be given space. And in jazz, there’s another factor: the freedom, the unknown, the choreographed time when Marsalis allows spaces for musicians to improvise, to be “turned loose,” as he calls it. From this, Marsalis carved a lesson on acceptance of others, and remembering to think on that macro, harmonic level.
Marsalis credited his father with instilling those values in him from a young age. Hamill credited her mother for influencing her work.
“She raised me to believe that I should have the same rights as my brothers and that I should be willing to use my voice to fight for those rights when I saw something was wrong,” Hamill said.
Her mother marched for the Equal Rights Amendment while pregnant with Hamill, so fighting for equality and justice is in her very roots.
The Light and The Dark, like all of her plays, has these themes at its heart. Before writing, Hamill had been feeling particularly “disillusioned” about the theater world, which she had fallen so in love with, as she became more involved in fighting to end harassment within the industry. Stories from survivors ate away at her.
“I was thinking about this legacy I had been given from my mother, and how that was seeming in direct contrast with the art I had chosen to give my life to,” Hamill said.
Then, while on honeymoon in Florence, she came across a painting by famed Italian Renaissance painter Artemisia Gentileschi that woke her up.
Gentileschi was the most famous female painter of her time. She was a survivor of sexual assault, and she was put on trial as a result. There, she was scrutinized and tortured. She eventually painted the work that changed Hamill’s life: “Judith Beheading Holofernes,” a depiction of a Biblical scene, only under Gentileschi’s pointed brush, Judith became a self-portrait, and Holofernes possessed the face of her abuser.
“I stood in front of this giant painting in the gallery, and I felt the motes of dust that were this woman from 400 years ago reach down through the ages and go, ‘Smack! You have a voice. The onus is on you to use it. I used it so you could tell the truth. You tell this story. You take a complicated story and you write this play.’ ”
Sixteen reference books and one painting class later, The Light and The Dark was born.
“I wrote this play because I believed so deeply in the legacy, not only of our literal ancestors and the people who fought so hard to get us here, but also in generations to come,” Hamill said, “and also the artistic ancestors, the ancestors of dissidents throughout the ages who are trying to make
society better.”
Hill followed by asking each panelist how their work challenges, transforms or animates in these divisive times. Moss answered by sharing a quote from Howard Thurman: “A crown is placed over our heads that for the rest of our lives we are trying to grow tall enough to wear.”
The work, Moss said, is hoping and trying to be taller tomorrow. And this requires growth, an antidote to the fears of change and stunting traditionalism that are crippling the nation.
“America operates out of a fundamentalist and originalist framework,” Moss said of the nation’s judiciary and political systems. “Fundamentalism and originalism function out of fear of someone introducing something new.”
This is in direct contradiction to the artist, the student, the believer.
“Otherwise, you keep playing the same thing. You keep saying the same thing over and over and over,” Moss said. “I will never reach the crown, but I want to be taller tomorrow.”
Similarly, Hamill has learned to be friends with that which frightens her, to take on projects that are riskier and bigger, requiring more vulnerability and honesty.
“(I want) to open people’s minds, open people’s hearts, make people reconsider what a hero or a heroine’s journey is, and to actually see the world around them in more nuanced ways,” Hamill said. “If we all had much more empathy for each other, the world would be a much better place.”
Marsalis also operates with a worldview of complexity, interwoven in his art and beliefs. The one fact we can depend on — perhaps paradoxically, he said — is that, while we must work to reject tribalism and embrace our differences, we share one fundamental truth: We are all people on this Earth.
During the moderated Q-and-A, a question came from the audience as to how we can rise above division in our communities and nation. Marsalis said to make it your “primary objective” to create spaces for others: “Get some blood to the capillaries.”
Hamill added that in order to do that, we must practice empathy for others, beginning by challenging our own assumptions. As a self-proclaimed “Molotov cocktail person,” she joked, she works to be the person who builds bridges, rather than barricades.
And capping off the final morning lecture of Chautauqua’s sesquicentennial, Moss shared a story from his father, about a baby crying on an airplane during a flight from Japan to the United States. Everyone on the flight understood the baby’s tears, just as they did its laughter.
“The baby didn’t laugh in Japanese nor English, but laughed in the language that we all could understand. That crying and laughter are universal, Holy Spirit actions,” Moss said. “When you want to laugh, you cannot hold it in, and when you want to cry, you cannot keep it inside. … If we can find the laughter, but be unafraid of the tears, then maybe we can break from some of the tribes that we operate out of.”
