Interim Chief Executive Kyle Keogh addresses thoughts and concerns from the community during “Conversations with Kyle” June 29 in Smith Wilkes Hall.
CODY ENGLANDER
Staff Writer
“Conversations with Kyle,” the weekly listening session series introduced at the start of the 2026 Summer Season during which Chautauquans have an opportunity to speak with Interim Chief Executive Kyle Keogh, resumed Aug. 3. The community engaged Keogh on topics spanning patron housing, programming and future updates to Chautauqua Institution’s website.
Keogh began the forum by discussing accommodations on the grounds, touching on patron housing plans he addressed earlier this summer.
“We actually need to do a better job just making sure the accommodation site is up to date and better. We have a range of accommodations in terms of quality, and a better way for you to be able to see that,” Keogh said.
He said the ability to make the process of booking accommodations more “seamless” for patrons is an “opportunity” for the Institution, and cited relatively stable attendance metrics throughout the past 25 years as another area that presents room for improvement.
“Our attendance at Chautauqua has been roughly the same for 25 years, plus or minus about 5%. Leaving aside [the COVID-19 pandemic], so leaving aside 2020 and 2021, you would actually draw a fairly tight line across all of it. That’s both a challenge and an opportunity,” Keogh said.
Keogh noted housing as an area restricting Chautauqua’s growth, with a decrease in patron housing availability as boarding houses have become defunct and been turned into single-family homes. He touched on locations for new housing, including new affinity housing next to Everett Jewish Life Center, condos near Turner Community Center behind Roe Green Theater Center and condos near Norton Hall. While the Institution initially proposed plans for new housing developments on the grounds, Keogh said some of those plans have been “pulled back on” because of concerns with cutting down trees.
Following the discussion of housing and accommodations at the Institution, Chautauquans in attendance raised concern about bias within Institutional and non-Institutional programming.
“Within denominational houses and in other areas where it’s not our Institution-run programming, we sort of let them run. We can’t fully police that. Same thing with other programming, other venues. We advertise for it because we have an openness that we advertise for things around the community, but at the same time, we do need to look into some…” Keogh said. “But it’s a challenging one, right? Because then you’re on one side, you could say, ‘If we’re going to get in there and monitor what is true and not.’ It’s a little hard to step in, in that way.”
A Chautauquan raised concern about the Chautauqua Symphony Orchestra and its ancillary use in other performances, as other external programming in the Amphitheater has been reduced.
“Thursday, it’s just a symphony on its own,” Keogh said. “We find it’s helpful to drive attendance to it and to get a greater audience. We want to expand the audience that loves the symphony, both at Chautauqua and beyond. And so, for instance, having the acrobats with them was actually a great night. Having a ballet partner with them sort of draws [audiences] in.”
Keogh clarified that there are 21 nights of strictly CSO performances throughout the 2026 Summer Season, giving Chautauquans enough time to enjoy CSO and non-CSO related performances.
The next conversation topics Chautauquans raised were the ticketing system and the website, both of which Keogh indicated need to be fixed.
“We are an incredibly complex place for our ticketing. No one looks like us, and so when we try to do it with a third party, it’s quite challenging,” Keogh said. “We need a new ticketing solution. Either we need to fix heavily what we’re working on, we need to go back and rebuild our own, or we need to find another third party and do a new integration, but there’s no great solution out there unless we’re willing to make our ticketing less complex.”
Finally, Keogh discussed the website, an area of the Institution he hopes to see make major changes to Chautauquans’ lifestyles.
“We’re doing a full redo on the website. We have an outside consultant working on it. We should have [it ready] for next season,” Keogh said. “… Think about all the use cases that need to go through that website, and we really try and get (it) for the one-weeker, right? Because that’s the person that we need to get a lot of volume through. A seasoned person tends to look at it in certain ways. They go to golf, they go to the [morning lecture], they do certain things. So with the number of different things, we basically have 75 to 100 different sub-scale businesses that we run, and running them all through that site is quite hard.”
Keogh said he has new hopes for a new type of Chautauqua summer planning for attendees next season.
“My hope, though, [is] most of you, by next year, will be planning your vacation from a [generative artificial intelligence] engine, not actually from our site,” Keogh said. “[The hope is that] you’ll be looking down at it, saying, ‘Hey, I’m coming to Chautauqua for this week. What should I do?’ and it will actually search our site and know what you love and give you that back. Because otherwise, if you look at the yellow sheet this week, it is overwhelming.”
“Conversations with Kyle” resumes at 1 p.m. today in Smith Wilkes Hall, featuring Mark Coolidge Johnson, incoming president of the Institution.
