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Arden Ryan
contributing writer

Masters of the four-part harmony and muse for vocal groups that followed them, the Four Freshmen model the sound of jazz-meets-barbershop.

“The Four Freshmen are considered one of the most inspirational vocal groups of all time,” said Bob Ferreira, the group’s drummer and bass vocalist. “There’s always been a draw to harmony. Today it’s as popular as ever.”

At 8:15 p.m. tonight in the Amphitheater, Chautauqua will get a taste of what makes the Four Freshmen such an influence.

Laura Savia, vice president of performing and visual arts, said she’s excited to bring the group back to Chautauqua. The ensemble, that last performed on the Amp stage in 2017, has “set the standard for a time less, classic, American sound,” Savia said.

“They deliver the quintessential male quartet sound with tight harmony that has spawned (generations) of offshoots in pop music,” she said.

Many popular a capella and vocal groups were “directly or indirectly inspired (by) the music of the Four Freshmen,” Ferreira said, including, he likes to note, the Beach Boys — Brian Wilson directly credits the Four Freshmen for helping his group solidify their sound.

Beginning with the group’s founding in 1948 at Butler University, the Freshmen have had a continuous line of members honoring the tradition of the male vocal quartet, marking 75 years of steady performances this fall.

“The group’s lineage is a cool feature,” Savia said ­— “an unbroken chain of singers, cohorts of foursomes linking back” to the original.

“This group is highly flexible in that when a member leaves, a new member will come in to replace them,” Ferreira said. “It’s been that way since its inception.”

The four current members have been together for several years, making them a tight, cohesive unit.

The group will add their pioneering musical style to the Amp entertainment season, “lifting up a jazz sensibility married with barbershop” that hasn’t yet been heard this summer, Savia said.

The Freshmen all play their own instruments, currently performing on drums, bass, guitar and trumpet. The lineup changes over the years with different group iterations, Ferreira said. They “play to the attributes of the members, and not every member brings the same thing as his predecessor.”

The band’s sound and interpretation have evolved over the decades, he said, remaining contemporary while staying true to their classic sound.

“The focus is the harmony. … We’ve tried to come back (recently) to what the group was originally,” centering on the vocal blend.

The group will sing familiar songs and introduce the crowd to new ones, performing throwbacks to their early years while staying accessible to younger listeners.

The Freshmen “are the rare kind of ensemble appealing to old and young,” Savia said. Their sound is “fresh, sophisticated, and fun,” and will bring the “intergenerational artistic experience” for which Chautauqua strives.

“Their music inspires audiences everywhere,” Savia said, “reminding us that four voices and a set of instruments can produce a dynamic and unforgettable sound.”

For Ferreira, performing the Freshmen’s vein of close-harmony music is just fun.

“When we’re singing and the four guys hit that chord, and it just locks in and it rings, there’s nothing like it,” Ferreira said. “Those little moments that come, you remember those. That’s the beauty about singing harmony.”

Since playing in rock groups as a high schooler, Ferreira has nurtured a love of sharing music and the camaraderie of an ensemble. 

“When you’re working with a band,” he said, “you develop a chemistry, a symbiosis … You’re able to read each other, finish each other’s (musical) sentences.”

Ferreira has been performing with the Four Freshmen for 31 years and said that “being able to communicate, almost subliminally, on the stage with others and be able to react and respond in this musical conversation … is pretty magical.”

Mary Lee Talbot
Staff writer 

The Rev. Robert M. Franklin, former director of the Department of Religion and senior pastor for Chautauqua Institution from 2014 to 2017, will preach at the 9:15 a.m. morning worship service today in the Amphitheater. He is the third and final preacher stepping up to the pulpit this week to fill in for the Most Rev. Michael Curry, who postponed his week-long chaplaincy to 2024. 

Franklin’s sermon title is “A Grandmother and a Garden: Modeling Moral Leadership.”

Franklin is president emeritus of Morehouse College in Atlanta, serving from 2007 through 2012. Currently, he is a senior adviser to the president of Emory University and serves as the James T. and Berta R. Laney Professor in Moral Leadership at Emory. He was a visiting scholar at Stanford University in 2013

He is a presidential fellow for the Andrew Young Center for Global Leadership at Morehouse College. 

In 2020, he was a candidate for Congress to complete the term of his friend and mentor, U.S. Rep. John Lewis of Georgia’s 5th Congressional District. He is the author of four books, including  Moral Leadership: Integrity, Courage, Imagination, published in 2020.  He has provided commentaries for National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered” and televised commentary for Atlanta Interfaith Broadcasting.  Educated at Morehouse College where he earned a bachelor’s degree; Harvard Divinity School, where he earned a master’s degree of divinity; and the University of Chicago Divinity School, where he earned a doctorate degree in philosophy, Franklin currently serves on the boards of the Princeton Theological Seminary and the Centers for Disease Control Foundation. He has worked with three U.S. presidents on their signature initiatives. including President Bill Clinton’s “One America,“ President George W. Bush’s “Community and Faith Based Initiative,” and President Barack Obama‘s “My Brother’s Keeper.” 

Kaitlyn Finchler
Staff writer

In a small Indian town, unsurvivable heat plagues the population. The government sends planes to spray sulfur dioxide to mimic the dimming effect of volcanic eruptions. Such is the premise of The Ministry for the Future, in which American science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson explores climate change through the capacity of literature.

For a combined Chautauqua Lecture Series and Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle presentation, Robinson will speak at 10:45 a.m. today in the Amphitheater to close the Week Six theme, “A Life of Literature,” as well as the CLSC’s Recognition Week.

“I’ll give my description of how I think literature works, especially in the novel, and specifically the scientific fiction novel,” Robinson said, “and why this can be an important aid to imagining climate change and changing habits now.”

He said he hopes the audience imagines some of their own new ideas. Described by Jacobin as one of the “greatest ever socialist novelists,” Robinson has written three series, 12 novels, six short story collections, 20 short stories and seven non-fiction books. His book 2312 was nominated for all seven of the major science fiction awards — a first in the industry — and in 2016, Robinson received two monumental honors: the Heinlein Award for lifetime achievement in science fiction, and an asteroid named for him.

Robinson said writing is a “habit” he likes, and a life of literature looks like “a lot of my time reading and writing — learning particular writers by reading lots of their books, reading back in the canon, and across world literature. Dispensing with social media and visual media, for the most part — believing in literature as a kind of humanist religion.”

Few writers, said Michael I. Rudell Director of Literary Arts Sony Ton-Aime, “have embodied the meaning and the possibilities of a literary life” like Robinson.

“In his prolific and long writing career, with each new book, he offers us new ways and possibilities to understand one another and our communities,” Ton-Aime said —  and The Ministry for the Future is no exception.

“Here is a book that engages and implicates us all in the biggest challenge that our species has ever faced. It presents us with solutions by imagining a new world that science cannot offer us yet,” he said. “This is what literature is supposed to do, and no other book, in my opinion, does it better than The Ministry for the Future.”

In an interview with Jacobin, Robinson said people should resist the idea of being doomed to climate disaster — and insists there’s a world beyond capitalism.

“I would say science fiction is a genre that divides into three parts: the far future, the near future and then a third, less frequent middle zone in time that I call ‘future history,’ ” Robinson told Jacobin, “which is about 100 to 300 years in the future … and it’s where I’ve placed many of my novels. But Ministry is near-future science fiction.”

While books are categorized into different genres, Robinson said “all books are based largely” around science, politics and the environment. This may not be something people are “aware of,” but he said he likes to stay aware — which is evident in his 2020 novel.

“The Ministry for the Future is a literary vision of the future,” Robinson said. “It deploys any number of genres in one novel to create a vivid sense of the next few decades.”

James Buckser
Staff writer

The Bible helped inspire David Jasper to study literature.

“In the first instance, it’s a great work of literature,” Jasper said. “That might sound a terrible thing for a priest to say. It is the word of God, whatever we mean by that — but actually it’s the word of God because something like the first chapter of Genesis, the first chapter of the Bible, (is) just extraordinary, imaginative.”

Since beginning his studies, Jasper has become an ordained priest and an academic, authoring numerous books and teaching across the world. He is professor emeritus and Honorary Professional Research Professor at the University of Glasgow, an honorary research fellow at the University of Edinburgh, associate editor at the International Journal for the Study of the Christian Church, and a fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.

Jasper will speak at 2 p.m. today in the Hall of Philosophy as a part of the Interfaith Lecture Series, closing out the Week Six Theme, “Literature and Meaning-Making.”

Jasper has taught theology for 40 years, he said, but was frustrated in his studies with the way people were looking at it.

“Certain parts of the Bible, which are just wonderful literature, … were being kind of closed down, because you were studying it for doctrinal or religious reasons,” Jasper said. “I wanted to kind of free the Song of Songs or 1 Corinthians 13, or whatever it might be, to be just what they are as wonderful texts.”

While Jasper said he knows “some people will argue to the death” with him that the Bible is literal, he feels the authors of the Bible were more poetic, with a text like Genesis illustrating how they were “exploring their idea of a divine creation.”

“They just saw the world as infused with the divinity of the creator,” Jasper said. “It’s a great poem, and that’s how I understand it first, and then all the theology and stuff comes later.”

Jasper has studied literature and faith across nations. In 2020, he released Literature and Religion: A Dialogue between China and the West, with Ou Guang-an, a Chinese professor of English literature at Shihezi University.

Jasper said what they were looking for in the book was “the things that bring us together rather than the things that separate us,” with Guang-an reading books embedded in English literature, and Jasper doing the same with Chinese texts.

In doing this, Jasper said they looked into words and ideas like “spirit,” seeing how the “Chinese spirit of the people” relates “to our understanding of the Holy Spirit.”

“Does that word have a commonality that we can bring together?” Jasper said. “We actually discovered that it did, so that these great divisions … had a lot more in common than we had in our differences, and that was important.”

Jasper will touch on his many international experiences in his talk today.

“I’ve been fortunate to have taught in various parts of the world,” Jasper said. “The lecture will be a virtual geographical tour through China, India, the USA, Australia, the UK, Ireland, and all the literature that I’ve encountered there.”

Jasper hopes Chautauquans leave his talk with a sense of the importance of literature.

“One of the things that was said to me when I started teaching literature at a university is, ‘You mean you just read novels and poems, and you do that for a living?’ ” Jasper said. “We live in a world, I think, in which … the humanities are really under pressure.”

Higher education, Jasper said, is depreciating the humanities, but they are necessary “in a world in which literature would celebrate aesthetics and beauty and explore the nature of human relationships.”

“Surely, we need that pretty desperately,” Jasper said. “Reading isn’t just a kind of add-on thing that you do when you’ve got a bit of spare time, but is actually something that is fundamental to our very humanity.”

Sarah Russo
Staff writer

A “life of literature,” the Week Six theme, can extend beyond just books.

The Chautauqua Symphony Orchestra will perform “American Song” at 8:15 p.m. tonight in the Amphitheater featuring one piece with written words directly from America’s 16th president, with vocals sung by Chautauqua Opera Company alumnus Yazid Gray. 

Under the baton of Music Director and Principal Symphonic Conductor Rossen Milanov, the CSO will perform two selections: Aaron Copland’s Appalachian Spring andMichael Daugherty’s “Letters from Lincoln.”

“(These are) two influential and captivating compositions that offer unique perspectives on American history and culture,” Milanov said. 

Both pieces showcase these perspectives, but in different ways, he said. 

“Daugherty’s work combines the power of Abraham Lincoln’s words with an imaginative and contemporary musical language,” Milanov said, “while Copland’s iconic piece captures the essence of the American spirit and landscape with its evocative melodies and rural imagery.” 

Gray will accompany the CSO for this evening’s program on the Daugherty. 

Gray performed with Chautauqua Opera as an Apprentice Artist and baritone soloist in As the Cosi Crumbles: A Company Developed Piece in summer 2021. Gray also participated as a featured Young Artist in Chautauqua Opera’s digital season for 2020. 

The CSO will begin with Aaron Copland’s Appalachian Spring. Originally composed for dance and choreographer Martha Graham, the work has become a representation of American culture. 

The final selection in tonight’s program is Daugherty’s “Letters from Lincoln,” featuring soloist Gray. First performed in 2009, Daugherty’s work creates a musical portrait of the 16th president, capturing his eloquence and hope that humanity could overcome prejudice to create a better world. The piece was also composed and premiered during the bicentennial year of Abraham Lincoln’s birth. 

Daugherty wrote in his program notes that he “discovered ways to bring (Lincoln’s) historic greatness into the present.” 

The composer read speeches, poems and letters for Lincoln to study his life. He even visited the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., and traveled to the battlefields of Gettysburg in Pennsylvania. 

Daugherty said many historians and the American public “regard Lincoln as America’s greatest president who successfully led the United States through the Civil War and initiated the end of slavery.” 

Lincoln’s life, full of spectacular opposites, ironies, contradictions and pathos, provided Daugherty “with an abundance of musical dramatic possibilities.” 

The baritone solo features words from Lincoln based on historical documentation. The 25-minute performance includes seven movements.  

“Both compositions not only showcase the immense talent and creativity of their respective composers,” Milanov said, “but also serve as an important part of the musical canon, resonating with audiences for generations to come.”

Arden Ryan
Contributing writer

In 2018, researchers at MIT demonstrated a device enabling people to search Google with their brains. 

Two years prior, the Neuralink Corporation launched efforts to develop implantable brain-computer interfaces, microchips enabling paralyzed people to use mobile technology via neural signals. 

But even before that, in 2009, Vauhini Vara began writing a novel which features a device allowing a person to connect their brain directly to the internet.

As an emerging technology reporter and author, Vara is engrossed by humans’ continual innovation. Her book, The Immortal King Rao, explores artificial intelligence at a crossroad with society.

“I find it fascinating that humans are always curious and always trying to invent new things, for better or worse,” she said.

“The spirit of innovation never stops,” she wrote in The Immortal King Rao, her debut novel and a finalist for the 2023 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction.

That spirit can bring the world “fascinating things” like ChatGPT, Vara said, but “there are two sides to that coin.” The same technologies might also infringe on copyrights and threaten jobs. At 10:45 a.m. today in the Amphitheater, Vara will continue the week’s Chautauqua Lecture Series theme, “A Life of Literature,” centering her lecture on the opportunities and implications of artificial intelligence.

Vara first encountered AI as a reporter in the mid 2000s, around the time startup companies such as Facebook and Google were on the rise — an “interesting time for tech,” she said. Vara found the tech industry intriguing once she started to report on it, and has been doing so ever since.

In her 2021 essay “Ghosts” for The Believer, Vara experimented with using AI in her writing. 

She reached out to Sam Altman, cofounder of OpenAI, to try out a new tool, GPT-3, a language prediction model using AI to write based on inputed words.

Vara began by “plugging in random sentences and seeing what it would spit out,” she said. Through that process, it occurred to her that the technology could be useful for helping people “write about things that are otherwise really difficult to write about.”

For Vara, the loss of her sister to cancer has been a hard topic to communicate, so she collaborated with the AI to write “Ghosts,” resulting in an unpacking and thorough expression of her grief and emotions.

Although artificial intelligence can be useful, Vara admits the ability of OpenAI to stand in for what “really should involve some human effort” — helping humans express difficult things — is part of what makes these technologies “insidious.” Her essay plays with that idea, manifesting what it looks like for AI to stand in for human contemplation. 

“The technology helped me unlock my ability” to describe her sister, Vara said. “At the same time, careful readers will also be aware that the essay plays out, on a meta level, this idea of what the technology is doing to attract us.”

Vara said she hasn’t come to a definitive conclusion about the appropriate place for AI in the literary world. 

“For me as a writer, the purpose of writing is to express something of my own singular consciousness,” she said. “That is not something that AI can do.”

Still, Vara said, using an AI language model “somehow helped to draw out something of my own consciousness, my own ability to express myself. The fact that that happened, and the fact that the AI produced some really brilliant lines as part of that process, makes it hard for me to totally dismiss AI.”

At several moments in “Ghosts,” Vara said she felt GPT-3 was able to write “something really beautiful, something that moved me,” Vara said. She feels many people are quick to deny AI and think that it will never write like humans, that “it’s not a threat because it’s not human. It (won’t) do anything close to what we can. Some of the lines that the AI wrote call that into question.”

When Vara looks to the future and imagines what neural networks might become as the technology advances, she recognizes “the one thing AI is not, is a representation of individual human perspective.” AI writing may lack emotional awareness and cohesiveness now, but many of those flaws “are technical problems that can be solved” with time. A moment in the future may come when the imperfections are smoothed over.

But right now, Vara said, human literature is unique in expressing the singular consciousness of the author. AI language models serve a different function — less a comprehension of human writing than a synthesis of available samples on the internet, which she noted “may have its own merits.”

“We, as humans, have (a) strong need for connection to one another,” Vara said. “There’s something really potent about the idea of a technology that can connect us all, something moving about it.”

James Buckser
Staff writer

Philip Metres knows first hand that the stories we tell have power, having spent his career telling his own and translating others.

“One of the things that strikes me about literature is that it really does require our imagination in a way that a lot of our contemporary media does not — it offers us a kind of a text, but we put it together, we make sense of it, just as we do in our own lives,” Metres said. “Story is the way we organize our understanding of ourselves and the world.”

A poet, author and translator, Metres will bring his perspective on story and literature to Chautauqua at 2 p.m. today in the Hall of Philosophy, as a part of the Interfaith Lecture Series and its Week Six theme, “Literature and Meaning-Making.”

As someone who has been “profoundly impacted and blessed and changed” by the reading and writing of literature,” Metres said he was “grateful to have the opportunity to share a little bit about what I find so distinctive about it and why we need it more than ever.”

Metres will also be interrogating more nuanced issues of storytelling, and the ways in which “stories can be really problematic” and “dangerous in their own way.”

“They’re very powerful; they have a huge upside,” Metres said “They (also) often leave things out, and so every narrative can be both compelling and also powerful and also dangerous.”

In the modern American political landscape, the two main parties have dominant narratives about reality, Metres said, leading to a “post-facts moment.”

“Part of that is, I think, that people have decided that the story is more important than the facts,” Metres said.

This, Metres said, is because people feel good within these narratives, where the world makes sense.

“The kinds of stories we need to tell are ones that sometimes can be discomforting,” Metres said. “People don’t like to be discomforted; people don’t like to face complexity, unfortunately. We prefer things to be easy, so we (can go) about our daily lives.”

Metres’ newest book of translated poems, Ochre and Rust: New Poems of Sergey Gandlevsky, will be released in October of this year. 

It highlights works from a poet Metres said he “really fell in love with” while living in Russia. Metres’ first book of translation was also of Gandlevsky’s poems.

“His work just absolutely devastated me and fascinated me,” Metres said. “He’s sort of a slow writer, but I kept translating his poems, even though they came out just a few a year, and I decided that I wanted to produce another one of his work.”

Ochre and Rust “spans 50 years of writing,” from Gandlevsky, who Metres said is now “in his 70th year of life” and living in exile in Tbilisi, Georgia, due to the war in Ukraine.

Metres will publish another book of his own work in 2024, Fugitive/Refuge, exploring the journey of his great-grandfather and grandfather from exile in Lebanon, and how the family came to the United States.

Metres said some of his inspiration for this book, about “the story and problem of human migration and the quest for home,” was seeing refugee crises in places like Syria, Afghanistan and Ukraine.

“I just found myself really moved and disturbed and horrified by just how many lives were being cratered and absolutely devastated by war,” Metres said. “I wanted to write a book that would be wrestling with this question about what was happening, what people were enduring and going through in the process of having to leave their homes and make a life elsewhere.”

Metres said he hopes Chautauquans will leave his talk continuing to “see literature as a source and a resource for their own self understanding and understanding of the world,” as well as a “repository of voices” that will “change us in the process of engaging with them.”

“It’s just so cool that a person anywhere could read a story from any other place and suddenly be connected to that other place,” Metres said, “to a way of seeing the world that might be totally different than their own, or might be so similar to their own that it opens up a different kind of door.”

JULIA WEBER
STAFF WRITER

Friends of Chautauqua Visual Arts are set to host their annual fundraiser for the art program, with a few changes this season.

Seasons past have welcomed the “Stroll through the Arts Gala,” an annual fundraiser that aimed to raise money for students of the School of Art program.

This year, with the School of Art’s curriculum on pause, Friends of CVA are hosting “Party on the Arts Quad” with the goal of raising funds to make much needed improvements to the School of Art’s facilities.

The fundraiser will take place at 5:30 p.m. today on the Arts Quad. Tickets are available for purchase on the Chautauqua Visual Arts website and at the door. There will be tours of the facilities, live and silent auctions, hors d’oeuvres and dancing for those who attend.

The pause in CVA programming comes amid a national search for a new artistic director, and the Institution expects to announce the new hire in the fall. The time is being used to clean out and upgrade the studio space. So far, sections of the roof of the Arts Quad have been repaired and the ceramics studio flooring has been replaced. Steps are also being made to make the facilities more ADA accessible so that Chautauquans and students can access the art studios more easily.

Betsy Vance, president of Friends of Chautauqua Visual Arts, called the Arts Quad building “beloved” and hopes that this event will inspire lovers of the visual arts to come together in celebration of Chautauqua’s visual arts community.

Av Posner, a Friends of CVA board member, hopes that this fundraiser will help to prepare the arts facilities for the incoming artistic director and that Friends of CVA can work with the director to support ample programming and educational opportunities in CVA’s next chapter.

“The main thing is to get it in shape for the next chapter,” said Posner. “A lot of that has to do with what exactly the director would like us to do. We try to have some funds to be able to respond.”

Leslie Zemsky, who has long been involved with CVA, speaks highly of the programming offered by the department.

“I really learned it all at Chautauqua,” she said.

She credited the educational programming through CVA as being a foundational resource in developing her artistry.

“(G)etting that college-level teaching, that level of instruction, to be able to take those from the general public, it was amazing,” she said.

Painter and longtime Chautauquan Beth Munro is a self-described “big supporter” of the visual arts and has taken myriad Special Studies courses over the years.

She said she looks forward to welcoming students back next year with a renovated space in which to work, find inspiration and collaborate.

“I think it’s so important to the overall feel of Chautauqua and the arts to have the visual arts represented with the students,” Munro said. “They add so much to the vitality and the atmosphere. I miss them.”

Lynn LeFauve, a longtime Chautauquan who works in the Strohl Art Center Gallery Store, brings her background as an art teacher to the Special Studies courses she teaches. She primarily works with watercolor painting.

All three artists will have their work auctioned off at tonight’s fundraiser. Proceeds from the auction will benefit the repairs needed to improve the Arts Quad.

“I certainly hope that this fundraiser will bring in the funds that can be used and needed for the betterment of a very historic part of Chautauqua,” LeFauve said.

Vance hopes that in its next chapter, the visual arts program will see “a wonderful symbiotic relationship between the artists that come here and work and the community.” 

She hopes that everyone, whether they are artists using the space or community members looking to learn or enhance a skill will have the opportunity to engage with the programming and use the space.

KAITLYN FINCHLER
STAFF WRITER

Chautauquans can gather while sharing their favorite books parading cheerfully around on red stickers as they enjoy celebrating Library Day at Smith Memorial Library.

“Library Day is an annual celebration of the life of the library and the greater Chautauqua community,” said Library Director Scott Ekstrom. “It goes back many decades (and) is the brainchild of the Friends of Smith Memorial Library.”

Kicking off the day is a reception sponsored by the Friends from 8:30 to 10:30 a.m. in the library, which Ekstrom said has turned into a “casual, continental breakfast party” over the years.

In addition to Chautauquans, librarians in the area get a special invitation to honor their work, he said. While the librarians are “geographically part of the community,” they are metaphorically part of the community, too.

“(Library Day is) also an opportunity for people to find out more about the Friends of the Library and to join them if they want to become a member,” Ekstrom said. “They raise money to support the library with special projects.”

Some of the projects over the years have included outdoor patio furniture, a printer and the accessible book-drop return. 

“For folks who maybe can’t make it to the party in the morning, we pass out ‘My Favorite Book’ stickers,” Ekstrom said. “It creates conversations about literacy throughout the grounds as people see one another’s favorite books.”

It’s true, some people may just come to the library to print something or use the bathroom, but Ekstrom said libraries are so much more. They represent democracy, equal access and an “antithesis” to censorship.

Now, more than ever, libraries are “amped up,” he said, with the multitude of print, digital and physical resources.

“(Libraries are) also about people wanting to be around other people,” Ekstrom said, then noted with a smirk: “Libraries have always been a great place for introverts to be around other people without necessarily having to talk to them.”

Julia Weber
Staff writer

The Garth Fagan Dance company will jump onto stage at 8:15 p.m. tonight in the Amphitheater.

The company incorporates a particular technique that draws inspiration from and combines multiple dance styles, said Natalie Rogers-Cropper, who is the interim executive director of Garth Fagan Dance as well as the company’s assistant rehearsal director and school director.

The Garth Fagan technique utilizes characteristics like the loose, torso-centered movement of Afro-Caribbean dance, the speed and agility of ballet, the polyrhythms of African music and dance and the loose backs of post-modern dance.

“His work tends to be impressionistic and abstract, not very narrative. He’s definitely a contemporary dance choreographer,” said Rogers-Cropper.

Another distinctive attribute of the Fagan technique is that dancers do not prepare for their jumps during their performances, which Rogers-Cropper describes as being “into the earth, out of the earth.”

“Our jumps have no preparation whatsoever. We just fly into the air; it’s a very technical thing that they have to learn, and it’s quite wonderful,” she said. “When we have to go down into the earth, (Fagan) wants that weight, he wants that strength that is connected with dancers that have a very primal feel.”

Dancers are formally trained in the Fagan Technique and will demonstrate their skill during tonight’s performance at the Amp.

Fagan, for whom the company is named, has choreographed for the Dance Theatre of Harlem and Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. It’s his technique and vocabulary behind Broadway’s The Lion King, for which he was honored with a Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Choreography, and Outer Critics Circle Award, a  Tony Award and the Laurence Olivier Award for Best Theatre Choreographer. The Fagan Technique aims to uplift dancers from all backgrounds, particularly dancers of color and older dancers.

“It’s also a reflection of the world that our company wants to present on stage. … The world is made up of children, teens, adults and mature people, so all the pieces reflect that,” she said.

Chautauquans can expect to see an emphasis on group performances, though solos, duos and trios appear intermittently throughout the pieces.

“Choreographically, that’s the art form where you have a different range of people, different directions, different amounts of people and different ages,” she said. “That makes the choreography rich.”

Rogers-Cropper hopes the audience will find the high-energy nature of the show inspiring, as well as the company’s “positive affirmation of humanity.”

“We want them involved at a very deep level – emotionally, certainly, intellectually – to think about ‘What is this about?’ and engaged spiritually, as well, where they really feel like part of the movement,” she said.

She hopes they leave with a heightened sense of joy, and cherish the experience. She also hopes that the performance will offer an alternative to stereotypes about dance in the media.

“It’s important that people of color, especially young people, see the positive images on stage and see that there’s an alternative to the stereotypes that you see in the performing arts and on basic media,” she said.

She would like for the performance to resonate with viewers and wants attendees to leave with a “rollicking time” — and a stronger feeling of connection.

“What (the audience) will experience is a celebration of humanity through dance, and anybody can relate to that,” Rogers-Cropper said. “…When you leave a Garth Fagan dance performance, you are uplifted, you are more positive, you want to talk about it with everyone.”

James Buckser
Staff writer

Philip Barnes got involved with choral music when he was about 6 or 7 years old.

“The local choir director came to my prep school and auditioned everybody, and I wasn’t very good,” Barnes said. “But the deal was, you can either have all the kids or none of them, so if a kid shows interest, you have to take him. I was one of those kids.”

Since joining that choir in school, Barnes has gone on to record 16 albums with the St. Louis Chamber Chorus, direct church choirs in St. Louis, and host “Re-Choired Listening,” a weekly program on St. Louis’ classical radio station. He is also an educator, teaching Greek and Latin at John Burroughs School, as well as classes through Chautauqua’s Special Studies. 

Barnes will bring his knowledge of music and learning to Chautauqua at 2 p.m. today in the Hall of Philosophy as a part of Week Six of the Interfaith Lecture Series, with its theme “Literature and Meaning-Making.”

Before Barnes embarked on his musical and educational career, he studied at Chautauqua through the Bell Tower Scholarship, designed to promote understanding between the British and Americans.

It was through the scholarship that Barnes first visited St. Louis, where he has spent much of his career.

“I got to visit a very famous school there, and I got to visit the head of school, and the head of school met me. Two years later, he appointed me to the faculty,” Barnes said. “My life took this unexpected turn where now I’ve lived in America longer than I’ve lived in England.”

Barnes said the catalyst for this turn in his life was Chautauqua Institution.

“I owe Chautauqua hugely,” Barnes said. “It changed my life.”

Barnes’ “Re-Choired Listening” had a home on St. Louis’ classical radio station, which was closed for some time after the Lutheran Church sold the frequency to a contemporary Christian operation, Barnes said, which resulted in St. Louis lacking classical radio.

“It took about 18 months, I suppose, for people to realize, this isn’t a temporary thing,” Barnes said. “If we don’t actively raise money and work on the idea of bringing back classical radio, it won’t come back.”

A number of people were “instrumental” in bringing classical radio back, Barnes said, including the CEO of Centene.

“He wanted classical radio back, and he had a lot of good friends who helped,” Barnes said. “About 10 years ago, it was relaunched — new frequency, new studios, new everything, and I was one of the local hosts tapped to be part of the programming.”

Barnes said it was important for a city to have a classical radio station, culturally.

“It’s part of the culture of the city. Just as it would be important for the city to have an art museum, I think in a similar way it’s important for a city to have a really outstanding sports team,” Barnes said, “something that has a local element to it, that local people can take some pride in, and they can effect and they can follow, and feel that the music, or the sports, or the art or whatever is accountable to local residents.”

Today, Barnes said he will speak about the “intersection of religion and literature before Islam and Christianity and contemporary Judaism,” through the ancient Greek perspective.

Barnes said the worship of Greek gods is “always to be found in Greek literature,” particularly in plays, but that a modern audience can lose sight of the religious aspect the works hold in addition to the artistic. 

Barnes plans to discuss these works through his distinctive lens.

“I tend to look at literature as a libretto for music,” Barnes said. “The perspective I bring is, ‘How do words and music complement one another?’ ”

Barnes will focus this broad topic on his own work translating Greek, and having that put to modern music by contemporary composers and sung by a choir.

“I would like people to focus greatly on the natural music of words,” Barnes said. “So often, we tend to think of words in one part of our brain and music in another part of our brain, and I think that’s an unnecessary and actually unhelpful division.”

The ancient Greeks are the best way to open this discussion, Barnes said, because of the Greek tendency to merge art forms; the Greek Chorus singing and dancing; and the Greek word “ode” referring to song and poetry.

For example, he said, their understanding of the word “chorus” didn’t distinguish between people who sing and people who move, he said.

“The Greeks didn’t distinguish between so many things that we separate,” Barnes said. “… It would be so amazing if we could realize again how well the two go together.”

Alton Northup
Staff writer

Kwame Alexander knows the power of words.

“I want to create literature that is cool, that is empowering,” he said. “I feel like because I can do that, I have the responsibility to actually do it.”

Alexander, a Newbery Medal-winning author and poet, will talk about how words transform lives and his path to becoming a writer at 10:45 a.m. today in the Amphitheater to continue the Chautauqua Lecture Series Week Six theme, “A Life of Literature.” 

The son of a publisher and an English teacher, books surrounded him growing up. But he did not set out for a career as a writer. Instead, he studied biochemistry at Virginia University. In the end, writing still found him.

“It was in my blood,” he said.

He has not stopped writing since and, as a daily writer, he lives a life of literature in the truest sense. He said he hopes to inspire Chautauquans – especially children – to live a life of literature too. A poet, Alexander writes most of his novels in verses that build on each other to form a narrative. He plays with the spacing, size, formatting and thickness of his words to make them “come alive.”

The author, co-author, or editor of 38 books, he has cemented himself as a powerhouse in literature.   He’s been awarded the Caldecott Medal and Coretta Scott King Award, as well as a Newbery Honor and a Newbery Medal. Chautauqua has included four of his books in its CLSC Young Readers program, including two 2023 picks Indigo Blume and the Garden City and The Door of No Return.

Indigo Blume and the Garden City tells the story of a young girl who builds a rooftop garden and shows her neighbors how to go green. The Door of No Return follows the gripping story of Kofi Offin, an 11-year-old boy who is taken from his village in Upper Kwanta and sold into slavery in the United States. 

At its core, it is an odyssey of an African family fighting for their culture, way of life and humanity.

Alexander’s characters all share a common story of believing in themselves, not letting others define them and moving forward despite the struggles they face, he said.

“If you want young people to be able to imagine a better world, then we have to make sure they have access to books that are going to help them see the whole world – the whole history of not only our country, but our world – and their place in it,” Alexander said.

Sarah Russo 
Staff writer

Since its beginnings in 1874, Chautauqua has become both a movement and a place — a historic learning destination for people all over the country, drawing in world-class speakers and popular entertainment groups. For many, it’s home, and family.

And families, of course, celebrate birthdays. On Old First Night every year, Chautauquans gather to celebrate and now, tonight is that night. The celebration is set to kick off at 6:30 p.m. tonight in the Amphitheater.  

The tradition of Old First Night is a celebration and time of reflection, said Geof Follansbee, a lifelong Chautauquan and the Institution’s senior vice president and chief advancement officer. 

“It’s a time where we’re honoring those who not just created Chautauqua back then, but all those who have sustained Chautauqua since 1874,” Follansbee said. “And at the same time, it’s supposed to be fun as well.” 

For the 149th birthday celebration, the evening will consist of many family-friendly activities. Music begins at 12:15 p.m. with the Chautauqua Community Band, under the baton of Aidan Chamberlain, performing on Bestor Plaza. The Amp festivities launch with a performance by Thursday Morning Brass at 6 p.m., followed by the evening program ­— beginning with Vespers followed by the Drooping of the Lilies, when those in the Amp raise white handkerchiefs or tissues to remember late Chautauquans. The celebration includes music and multigenerational audience participation, including performances by Children’s School and Boys’ and Girls’ Club, and will finish with a rendition of “Happy Birthday” accompanied by the Massey Memorial Organ.

Much like the Institution itself over the years, the Old First Night celebration has changed with it, Follansbee said. 

One part of the night that is still a focus all these years later is the community gift. Chautauqua Institution “lives off of the philanthropy of those who care about it” as a nonprofit, he said.

“It is a recognition that we’re celebrating Chautauqua’s birthday, and it’s appropriate to bring a gift to the party,” Follansbee said. “What we raise in the Chautauqua Fund and all the Old First Night proceeds keep this place operating, and the more resources we have, the better this place is going to be, the stronger the program is going to be each and every year. ” 

Everyone is invited to the celebration that is Old First Night, Follansbee said. Longtime Chautauquans and first-timers alike can enjoy a day filled with music, song and fun.

“I hope people will come and begin to get a better understanding of how the history of Chautauqua is (important) … while we also think about our future and look forward to our 150th next year, and beyond,” he said.

Stacey Federoff
Staff writer

Starting out in the mid-1990s at dive bars and punk-rock venues, Keith Nelson, co-founder of Bindlestiff Family Cirkus, said performing for late-night crowds compared to families has one major difference.

“Six-year-olds will let you know if they don’t like it immediately,” he said.

The universal appeal of traditional circus is what has helped the production become one of the longest-running in New York. 

The Bindlestiff Cirkus will come to town at 7:30 p.m. tonight in the Amphitheater as part of the Family Entertainment Series and Old First Night celebrations. 

Despite this age of shorter attention spans and more competition for entertainment, Nelson said the circus endures because it reminds people of the magic of live performance.

“People sitting in a circle with entertainment and communication is one of the oldest things in humanity,” he said. “Watching amazing human potential is … the oldest art form.”

Acts planned for the evening include wirewalker Logan Kerr, who started out years ago working behind-the-scenes for the troupe.

“She pretty much grew up with Bindlestiff,” Nelson said. “It’s been amazing to watch her go from a really good stagehand to now being an amazing performer.”

Other acts include acrobat Ermiyas Muluken, juggler Kyle Driggs and aerialist Kylie Webb.

Driggs is best known for juggling umbrellas, which could prove to be a bit of an extra challenge in the open-air Amp, Nelson said.

“We’re hoping we’re not dealing with crosscurrents,” he said.

As the ringmaster, or master of ceremonies, Nelson said he ushers people from an everyday mindset to the fantastical one created by the circus.

“My role is to connect to the people and help them on their journey into this world of joy and wonder,” he said.

In terms of guiding people, the circus and Chautauqua have something in common, Nelson said. Both draw people together for a short time to “explode in magic,” then allow them to grow from it.

“Chautauqua, historically, is one of those magic meccas, and … it’s amazing to be a part of,” he said.

Bindlestiff Family Cirkus was set to perform last year on the grounds, but the performance on Aug. 12, 2022, was canceled following the attack on author Salman Rushdie earlier that same day.

“To be able to come back on to the grounds and do the show that we wanted to do will be an amazing moment,” Nelson said.

At its heart, the circus encourages people to take risks and “try the impossible,” even if it means an “exquisite failure,” he said.

“Failure moves us (forward) in life,” Nelson said. “Circus is one of those art forms where there are so many hours of failure before what you’re seeing in that ring. We would not be where we are as a society without tons of failure.”

James Buckser
Staff writer

Jillian Hanesworth started writing songs as a child hoping that her mother would sing them, but when she got into hip-hop, it inspired her in a new direction.

“I wanted to try to use that kind of style with my style of writing, and the best way to do that was spoken word poetry,” Hanesworth said. “Most of my favorite poets are rappers.” Hanesworth said she started writing poems at around 9 years old, and “just never stopped writing.”

Now, Hanesworth is the first-ever poet laureate of Buffalo, New York. She’ll  speak at 2 p.m. today in the Hall of Philosophy, as a part of Week Six’s Interfaith Lecture Series theme “Literature and Meaning Making,” and almost a year after her first scheduled appearance at Chautauqua, on Aug. 12, 2022, which was canceled following the attack on Salman Rushdie.

While there is a poet laureate of New York State, Hanesworth said she felt that Buffalo needed one of its own.

“It can be hard for somebody who lives in New York City to create art that reflects the day-to-day life of somebody who lives in Western New York,” Hanesworth said.

She spent about two years trying to get the Buffalo Common Council to vote on a resolution to create the role, coming up with a description and writing resolutions.

“I didn’t think I was going to be the first one,” Hanesworth said. “But then, they determined, ‘Everything that we want our poet laureate to do on paper, you’re already doing.’”

In Buffalo, Hanesworth said, the poet laureate is supposed to “create poetry that reflects the needs, struggles, desires of the people,” perform at all city events, and go into schools to talk to students about art.

“For me specifically, I talked to students about using art for the sake of community organizing and moving people to action.” Hanesworth said.

Hanesworth also oversees the Buffalo Books program, which provides books to residents of Buffalo’s East side, “into neighborhoods where Black and brown kids live, with main characters that look like them,” Hanesworth said, and focusing on themes that are not always reinforced in school.

“Some of the authors that we use for Buffalo Books are from Buffalo, so in some cases it’s finding an author that might have grown up around the corner from you,” she  said. “We don’t just put any book in our library; we are very intentional about making sure that these books reflect the population that the library box is placed in.”

The program provides these books through pop-up bookstores where people shop for free, and through little library boxes, which are either built or donated.

“By the end of this summer, we’ll have over 30 of them placed around the East Side,” Hanesworth said. “Right now, I’m working on getting eight placed on the front lawns of Buffalo public schools.”

Today, she said she will be discussing some of the writers and books who have influenced her style of writing and her way of thinking.

“I’m going to talk about what led me to pick up a pen and start writing,” Hanesworth said. “I’m going to try to take the listeners through a journey of what I read that inspired me to write, when I started writing, when I did write, the good and the bad, and how that’s gotten me to the point today, where I am a professional writer.”

Hanesworth said she hopes that Chautauquans hear about authors they may never have heard of before, and that the talk will make them want to pick up a book.

“Even more than that, I want them to leave and try to write something,” Hanesworth said. “I’m hoping that people will hear my journey and my story, laugh at some of it, and when they leave, they’ll be inspired — or they’ll inspire their children or their grandchildren to not only read stories, but write your own story, because you have one that’s worth telling.”

Mariia Novoselia
Staff writer

Classical literature, philosopher Jennifer Frey said, helps people find the meaning of life by exploring “big existential questions,” such as: Are we free? Does God exist? What is love? What is justice? What’s my purpose? Why do I suffer? Expanding on this week’s theme “The Life of Literature,” Frey will discuss the role and power of classical texts in hopes to give Chautauquans “an impetus and desire” to read them. Her lecture, in which she said she’ll try to debunk misconceptions about the value of classical literature, is at 10:45 a.m. today in the Amphitheater. 

The purpose of higher education is one of many questions that Frey ponders: “Is it an education for work? I would like to say that it isn’t.” Instead, she said she sees higher education as “education for flourishing, for living well, for being free.” 

Being free, Frey said – free to think, to respond, to pursue “the true, the good and the beautiful” – constitutes a “flourishing human life.” These “ends” are beyond work, which Frey said, is undoubtedly important. Higher education, she said, “was always aimed at those higher ends.”

Right now, Frey said, society is in the middle of the so-called “crisis of the humanities and higher education.” 

“Humanities majors, which were very traditional forms of study in the university, like English and literature, philosophy and classics, are starving for students,” Frey said. “Students don’t want to enroll in these classes, and the result is, in many cases, that departments are shut down.”

Frey said she found interest in moral questions as a young person. While she felt strongly about her moral beliefs, she said she could not justify them, which bothered her. This prompted her to pose questions, which eventually led her to believe that to live in a praiseworthy way, one has to “cultivate virtues.”

Virtues, she said, are “stable dispositions of thinking, feeling, acting and desiring.” 

Currently, Frey said she is keen on virtue pedagogy. Some of the questions she is trying to find answers to include if and how one can teach virtues and whether or not there is a connection between the study of classical texts and the cultivation of virtue. 

“I think there can be,” she said.

Frey earned her bachelor’s degree in philosophy and medieval studies at Indiana University, then a doctorate degree in philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh. 

At that time, in the late 1990s, when she was an undergraduate student, Frey said she never worked with a female philosophy professor. While the numbers have gotten better over the years, she said, they are still “nowhere near even.”

During the course of her career, Frey said what’s prevented her from burning out is the love she has for the discipline. 

“I find that intellectual life is incredibly exciting. It’s really hard and it can be exhausting, but it’s also really exciting,” she said. “It’s really gratifying to share that with other people in the classroom, in conversation, in conference with other scholars.”

In July, Frey became the inaugural dean of the Honors College at the University of Tulsa. The curriculum she is building, Frey said, will be centered around the study of classical texts. 

Those texts that “have stood the test of time,” she said, can shape the ways people think and see the world, as well as their purpose, or meaning, in it. 

“I think the reason that these texts endure is because (they) raise the fundamental human questions that lie at the center of human life,” Frey said. 

The meaning of life, she said, can and does change over time, and from one person to another.  

“A meaningful life is one that is intentionally ordered to some kind of good that transcends the self and fulfills human nature in a deep way,” Frey said, noting that this definition is general and abstract, which befits a philosopher. 

Some, she said, find meaning in prayer and worship of God, others in family or giving back to the community. Research data suggests, Frey said, that people who are oriented toward “self-transcendent goods,” are more likely have a stronger sense of meaningfulness and purposefulness. 

Frey is also the host of the “Sacred and Profane Love” podcast, which she started in 2018. The podcast, she said, is “at the intersection of philosophy, theology and literature.” 

Every episode is devoted to a piece of classical literature that Frey discusses with a theologian or a literary critic. The only instruction Frey said she gives to podcast guests is that they have to choose a book that transformed their lives. 

For Frey, this book is Madame Bovary, by Gustave Flaubert. Described by Frey as “a perfect novel,” amazing and awe-inspiring, she said it addresses the issues of escapism and the dangers it imposes on the ability to love.  

“(The book) has incredibly profound philosophical insights, but it’s not a work of philosophy. It’s a work of literature, and so it’s communicating those insights in a really different way – it’s art, not theory,” she said. “It really changed the way that I think about how I live. … I felt very convicted reading it.”

In today’s lecture, Frey will discuss more texts that transformed the way she perceived her life, the possibilities of that life, and the relationships she has built.