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Groupers were excited to get down the waterfront on Wednesday, but for a different reason than usual: the annual Club Carnival. The carnival serves as a fundraiser for Old First Night, or as Boys’ and Girls’ Club Assistant Director John Chubb affectionately described it, “Chautauqua’s birthday.” Groups took their time in setting up a slew of different activities for the Groupers, with new ones brought in for the first time this year. Booths for face painting were next to fortune-telling stations, and stations that awarded candy to those who could bounce a ball into cups of water. After putt-putt games, Groupers could run over to the “Kid Car Wash,” to be towed through a makeshift slip-and-slide on a ring buoy by Club staff.

“This is my 11th time,” Grouper Ethan Taliercio exclaimed gleefully as he darted back into line for his personal favorite event, “Peg the Counselor,” a game in which kids get the opportunity to try and hit their counselors with rubber balls.

While the counselors had some good moves, several got out and cycled through the area, ducking and dodging as best they could. Between the music and bouncy slides, Groupers ran from station to station, paying for tickets to enjoy all sorts of activities.

One of the most popular events seemed to be “Rock the Boat,” where Groupers lined up to shoot water balloons at pirate-themed sailboats.

“Where else can a kid do something like this?” Chubb said. “You almost feel like a pirate aiming for someone else’s ship — the water balloons are the cannon balls.”

As activities winded down for a clean-up, Groupers were more than ready for afternoon programs to begin.

In the prologue of her book, Gloria Plevin: Art and Essays, published in May, Cleveland artist Gloria Plevin describes visiting Chautauqua for the first time in 1968.

“For three hours, I attended a painting and drawing course at the Chautauqua Arts Quadrangle,” she wrote. “For three hours, five days a week — 15 hours in all — I was totally happy.”

Plevin and her husband Leon decided to buy a house on the grounds, and one season blossomed into 50 years of visiting the Institution.

“Right away that first summer, … I was so happy, and (Leon) saw that, and realized this would be very, very good for us and good for the whole family,” she said. “That was it.”

From 1986 to 2002, Plevin owned and operated the Gloria Plevin Gallery in the town of Chautauqua.

She has exhibited her work in more than 40 shows in the last 46 years.

Plevin will be signing copies of her new book at 3 p.m. Sunday, July 28 in the Author’s Alcove of the Chautauqua Bookstore.

The signing will follow the inaugural Leon and Gloria Plevin Family Museum Director Lecture at 1 p.m. in Elizabeth S. Lenna Hall.

Jill Snyder, the executive director of the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland will be the first speaker in what will be an annual lecture.

“I have so many wonderful memories and obligations and connections to Chautauqua,” Plevin said. “Especially since I was going to be able to, the first year, have a Cleveland person that we would be sponsoring, I thought it was very exciting.”

She decided to come out with a book while preparing for a major career retrospective in Cleveland.

“I had a long career, and many, many paintings, but I also, in the later years, have been writing essays, and I thought that it could be a nice combination,” she said. “I thought, what better time to make a book?”

The book features a selection of portraits, landscapes and still lifes paired with essays that ruminate on Plevin’s artistic practice, her family and memories of Cleveland and Chautauqua.

Plevin has worked with her daughter, Mimi Plevin-Foust, to edit the book and her friend, Joyce Rothschild, to design it.

“The book is something that is like a culmination for me, and it has been very exciting and very gratifying,” she said. “I had excellent people helping.”

Plevin cites her first art classes at the School of Art and winning blue ribbons in an art show at Bestor Plaza as pivotal moments that encouraged her to pursue a career in art.

“There were turning points in my life,” Plevin said. “Going to Chautauqua was a very big turning point for me, because right at the time when I was looking for something, it enabled me to see that I could become an artist.”

“Neighbor, oh neighbor, I want you to know you were built for this,” said the Rev. Otis Moss III at the 9:15 a.m. Friday Ecumenical Service. His sermon title was “You Are Built for This,” and the Scripture text was Daniel 3:16-18.

“You are more powerful than you will ever know,” Moss told the congregation. “With all you have experienced, lesser beings would have crumbled.”

When Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego faced King Nebuchadnezzar, they told him they would not bow down to his golden idol, whether or not God saved them from the fiery furnace.

“They told the king they would not serve his goals, follow his principles or ingest his values,” Moss said.

Moss told the story of how powerful the spirit of God can be. In 1862, the enslaved African Robert Smalls, his wife Hannah, his son Robert Jr., daughters Elizabeth and Clara and the families of the enslaved men working on the Confederate ship Planter, decide to do the impossible and escape Charleston, South Carolina.

“Remembering the words ‘And before I’d be a slave, I will be buried in my grave, And go home to my Lord, and be free,’ they decided to steal the war ship and sail it to freedom,” Moss said. “Smalls stood as a man of principle and decided to fight through the antebellum belief that those who had been kissed by the sun were spiritually devoid and intellectually wanting. This great heist pushed past every lie.”

Moss continued: “When you realize that God is love and that you are created in his image, it does something to your soul and you are moved internally. Smalls said to himself, ‘I am built for this, to defy expectations. I must be more than three-fifths of a person, I must be so powerful they have to use a whip to keep me down.’ ”

Racism is stupid and ignorant, Moss said.

“In Charleston, their racism was so stupid, they had enslaved Africans running everything on the ships,” Moss said. “The Africans knew the secret codes, how to navigate the ships; they memorized what needed to be done.”

One night when the white sailors on the ship left to go into town, leaving the Africans to clean up, Smalls decided it was time to leave. It was dangerous, but the slaves knew the codes with the appropriate signs; they put the person with the lightest complexion on the bow to give the signals.

They made it past the harbor master and past Fort Sumter.

“The dangerous moment came when they met the Union blockade,” Moss said.

They slowed down and ran up a white sheet as a sign of surrender.

“Fog rolled in,” Moss said. The ship USS Onward was getting ready to sink the Planter when the fog broke and the white flag became visible.

The captain of the Onward told them to “hold and be ready to be boarded.” When the crew of the Onward came aboard the Planter, they went looking for the white sailors they thought were sailing the ship.

Robert Smalls stepped up and said, “I give you this ship as a gift to Abraham Lincoln.”

Smalls became a captain in the Union Army, moved back to South Carolina after the war and became a businessman, publisher and politician.

“He bought the plantation where he had been a slave and allowed the widow to live on the plantation, not in the big house but a small house out back,” Moss said. “He also founded four schools for the formerly enslaved Africans. If Smalls could recognize himself as a child of God, who are we to hang our heads in despair? We have to unleash the power in our souls and the word of God is a key component. The story of Daniel reminds me of Smalls.”

The King of Babylon, Nebuchadnezzar, wanted the Talented Tenth of Israel to work for him, cutting his lawn and tending to his children. He brought Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael and Azariah from the tribe of Judah to live in Babylon.

The king changed their names to Belteshazzar, Shadrach, Meschach and Abednego.

“You know you are living in exile when those in power change your name,” Moss said. “If they called you by your real name, they would have to recognize your humanity.”

The king issued an executive order that everyone should bow down to a god he created, “a public, phallic symbol of his deep insecurity,” Moss said.

“The material is what the market deems valuable; it celebrates gold and silver, but money does not make a moral compass,” he said. “You have to have strong roots when you are tempted by the king. Meschach, Shadrach and Abednego would not bow down to a king who sought to bolster his own image and his polls. You have to be careful what you conform to.”

The king had unchecked power, and no one could tell him he was wrong.

“There was no one to say ‘the Emperor has no clothes,’ ” Moss said. “He really thought he was the be-all and end-all.”

Nebuchadnezzar threatened the Israelites with death if they did not bow down. They replied to him, “If God will save us, so be it. And if we are killed, so be it. We will not bow down.”

They would rather burn than bow down to the material, Moss said.

“Notice they did not say, ‘We know God will save us,’ ” he said. “They knew that God could save them or not, but they would not bow down. If you have faith, you have doubt. It is courage that allows you to keep working and walking. Faith without doubt is certainty, not faith. You must walk through your doubts. Doubt is like the salt in the roux of the gumbo.”

Moss said with faith, one has “a unique moral compass.”

“The compass will point you in the right direction,” he said. “You have to be willing to walk and hold on to your ideals.”

James Baldwin had to come back from his 1950s’ self-imposed exile in Paris, because he realized he could not just talk about his ideals, he had to live them.

“Baldwin said it was not enough to critique what was wrong; he had to put his body and his ideals on the line and be part of the movement,” Moss said. “It is not enough to tweet, or post, or Instagram. You have to be willing to step forward and take your body and spirit to transform conditions in the world.”

Maya Angelou said that it is not enough to have love and faith.

“She said that if you don’t have courage, you are not activated and only (engaged in) an intellectual exercise. You have to walk through your doubts and fears,” Moss said.

God has given us a “moral imagination,” according to Moss.

“We have to imagine a different America or others will design what America is to be,” Moss told the congregation. “A mother is incarcerated in a detention cell in Arizona, and her son in a detention cell in Chicago. Why should this mother have her child taken, or this child be without a mother? We should want to see all families thrive, no matter how they got here. That is the function of moral imagination.”

Do we have the moral imagination to abolish bail?

“Prison is when you are convicted,” Moss said. “Jail is for when you are poor.”

A man committed a small traffic infraction, and his bail was $750. He spent two years in jail because he did not have $750.

“He was penalized for being poor,” Moss said. “I believe we have a better moral imagination. We will not bow down to fear or political pressure. When you go against power, they turn up the furnace seven times hotter. In my sanctified imagination, I imagine the three Israelites saying, ‘Go ahead, do what you gotta do.’ ”

The person who turned up the heat on the furnace burned and died. The man who reported back to the king said the three men were not dead, but had been joined by a fourth person, who seemed to be the Son of God.

“God does not extinguish your furnace, but God will spend time in the furnace with you,” Moss told the congregation.

Moss then quoted Howard Thurman, theologian and mystic: “A crown is placed over our heads that for the rest of our lives we are trying to grow tall enough to wear.”

Moss urged the congregation “to have dialogue with people who do not agree with you, to teach your children courage so when children yet unborn ask, ‘Did you have the courage of Robert Smalls or Maya Angelou, or did you bow down to the world?,’ you will have an answer.”

“I believe in the America that America will be one day — prayerful, equitable and free from patriarchy, racism and misogyny,” Moss said. “God will join us in the furnace. Can I get a witness?”

Members of the congregation gave witness, standing on their feet.

The Rev. John Morgan presided, David Green, a native of Pittsburgh and a Presbyterian elder, read the Scriptures. The Motet Choir sang “Every Pilgrim Has a Mountain,” by David Hurd, words by Michael Hudson. Jared Jacobsen, organist and coordinator of worship and sacred music, conducted the choir. The Gladys R. Brasted and Adair Brasted Gould Memorial Chaplaincy supported this week’s services.

When Zac Thompson arrived at Miller Park to sell his pieces for Chautauqua’s bi-annual Art in the Park market earlier this month, he was impressively coordinated; Thompson wore a long orange skirt with a tropical print shirt tied above his waist. His orange eyeshadow matched the orange glitter in his mustache.

Thompson is a student and emerging artist at the School of Art, who recently earned his Master of Fine Art from the School of Visual Arts in New York.

He has been dressing in drag for the last three years. He describes his drag persona, Zacrilegious, as “The Ned Flanders of Drag.”

“He’s mustachioed and glittered … (and) he’s literally the nicest queen you’ll ever meet,” Thompson said. “Basically, it’s just me extroverted. I feel like that’s why I do drag, …  to engage with people in ways that I can’t do when I’m (not in drag).”

When he arrived at Chautauqua this summer, whether or not to occasionally walk around the Institution in makeup and a wig wasn’t a question.

“I’m just going to do me,” he said. “(At Art in the Park) I definitely got side eyes from people, but I made a point to say hi to each of those people, and they all said hi back, and we usually ended up talking.”

He enjoys challenging people’s perceptions about drag.

“To make people reconsider (drag) … just by being visible I think is really important, and most people have been very accepting of it,” he said.

This weekend, Thompson has joined with fellow student and emerging artist Jungmok Yi to host “Genesis: The First VACI Drag Show.”

From 8 to 10 p.m. Saturday, July 27 in the Arts Quad, more than 10 students and emerging artists will perform drag and performance art pieces at the show, which is open to all Chautauquans.

A $10 donation is requested, which will go back to the students and emerging artists who are performing in and coordinating the event. Anyone who pays the requested price will be entered into a raffle for student art.

Yi and Thompson bonded in their first week at the School of Art over their shared interest and participation in drag.

Yi is a current graduate student in the Tyler School of Art and Architecture at Temple University in Philadelphia. They have a background filming and writing about drag and burlesque shows and have published a book, Are We a Joke?: Burlesque Volume I, on pan-Asian burlesque, which is featured in the School of Art Students and Emerging Artists Exhibition.

“I think that’s why we bonded,” Thompson said. “If books and publishing can be art, why can’t drag shows? I feel like this is a work of art that we’re putting together.”

Yi and Thompson said the show is a heavily collaborative project. Besides performing, students and emerging artists are contributing by creating art and videos to be used as performance backdrops, running front of house for the show and participating in set-up and tear-down of the stage. There will also be merchandise tables for artists to sell drawings, prints, stickers and other smaller works.

“Basically everybody, all 38 (students and emerging artists), are actively involved in making this show happen,” Yi said.

Some of the students and emerging artists will be performing in drag for the very first time.

“They all have performative elements to their (artistic) practice,” Thompson said. “I want to not only let this drag show be open to anyone expressing themselves in the way they want to, but also open to anyone who wants to come (watch) and be a part of that, too.”

Thompson and Yi said that drag is more than the binary concept of men dressing as women and women dressing as men.

“The definition of it is really varied, and drag can be a lot of things,” Thompson said.

Yi said that drag has given them freedom to express different facets of their identity.

“I think there is a lot of space where I can create my own narrative to fulfill whatever identity I would like to embody,” they said. “I love how drag doesn’t necessarily have to be kings and queens. … (You) can be any kind of creature.”

During the show, Yi will be recording and photographing the event as their drag character, Golden Yok.

“Genesis” will be split into two acts, with the first half geared toward a family-friendly audience, and aims to be accessible to Chautauquans who are curious about drag.

“A lot of people have preconceptions around drag,” Thompson said. “(And) most people who have those haven’t been to shows, and I think some people are nervous about what they would see. So the show is definitely a way to be like, ‘No, it’s accessible.’ ”

The second half will be for a more mature audience.

“There are certain gallery or museum shows that have signs … giving viewers the chance to opt in to see that work or not,” Thompson said. “It’s not that it’s not artistic or (doesn’t have) merit or value, it just might not be for everyone.”

Thompson and Yi hope that viewers will come with open minds, and, as is tradition at drag shows, plenty of dollar bills.

“It’s customary and part of the culture to tip performers,” Thompson said. “Even if you have to wad it up and throw it.”

A workshop, according to Roy Hoffman, is “not only a round-robin of texts, but also a circle of creative souls.”

The author of three novels will teach an advanced prose workshop at the Chautauqua Writers’ Center titled “Journeys (Of the Heart and Page),” rounding out a full week of literary arts programming that includes workshops and Brown Bag lectures from prose writer Dustin Parsons and poet Aimee Nezhukumatathil. Parsons and Nezhukumatathil, who both teach at the University of Mississippi, will lead the workshops “Your Life in Miniature: Short Memoir” and “The Sharing of Joy: Nature Writing That Snaps, Crackles, and Pops,” respectively. All three writers will give readings at 3:30 p.m. Sunday, July 28 in the Hall of Philosophy.

“I selected all the work (for the reading) to give the audience a sample of how I’ve developed as a writer,” said Parsons, who plans to read from his graphic book Exploded View: Essays of Fatherhood, with Diagrams, as well as from new work. “It is important for people, especially those who will be in my workshop, to see that even after a book, even after a small bit of success, there is so much more learning to do, so much more growth that is still waiting to happen.”

This non-judgmental, all-inclusive philosophy guides his workshop, too. With an emphasis on short forms, Parsons and the writers he coaches will study the link between memoir and personal essay, examining how to “suggest a whole life in 300 words” and interrogating the role of metaphor and repetition.

“I want to give everyone time to be heard, to read out loud their own work, to write,” he said. “I want the space to become a place where everyone trusts everyone, and I want it to happen on day one. That’s a tall order. But, magically, it seems to happen every time.”

Nezhukumatathil writes poems of the Earth. Her 2018 collection, Oceanic, explores a communal planet that is strange and wondrous, while Lace & Pyrite: Letters from Two Gardens is an epistolary book of nature poems co-authored with Ross Gay. Her forthcoming work, World of Wonder, is a book of illustrated nature essays.

In a 2013 interview with David Winter for The Journal, she shared how she “always” reminded her poetry students to heed a scientific metaphor: “Poems are not frogs.”

“That is, we’re not going to dissect them until all that is left are some unappetizing bits of skin and bone, and yet we need to at the very least check the poem’s heartbeat, see if it is as healthy as it can be, and, of course, along the way, recognize that there are several versions of what it even means to be ‘healthy,’ to extend that froggy metaphor,” she told Winter.

Hoffman, who returns to the Institution as a prose writer-in-residence, is “delighted” to teach a workshop on the art of revision in “an environment as lovely, diverse and dynamic as Chautauqua.”

“There’s the setting itself, an inspiration in its lakeside beauty,” he said. “The arts, and intellectual discourse, are everywhere. And the people who flock here are curious, open, eager to learn. I love taking a stroll in the morning, teaching a workshop in the afternoon — the writing students, beginning or seasoned, bring a breadth of life experience — and enjoying a concert in the evening. It inspires me as a writer and educator.”

Paraphrasing Ernest Hemingway, “the only kind of writing is rewriting,” Hoffman described the creative process as “a journey from inspiration to finished work” that flourishes in the company of an “upbeat, supportive group.” His workshop will be a deep dive into the character development, point of view and narrative arc contained in the work of his participants. By “reading like writers,” they will address each piece’s strengths and possibilities.

“What journeys, actual or emotional, are the characters and the author taking?” Hoffman asked. “How can we help the author succeed?”

Nurturing this “circle of creative souls” requires, for Hoffman, collaborating “in a motivating, non-competitive way.” He characterized his role as “(guiding) a group dynamic” and ensuring that the writer in focus receives helpful insight from both himself and other workshop participants.

“In doing so, we learn a great deal about one another,” Hoffman said.

For Parsons, the most gratifying time in a workshop is when he is able to hear the work generated from in-class prompts and projects.

“The magical moments they bring to life are stunning,” he said. “I’m reminded every time that people might be new to writing, but they have these rich stories they’ve lived, and they need, they want, a way to express them.”

Sporting flared pants and oversized glasses, the young woman in the photo stands in front of a sign that reads “Welcome to Chautauqua.” Her parents, aunt, uncle and two small cousins — one wears a red shirt featuring Miller Bell Tower — gather around her. The young woman in the center with the thick, clear frames is Jimin Han, and the 1983 snapshot captures “one of many” family visits to Chautauqua Institution.

A panelist at last year’s Writers’ Festival, Han lived her adolescent and teenage years in Jamestown, New York, and spent time on the Institution grounds from ages 8 to 18. In sixth grade, she sang in the Chautauqua County Music Teachers Association’s annual Spring All-County Concert; her high school graduation was in the Amphitheater. After 20 years away, she traveled back to Chautauqua and met up with her English and history teachers, staying at the Athenaeum Hotel with her partner and two children.

This year, Han is Week Five’s prose writer-in-residence at the Chautauqua Writers’ Center. She spent the week leading the workshop, “Story, Plot, Structure: Telling the Difference and Telling It Well,” wherein she explored perspective and form, a potentially abundant relationship manifest in Julian Barnes’ The Only Story, Marguerite Duras’ The War: A Memoir and her own work of segmented fiction, A Small Revolution. At 12:15 p.m. Friday, July 26 on the porch of the Literary Arts Center at Alumni Hall, she will give her Brown Bag lecture, “Going Home Again: Memory and the Fiction Writer.”

Given her long history with Chautauqua, Han admits that offering a craft talk on “Going Home” is “going to be really weird” — especially because she located the setting of her newest book in a fictional, Mayville-esque blue-collar town on the shores of Chautauqua Lake. But Han’s ties to the homes of her reality have long been entangled and made strange by forces beyond her control.

Raised by her grandmother until she was 4 years old, Han immigrated with her family from Seoul, South Korea, to the United States in 1970, leaving her grandmother behind. During her 10 years in Jamestown, she lived in five houses in various neighborhood, which taught her that “even within a town, you can have different experiences.”

As a young adult, she returned to the country of her birth and felt “uncomfortable” with her crowded living arrangements. A friend suggested that living for decades in the United States had “affected (her) sense of space.” Her inability to grasp her own unease, and seeing how her cousins living in the United States might not understand it either, inspired Han to write A Small Revolution.

“Part of writing was dealing with the places that haunt me,” Han said. “I think more about my childhood now than I have ever before. I’m interested in how places are frozen in time for me and how there are so many stories about characters going home — how we fight over a sense of place.”

In a July 14 tweet, President Donald Trump suggested that “ ‘Progressive’ Democratic Congresswomen … go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.” Han cited this racist language, as well as the U.S.-Mexico border humanitarian crisis, as evidence of “an obsession with separating ourselves.” As an Asian American writer born in South Korea who now lives outside New York City, Han found herself feeling vulnerable to accusations that her home is “somewhere else.”

“It made the writing more urgent,” she said. “I’m constantly surprised by how much we are within our own points of view on (belonging). That’s why I believe place is so integral to character and story. I need to write to understand how I think about something.”

As a teacher at the Writing Institute at Sarah Lawrence College, Han has to schedule blocks of writing time “like a dentist’s appointment” or else she’s “really hard to be around.” Twitter scrolling is a prime enemy of productivity — Han emails herself articles from the app to read later in an attempt to avoid that particular pitfall — but she knows what “years of silence” sounds like, and she is motivated to be part of the literary conversation.

“Someone’s going to be part of that conversation,” she said. “I don’t like to say I am an Asian American writer, but there’s still so much shit in the world, so much racism. Not that I want to change people’s minds; I just want to fill them in with another story.”

Her current project — the book set near the Institution — investigates the modes in which patriarchy does or does not value women and draws from a lopsided mentor-mentee dynamic from Han’s own past. For her, there is power in writing fiction that mirrors a lived experience. At the same time, she gets nervous.

“The common refrain is that writers of color are often seen as writing from our lives even as we write fiction,” Han said. “It’s a gross assumption. What’s fun about fiction is (that) it’s playing and looking around and making up this world.”

Contemporary politics deflate her optimism, but Han remains a steadfast believer in the written word. 

“I’ve been sort of conditioned to believe that if we can just say it in the right way, people will understand what they’re doing to each other, to these children in these cages,” she said. “It’s exciting when you can get through. There’s so much noise.”

It takes a special kind of person to be able to create poetry, to entice listeners and have them wrapped up in every word. But it also takes a special kind of person to use words as a platform to help others and spread knowledge.

That’s what Joshua Bennett does, and has been doing since the age of 4, if you let his mom tell the story. Bennett recalled coming home from church, and re-creating sermons on a regular basis.

“I knew since I was very young that I just believed in the power of both my writing and performance, and those two things are separate, but necessarily connected,” Bennett said. “We’re a complex people that have always went across genre, across time, and we supported each other and kept each other afloat.”

Bennett, an NAACP Image Award nominee and current assistant professor of English and creative writing at Dartmouth College, will close out Week Five, “The Life of the Spoken Word,” at 10:45 a.m. today in the Amphitheater.

Since his performance at the White House in 2009, Bennett has been touring across the world — that’s 10 years of impacting people with his words.

“It’s been a real blessing, and that’s been the journey of my life,” he said.

In this field, Bennett had to become his own role model, not only professionally, but in the life he’s living as a whole.

“I don’t really know of many people that are sort of poets publishing books, poets that perform, and then people that are literary critics. … I actually have maybe three very distinct careers that are all happening at the same time,” he said.

As his own role model, Bennett published his first poetry book, Algorithm and Blues in 2014, and his second book, The Sobbing School in 2016. He has two more books coming out in 2020, Owed and Being Property Once Myself: Blackness and the End of Man. Bennett describes Owed as “a book about reparation, … the long-standing fight in African American culture for physical reparations from the government, … but also reparation as a cultural practice. How do we feel? How do we repair bonds that have been broken?”

Being Property Once Myself stems from Bennett’s 2016 Princeton University dissertation, which was “largely about animal figures in African American literature, how black people have historically written about their relationship with the animal world and the midst of a world that starts to animalize them, to dehumanize them.”

“How then are black people able to conceive a relationship with the animals, but also the natural world in ways that you wouldn’t expect?” Bennett said.

Along with those two books, he has another book forthcoming in 2021, Spoken Word: A Cultural History. And while things are working out for Bennett, it took years to get to this point. Getting into these professional creative spaces hasn’t been the easiest, but Bennett has experience navigating in professional spaces that don’t always represent him.

Growing up in South Yonkers, New York, he received an academic scholarship at the age of 14 to attend “an elite, largely white private school two hours away from my home … with the children of millionaires and billionaires.” He took that journey — those two buses and a train — every day, and it was in those moments where he made a promise to himself.

“Ever since that time, I have to reckon what it meant to have my honest, black identity, to have my life as someone who was raised in the black church, around … working-class people, black people with dignity and with love and with care,” Bennett said. “I would never lie about who I was or what I was there to do. I was never going to diminish the light of my blackness at any point.”

Bennett’s lecture today holds the same title as his forthcoming book and will explore “a dynamic living, complex history of this form.”

“A lot of what I’m trying to actually recover in my writing on spoken word was a particular time for the black and Puerto Rican writers, organizers, teachers, activists in the late ’60s and early ’70s who were thinking about spoken word as an instrument of radical social change,” he said. “It’s really a hybrid kind of performance lecture of both my historical analysis of spoken word as a literary phenomenon … but also my own experience as a writer, an educator, as a thinker that was molded by this tradition, and is trying to carry it forward into the future.”

Bennett spoke with The Daily ahead of his lecture to share his life, work, and what we can expect. Listen to the interview below.

Chautauqua Theater Company’s 2019 season brings a variety of shows to the table.

Their first play, The Christians, presented audiences with a deep and introspective look at questions of faith and family. Recently, their first New Play Workshop show, How the Light Gets In, portrayed an unexpected love story with a message that flaws are what make people unique. The upcoming two NPW shows, On the Exhale and Agent 355, will give audiences a powerful look at the aftermath of gun violence and an exciting musical about a female spy in the Revolutionary War, respectively.

As for Richard Bean’s One Man, Two Guvnors …

“It’s going to be really, really funny,” said Sarah Clare Corporandy, CTC managing director.

The show, CTC’s second mainstage performance of the season, opens at 8 p.m. tonight, Juky 26, in Bratton Theater and runs until Aug. 11. Corporandy said audiences are in for a humorous, energetic, electric experience.

“(Audience members) are going to have a lot of laughs,” Corporandy said. “It’s going to be very physical, musical, funny, joyful and just a good time.”

One Man, Two Guvnors takes the audience back to the 1960s, and across the pond to Brighton, England. It follows a recently unemployed musician, Francis Henshall, as he precariously balances working for two different employers while trying to keep this fact hidden from both of them. To make things worse, the employers know one another, and Francis soon finds himself caught up in a complex web of comedic scenarios.

Alex Morf, a CTC alumnus from 2006 and 2007, is returning to the grounds to take on the role of Francis. Morf said the show is going to give Chautauquans something unlike anything they’ve seen from CTC before.

“I think it’s going to be a little wilder than some of the shows that people are used to,” Morf said. “There’s improv every night that keeps it changing every time, there’s a lot of physical comedy and some amazing effects alongside some really good music throughout.”

The show features a live skiffle band every night that will play Beatles-inspired music to help transform modern-day Bratton into 1960s Brighton. Before each show, the band will play a short concert so that anyone looking to find an early seat will have something to groove along to prior to the play.

“It’s a big show to pull off in two weeks, but it’s going to be so much fun,” Morf said.

Amidst the chaos and comedy of the show, One Man Director Andrew Borba said the play has more to offer than slapstick humor.

“The show features a lot of big humor, and a lot of physical comedy, but at no point does it ever feel mean,” Borba said. “It’s very warm and very human, and (staging it) might be a sort of unconscious response to the tension and fighting that’s happening in the world right now.” 

Morf agreed, and said that laughter can often be the best medicine when facing the serious and somber aspects of the world. To him, One Man, Two Guvnors is a show that helps people through the comedy it brings.

“I love what (Borba) is doing with this play,” Morf said. “‘Because it isn’t just escapism; we’re laughing at ourselves. We’re laughing at how serious we get about things like romance and our jobs and political situations. We take all those things so seriously, and it can be so important to just stop and laugh sometimes.”

Borba said that from its plot to its setting, the show has many strengths. Set in a time when gender roles in society were starting to change and when the British music scene was set to explode, there are a number of things Borba said he’s excited to get into.

“What’s great about this play is that it has great anchor points to explore,” Borba said. “From those, we go into madness — really fun, very enjoyable madness.”

“Neighbor, oh neighbor, it’s time for us to build a liberation ministry,” the Rev. Otis Moss III said at the 9:15 a.m. Thursday Ecumenical Service. His sermon title was “A Liberation Ministry” and the Scripture reading was Mark 5:1-20, the Gerasene demoniac.

“The last several decades people have marginalized putting liberation and ministry together,” Moss said. “People with a broad vocabulary but shallow minds say that liberation ministry is antithetical to the Gospel. I define liberation as the ability to be fully human and divinely directed without barriers to full personhood.”

He shared a story from the Gullah culture of St. John’s Island, South Carolina, about people who could fly.

“These people could fly because, by the power of God’s word, they were connected to their full personhood,” he said.

There was a slave woman in the Antebellum South, who was property — and a problem. She had her 8-year-old son with her as she picked cotton, and was so dexterous that she could pick cotton with her right hand and stroke his cheek with her left.

One day the sun was so intense that she fainted in the field. Her child attempted to wake her because he knew the slave driver would be coming after them and punish her.

“Before the slave driver got there, an old man called ‘Preacher’ or ‘Prophet,’ but whom the owner called ‘Old Devil,’ went over to the woman,” Moss said. “ ‘Is it time?’ the woman asked. Preacher said, ‘It is,’ and he whispered a word in her ear.”

She rose as someone with authority. Her son asked, “Is it time for me?” Preacher whispered in his ear, and he turned into a prince. They joined hands, looked up and took flight. The slave driver stopped. Preacher whispered the word to all the enslaved people, and they flew away.

“Three-fifths of a human being was flying,” Moss said. “The dehumanized and dismissed were flying. The slave driver beat the old man and told him to bring back the property.”

“I can’t,” Preacher said. “Once the word enters, it transforms. When the right word comes, divine transformation takes place.”

“Jesus was starting a liberation ministry,” Moss said. “As he said to the people at Capernaum, ‘The spirit of the Lord is upon me to set the captives free.’ ”

The beginnings of a liberation ministry can be seen in Mark 5.

“Jesus looked at the condition of the brother; he lived among the tombs,” Moss said. “It was an economically depressed area. There were no schools, no health care, no libraries — just death and decay.”

The man had mental health problems and the people in his town tried to incarcerate him.

“That mental health system sounds a lot like America to me,” Moss said. “We would rather incarcerate than help. The largest mental health facility in the country is in Chicago — the Cook County Jail.”

The man with issues ran to Jesus and fell at his feet. He said, “Don’t torment me, rabbi.”

“How did the man know Jesus was religious?” Moss asked. “Some people like to spiritualize the story and say that Jesus had an aura. But the man had run into religious people before, and he was in recovery from religious people who would rather torment than help him.”

Many people are traumatized by religion, by people who will “pray at you, but not for you,” Moss said.

“If religion is the problem, faith is the answer,” he said. “Religion tells you when to stand up and sit down. Faith tells you how to serve, how to operate with compassion. America is in recovery from religion that is more capitalist than operating on the love of God. We lock some people up, tell them ‘three strikes and you’re out.’ Then we turn around and say we have an opioid crisis. We lock up one and say we need help for the other. That is religion not deeply connected to love and justice. Something is wrong, something is wrong, something is wrong.”

Jesus came to the lost who need to be found and the sinful who need to be saved.

“Jesus said, ‘I can lift and transform you,’ ” Moss said. “He is dealing with people we don’t want to deal with. Jesus liked thugs. The chief disciple, Peter, is the thug of the Bible because he carried a knife everywhere and cut off an ear when people rolled up on Jesus the wrong way.”

Jesus, on the cross, told one of the thugs that he would be in Paradise with Jesus that day.

“There was no new member class, he did not need to be baptized or voted in,” Moss said. “I don’t know who will be in Paradise, but I do know one thug will be with Jesus. It must be a gangster paradise.”

When Jesus asked the man his name, he did not answer, but the demons did.

“When we are defined by others, the issues answer before the humanity,” Moss said.

The demon said its name was Legion, a Roman military term for a garrison of 10,000 soldiers.

“What Mark is saying is that the man was possessed by 10,000 Roman policies; he connected the demon possession to the Roman occupiers,” Moss said.

The demon then begins to negotiate with Jesus: “Please send us to a place where we can continue our work; don’t dispatch us into the abyss,” the demon says. Jesus sent the Legion into a herd of 2,000 pigs who immediately committed “pigicide.”

“That was five demons per pig, and they couldn’t handle it,” Moss said. “The man had all 10,000 in him and he had incredible strength. We must recognize the power it takes for people with mental health issues to get up and deal with the things we never have to. We have to honor them.”

The man was set free in a unique way. Three times Moss said: “The demon went into the pigs. The pigs committed pigicide. The people caring for the pigs had to go back and tell the owners, ‘The herd has died, your investment is wiped out.’ ”

“Whenever we connect with God in a way that is not just personal piety, we can upend the economic system of a community,” Moss said. “I have a question — what was pork doing in Palestine? These people were making money off something that should not be in the community.”

But Jesus flipped the script on the economic system.

“With love and compassion, we can change the economic system of a nation,” Moss said.

When the community saw the man clothed and in his right mind, they were afraid. They were not afraid when he was cutting himself and they could put him in chains and make money off him.

“The most dangerous thing is when someone is awake, in their right mind, and knows how to shift the system,” Moss said. “America has issues with people like this. Colin Kaepernick is one of my heroes. He was attacked for non-violent protest, for kneeling during the national anthem. He was just silent.”

Moss told the congregation, “we should remember that we do not sing all the verses” of the “Star Spangled Banner.” Francis Scott Key was upset that enslaved people were fighting for the British in the War of 1812. In the third verse he wrote the lines “No refuge could save the hireling and slave / From the terror of flight, or the gloom of the grave.”

“Why don’t we get upset with people in higher offices who are misogynist, who tell people to go back to their country and try to destroy democracy?” Moss asked. “We have a peculiar way of looking at things. This country is not clothed in its right mind.”

The man, now in his right mind and clothed, wanted to go with Jesus, but Jesus told him he could not.

“The man wanted to leave because he was messing with money,” Moss said. “People were holding on to their doctrine, not their faith.”

The man needed to stay with his family and community because if he had left, they would think he was still ill.

“People never let you forget what you used to be,” Moss said. “Jesus turned his life around so that he could put things in the hands of God. Put things in God’s hands and God will turn them around. When Jesus went to a banquet, he turned water into wine. When I go to a banquet, when the wine is done, it is done. When I go to a funeral, the corpse stays in the casket. When Jesus goes, the dead walk. When I go to the ocean, I get sea sick; Jesus calms the sea. I have a little hang time when I play basketball. Jesus hung all day Friday and got up again on Sunday.”

Moss then concluded his sermon.

“Put it in God’s hands,” he said. “Put it in God’s hands. Put it in God’s hands.”

The Rev. John Morgan presided. Deborah Hazlett, a member of a seventh-generation Chautauqua family read the Scriptures. Hazlett is an actor and teacher currently living and working primarily in the Baltimore and Washington D.C. areas. She is the cousin of Daily staff writer Mary Lee Talbot. The preludes were “Allegro assai,” from “Sonata” by Jakob Friedrich Kleinknecht, and “Trio” by Joseph Musser in memory of Chautauquan Richard Kemper. The preludes were played by Barbara Hois, flute, Rebecca Scarnati, oboe and Joseph Musser, piano. The Motet Choir sang “How Can I Keep From Singing,” arranged by Z. Randall Stroope. Jared Jacobsen, organist and coordinator of worship and sacred music, directed the choir. The Gladys R. Brasted and Adair Brasted Gould Memorial Chaplaincy provides support for this week’s services.

Béla Fleck maintains there’s a distinct difference between being active in music and being “all fired up.” The guitar sparked his interest, “but when I got my banjo, I got all fired up,” Fleck said.

Dubbed the “king and queen of banjo” by Paste magazine in 2015, Fleck and Abigail Washburn return to Chautauqua at 8:15 p.m. tonight in the Amphitheater, as part of the husband-and-wife duo’s two-week summer tour of the northeastern United States. All net proceeds from merchandise sales at tonight’s concert will benefit Chautauqua Institution Arts Education programs.

Fleck last performed at the Institution in 2017, co-headlining an Amp performance with his band, Béla Fleck and the Flecktones and the Chick Corea Elektric Band. And in 2015, Fleck and Washburn shared the Amp stage with the Punch Brothers. 

“Béla and I definitely have a bond, other than our marriage, that probably even started with the banjo and our love for it,” Washburn said. “We come from very different styles of playing the banjo, but one thing we decided right at the beginning when we started making our first record together, six years ago now, we decided that the banjo is enough, that we both are in love with the way the banjo sounds and that we want to share that with the world.”

The Fleck and Washburn Friday concert follows Thursday evening’s Our Native Daughters performance to create “a perfect weekend that blends a little folk, bluegrass and rock together,” said Deborah Sunya Moore, Chautauqua’s vice president of performing and visual arts. 

Though Our Native Daughters members — Rhiannon Giddens, Amythyst Kiah, Leyla McCalla and Allison Russell — are not scheduled to perform with Fleck and Washburn tonight, Washburn said she and Fleck share a deep history with Giddens, who is a “dear friend,” and have built connections with Kiah, McCalla and Russell as well. During Washburn’s years with Uncle Earl and Giddens’ time with the Carolina Chocolate Drops, the two would often find themselves in the same places. Similarly, Fleck said the Flecktones would often tour with the Carolina Chocolate Drops.

“Rhiannon and I keep threatening to do something together,” Washburn said. “I know it will happen someday, and it’ll be a neat thing.”

Washburn described her and Fleck’s 2015 Chautauqua performance as a “dream gig,” and said she considers tonight’s performance a highlight of their tour. The duo will perform selections from their 2014 debut album, Béla Fleck & Abigail Washburn, their 2017 record, Echo in the Valley, as well as pieces that may be unfamiliar to the Chautauqua audience.

“I find it deeply fulfilling and meaningful that I get to look at the world around me and feel the things inside of me that have made me who I am,” Washburn said. “Then I can piece it all together — in one way or another — and sew these tapestries of sound that I get to share with people. Those tapestries help us understand each other and connect and process the world that we live in and bring, hopefully, more beauty to how we live our days.”

Such “tapestries of sound” are woven by the duo’s richly blended playing — a combination of Washburn’s African clawhammer style of banjo playing and Fleck’s more contemporary pluck.

“We had to figure out right away how we were going to make the sound of two banjos and a voice enough,” Washburn said.

In all professional endeavors — whether creating music with Washburn, the Flecktones, The Sparrow Quartet or New Grass Revival — Fleck said he tries to be as honest in his music as he can.

“It’s not about how I can get as many marbles out of the game before people stop coming to the shows,” Fleck said. “It’s about presenting an honest picture of my musical perception of the world and what I can do with it, what I can create with it.”

For the banjo skeptic, Washburn said its sound is “warm and intimate,” and Fleck concurred.

“If you’re afraid of the banjo, and you’re not sure you’ll like it, give it a shot,” Fleck said. “If you don’t like this show, then you don’t ever have to go to another banjo show again.”

Between the 1840s and World War I, people struggled across the world. Many died in wars and, due to a lack of sanitation and advanced medical treatment, many were dying of sickness. More specifically, children were dying of diseases that are now typically present only in developing countries.

“There were no antibiotics, there were no emergency rooms or advanced surgeries,” said the Rev. Elaine D. Thomas, spiritual counselor, medium and teacher based in the Lily Dale Assembly in Western New York. “Children shouldn’t be dying before their parents do, and yet they did and they still do. And the gift of mediums and the message that spiritualism has brought, and continues to bring to the world, is the evidence that there is survival after the change that we call death.”

As the first Spiritualist ever to speak on the interfaith platform, Thomas continued Week Five’s interfaith theme, “Chautauqua: Rising from the Ashes of the Burned-Over District,” Wednesday in the Hall of Philosophy with her lecture, “Spiritualism’s Role at Its Inception and Its Relevance Today.”

Thomas began with a short story about her grandfather, her mother’s father, who died when she was 5 years old. After his death, Thomas’ mother would talk at the breakfast table about the things she and Thomas’ grandfather would talk about in her dreams.

“I wanted to say, ‘Mom, when are you going to get it? Grandpa’s really there. It’s not just a dream,’ ” Thomas said. “He started appearing to me mostly when I was out with my friends … and he was never judgmental. He always came with love and, whether I heard his voice or not, he’d give me one of those looks where I knew I had a choice to either follow his guidance or not.”

Thomas said she never questioned whether seeing her grandfather was a good or bad thing. Since she was raised Jewish, and the devil played a minor role in Judaism, she never thought it could have been a negative experience.

“I never gave a thought to the fact that it might be something negative because he came in love, and love is the binding force throughout the universe,” Thomas said. “It’s the only thing we can take with us when we leave this planet. We can’t take our investments; we can’t take our accomplishments. We can take the love and leave the residue of love that we’ve shared and other people have shared with us.”

The inception of modern Spiritualism is threaded within the fabric of many changes during the 19th century, and those changes continue to affect the world, Thomas said.

By the end of the Civil War, 750,000 people had died. As a result, the mediums of the 19th century served as a comfort to those mourning and provided them with evidence that those who passed away were still alive and well in another dimension with God, Thomas said.

“There is comfort, there is consolation,” Thomas said. “All religions talk about it. Spiritualism has the unique approach that (mediums) demonstrate and are able to give this evidence and this comfort and consolation.”

Thomas had studied with the late Edith Sandy Wendling. Her mother died before she was 6 years old, and her father spent a lot of time traveling. In England, she was raised by a nanny, a housekeeper and a sister. When Wendling was about 8, Thomas said, her sister told her that she was going to take her to the neighbors’ house to give the nanny and housekeeper a break.

“Their next door neighbors were Sir Arthur and Lady Conan Doyle,” Thomas said. “She was his second wife, and she was a trans-medium.”

When Wendling’s sister took her to the neighbors’ house, she sat Wendling on the couch and told her to behave herself. The sister wanted Wendling to take naps, but Wendling was curious as to what the married couple was doing in the room near where she was sitting. After six months, the couple allowed her to join them in the next room, where they held their meditation group. After many years, they all remained in touch, even when Wendling moved to North America.

“They (visited) her in Lily Dale,” Thomas said. “As they were leaving, Sir Arthur took (Wendling) by the shoulders and said to her, ‘Promise me something, Edith. Promise me you’ll always be a student of life, and a student of your work and your mission.’ ”

Thomas said that Wendling was a vital force in her own life, and it was thanks to the couple who welcomed a child into their meditation group that Thomas had the opportunity to meet her.

“The Bible calls us children of light, and whether we believe in a literal interpretation or we believe that the Old and New Testament were written by inspired people,” Thomas said, “it’s been my experience and it’s my belief that we are children of light and our culture.”

Through her work as a reading specialist for children, Thomas said she found that all of the children she worked with had intuitive mediumistic or psychic experiences. Working with adult students, Thomas said that no one loses that experience, that connection with the divine. It is always within us; it simply recedes with lack of use.

“Somebody once said, ‘Wherever we look, we see what we’re looking for,’ ” Thomas said. “In other words, the world that we give our attention to is what becomes our reality.”

Thomas said that by training in ancient techniques and mixing them with accelerated learning tools, one can “reclaim what they had as children.” Children pay attention instinctively to what modern adults ignore. By returning to this observant behavior, it can be used practically in life, Thomas said.

This mental training is also how one connects to someone who has died.

“What our intuition and communication with those who have gone on, who don’t have a physical body, have to offer us is a broader view and an insight and the love which they had for us when they were here, which can still reach across what some people call the veil to communicate with us, to be of service in the same way that people are of service here today,” Thomas said.

Thomas said it is taught in Spiritualism that everyone is responsible for their own unhappiness and happiness, and the divine is always available to people. And, by taking the time to focus on how one lives and how one works on their spiritual growth, one will be able to find divinity within themselves, allowing them to connect to the divine.

So, Thomas asked, why is this important in our lives?

“It gives people hope that we will meet those that we know and love here on this Earth when we pass into another dimension and leave this life,” Thomas said. “Knowing that they can reach across what the dimensions are and touch us makes a difference in our lives today.”

Thomas said the concept of spirits is a universal idea. The Bible talks about gifts of the spirit, Thomas said. Thomas believes the world will one day outgrow a religion based on the ideas of Spiritualism.

“Its message for over 150 years has been to bring to the Earth, to bring to people, that not only does life continue, but it continues in a way where we can communicate with one another, where comfort and validation are there for everyone, not just a few,” Thomas said.

Thomas said that some people do misuse the powers of Spiritualism, but that is a small minority. In general, the wisdom of the creator is available to each one of us, Thomas said. And, this opportunity should encourage people to improve their lives on a personal level and reach out to improve the lives of those they touch and, ultimately, try to make the world a better place for everyone.

“It’s not about powers, it’s about service,” Thomas said. “And it’s about healing. … That is the gift of mediumship, the gift of healing, the gift that all the knowledge, that all spiritual religions teach that life is eternal and love can reach across the veil that we seemingly call death. And it’s as relevant today as it was a hundred years ago or a thousand years ago.”

It was Theodore Parker, a 19th-century abolitionist and Unitarian minister, who once said, “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.”

Philip Gulley says that there’s nothing to suggest that sentiment is true.

“The myth of inevitable justice is falsely optimistic,” said Gulley, a writer, Quaker pastor and speaker. “Justice isn’t something that exists inevitably. It’s something that exists because of our commitment to it.”

At 2 p.m. today, July 26, in the Hall of Philosophy, Gulley will conduct Chautauqua’s fifth Interfaith Friday on the problem of evil and the Quaker response to it. Gulley will be joined in conversation by the Rt. Rev. V. Gene Robinson, Chautauqua’s vice president of religion and senior pastor.

“Quakerism is so theologically diverse,” Gulley said. “We have evangelical Quakers, we have Quakers who are atheists. Some Quakers would look at this problem and say, ‘Well, evil is vanquished when Jesus comes again. He’ll descend from the clouds, and some people will go to heaven and some to hell.’ And there are other Quakers who say, ‘There is no heaven and no hell.’ ”

Gulley began down the path that led him to his current writing career back when he was pastoring for a small Quaker church.

“They wanted a newsletter,” he said. “So I began taking writing courses at the Earlham School of Religion in Richmond, Indiana. They really loved my writing, and one of my essays came to the attention of the radio personality Paul Harvey.”

According to Gulley, when Harvey read his essay on-air, it came to the attention of a publisher who offered him a book contract after hearing it.

Fast-forward to 2014, when Gulley published his book, Living the Quaker Way: Timeless Wisdom For a Better Life Today.

“When (Quakers) first began in the mid-1600s, we were quickly an apocalyptic group, as were many other groups started on the heels of the English Civil War,” he said. “We felt the end of the war was near. We had this radical theology and religion that thought we were living in the last days. And that didn’t happen, of course, so we had to evolve into something else — or die.”

While many of the other religious groups of that time gradually faded away, Gulley said that Quakerism lasted.

“What I think caused us to last, was that we were able to make a social and spiritual shift away from apocalypticism, and towards this radical life of holy obedience,” he said. “We believed that life was centered around the Testimonies, which were values like simplicity, peace, equality, compassion and integrity.”

Gulley said those Testimonies were what drew him to Quakerism in the first place, and eventually led to his writing and publishing Living the Quaker Way.

“I decided I’d like to write about the Testimonies,” he said. “I wanted to focus on what it means to be a Quaker today, what animating forces excite us and what it is that we value.”

Out of 45 grandchildren, J. Ekela Kaniaupio-Crozier was her grandmother’s “golden child.”

For years, Kaniaupio-Crozier’s grandmother held onto what was left of the then-forbidden Hawaiian language. But when Kaniaupio-Crozier was born, her grandmother chose her to carry, or perhaps redefine, the legacy of her native language.

Now, after a lifetime of teaching, Kaniaupio-Crozier has learned what her grandmother always hoped she would: Aloha, more than anything else, means love.

Kaniaupio-Crozier, the E Ola! learning designer and facilitator at Kamehameha Schools Maui, and contributing member of the Hawai‘i Development team for the Duolingo language-learning app, gave her lecture “Renormalizing the Hawaiian Language” at 10:45 a.m. Thursday in the Amphitheater, continuing Week Five, “The Life of the Spoken Word.”

“From the rising of the sun, high above Haleakalā, unto its setting on the sands of the bays of the high chief Pi‘ilani; from one level to another level; from the verdance of the deep forest to the glistening ocean; from my homeland, to here in Chautauqua — here I am,” Kaniaupio-Crozier said.

Kaniaupio-Crozier is the daughter of Antonia and Kuanoni Kaniaupio, the grandchild of Kauhiwaiokamakalepo and the great-great grandchild of Lakana, a descendent of Keaunui, high chief of the Ewa plains. Those ancestors, along with many more, are who allow her to share the love of Ōlelo Hawai‘i, the Hawaiian language.

“It’s not the things that I’ve done that define me and my identity, it’s the people I’m connected to,” Kaniaupio-Crozier said. “I recognize my ancestors and my children — for the work I have done and continue to do is not just for me or for the moment or to put some nice cash in my pocket — I do it because I know I have a responsibility to those who stand beside me in this good work and a responsibility to those who will come after me and continue to do the good work of sharing the spoken word.”

From the day Kaniaupio-Crozier was born, Kauhiwaiokamakalepo spoke to her in Hawaiian.

“She chose me, for whatever reason, to be the one that would carry on this language,” she said. “She was the first Hawaiian activist I ever met, but I didn’t know it. She held on to this language until I came into her life.”

Speaking Hawaiian was rare while Kaniaupio-Crozier was growing up, and when she realized she didn’t hear it anywhere other than her home, she “rebelled.”

“I thought, ‘Why are you speaking this language when the only people who speak it look like you?’ ” she said. “They were all kupuna, our elders. I didn’t see any future in this language living or surviving, so for (my grandmother) to speak to me in this language, it just didn’t make sense.”

When Kaniaupio-Crozier was 9 years old, her grandmother brought her to Hawaiian language classes at their local church, where the two were joined by her mother, father and grandfather every week. Considering her family already knew Hawaiian, Kaniaupio-Crozier was confused as to why they came to class with her — until now.

“I know now that they were there for me,” she said. “They were there to show me aloha, to support me in all my frustrations.”

Kaniaupio-Crozier attended Hawaiian language classes until she graduated high school. Excited by the chance to pave her own path in college, she decided to take Spanish for her language credit.

Her Spanish professor, Marjorie Woodrum, was a charismatic woman who demanded attention the minute she walked in a room — the kind of person Kaniaupio-Crozier realized she wanted to become. However, by the time Kaniaupio-Crozier entered her sophomore year, her school had implemented a Hawaiian language course and per her grandmother’s wishes, she took both Spanish and Hawaiian. When Kaniaupio-Crozier found out Woodrum was also teaching Hawaiian, the woman she once idolized suddenly lost her charisma.

“I was mad,” she said. “I was like ‘You don’t know anything about Hawaii, you’re not even Hawaiian. You are a white lady from far away who teaches Spanish, and that’s cool, but you’re going to teach me Hawaiian? No.’ ”

Kaniaupio-Crozier maintained a good attitude in her first-period Spanish class, but as soon as her second-period Hawaiian class rolled around, Kaniaupio-Crozier made sure Woodrum felt her disdain.

In response, Woodrum told Kaniaupio-Crozier that she understood her frustrations. Woodrum then pulled out a globe and asked her if she knew where Czechoslovakia is. Kaniaupio-Crozier did not, and that was the point.

On the other hand, Woodrum knew everything about Czechoslovakia. She knew its culture, its customs, traditions, how people dress, how they think, what they eat and what they value — all things she learned by speaking the language.

“(Woodrum) said, ‘You speak your language, you know who your people are, you know everything about them, but there are Hawaiian children in this school who know nothing about who they are because they don’t know their language — they haven’t heard it,’ ” she said.

Woodrum told Kaniaupio-Crozier she should be the one teaching the school’s Hawaiian class and in that moment, the entire direction of Kaniaupio-Crozier’s life changed.

“I understood what she was saying,” Kaniaupio-Crozier said. “Our language is our identity. Our language answers so many questions about who we are and why we believe what we do and why we think the way we do.”

Kaniaupio-Crozier went home and told Kauhiwaiokamakalepo she had decided to become a Hawaiian language teacher. The only way her grandmother knew how to respond was by telling her story.

Growing up, Kauhiwaiokamakalepo was beaten for speaking Hawaiian. On her first day of school, at 5 years old, her teacher covered her mouth with tape, telling her she couldn’t speak in class until she learned English.

“(My grandmother) said to me, ‘Do you know how hurtful that is?’ ” Kaniaupio-Crozier said.  “ ‘Do you know how painful it is to not be able to express your deepest emotions? At 5 years old, you’re told everything that you know is wrong, and you’ll be told that for the rest of your life. You can’t understand, not just the physical pain of being beaten with a frying pan for speaking your language —  but the emotional pain, the physiological pain. All of that kind of pain? You will never understand because that’s why I have given you this gift.’ ”

After hearing her story, Kaniaupio-Crozier said she felt a responsibility to her grandmother, and to every Hawaiian, to ensure no one else would have to endure that pain.

“It was wrong, and it should never happen again,” she said. “I was going to make sure that it wasn’t going to happen again.”

Kaniaupio-Crozier was unable to switch her major because her school did not offer a degree in Hawaiian language, but she forged ahead, believing that with her grandmother by her side, she could become a teacher anyways. However, five months later, Kauhiwaiokamakalepo passed away.

“I was mad,” Kaniaupio-Crozier said. “We were supposed to do this together, but then she left me.”

It didn’t take long for Kaniaupio-Crozier to realize her grandmother was still with her, just in a different way.

“She showed up, every day, with me,” she said. “She was always there.”

In Kauhiwaiokamakalepo’s passing, Kaniaupio-Crozier felt the presence of an unanswered question: Who would want to take her Hawaiian language classes? Her grandmother always said people would line up to take Kaniaupio-Crozier’s classes, a compliment she didn’t believe until her school approved a Hawaiian degree program and she became the first to graduate with a bachelor’s in Hawaiian language.

“That’s no coincidence,” Kaniaupio-Crozier said. “I don’t live my life by coincidence. I know that every step has been determined by my God, that every step he has already set up for me, and (my grandmother) was my prophet. I call her my prophet and my Hawaiian activist because she knew all of these things and she fought for it.”

Upon graduation, Kaniaupio-Crozier received multiple job offers. She went from teaching preschoolers, to university students and everyone in between — never interviewing for a single position. Even with Kaniaupio-Crozier’s success, her community still questioned why she pursued her career. According to Kaniaupio-Crozier, it’s because the language “touches so many hearts.”

“When you share it wide, people feel it,” she said. “They feel it in their guts and they feel it deep inside because everybody in the world has aloha in their hearts. At the core of every single one of us, is love, love that we want to share.”

In 1978, Hawaiian became Hawaii’s official language, along with English. Though that status is an accomplishment, Kaniaupio-Crozier said the state has a long way to go in terms of respect for the islands and their people.

“It’s become the token. It’s like, ‘Here Hawaiians, you have the official language of the state,’ but when we say we need more money to educate our children in their language, we don’t get it,” Kaniaupio-Crozier said. “When we want to protect our lands and protect our people, it’s not honored. It sounds really good to say that we have the official language, but the reality is it’s not official.”

Regardless, Kaniaupio-Crozier said over time, Hawaiians have become more and more interested in learning more about their culture — and the language especially. As a result, schools —  from preschools to universities —   have implemented Hawaiian language classes.

“Now we have hundreds of graduates and thousands of students who are not just learning Hawaiian, but are learning in Hawaiian,” she said.

Things got even better when Duolingo, a language-learning website and app, was launched in 2011. Now, more than 500,000 people across the globe are learning Hawaiian online. According Kaniaupio-Crozier, that kind of access is crucial for a language to survive.

“The more people that have access to our language, or languages in general, the more it brings us together,” she said. “It helps us to stand up for each other, it helps us to believe that the things that each group needs and wants for their people are good things. Language is the key; it’s the key for us to be able to unlock doors to know about people, to understand their culture and their identity.”

Kaniaupio-Crozier wonders what her grandmother would think if she saw the way Hawaiian language has transformed under her watch. Although she can’t know for sure, Kaniaupio-Crozier has a pretty good guess: “Ua ha‘i aku wau iā‘oe pēlā.”

“I told you so.”

From July 17 to 19 in Smith Wilkes Hall, members of the Bestor Society, Eleanor B. Daugherty Society and 1874 Society Fellows were recognized with a special invitation to attend the Scholar in Residence series featuring Amani M. Allen.

Allen, associate professor of community health sciences and epidemiology at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Public Health, delivered three in-depth presentations focusing on social inequalities as fundamental causes of health inequalities following her 10:45 a.m. lecture on July 16 in the Amphitheater.

Each day was part of an overarching theme that explored the role of social inequalities in long-term disparities in health among different races/ethnicities and socioeconomic statuses.

In her presentations, Allen focused on the origins of racial and ethnic classifications, patterns in racial and ethnic health disparities over time and challenges that are associated with underlying evidence and common explanations of racial/ethnic health disparities.

“We have the pleasure of spending the next three days together to dig a little deeper into this idea of how social factors impact health,” Allen said.

Allen presented a video that showed how the stress of racism and discrimination negatively impacts pregnancies in women of color. Social injustices and biases can cause poor health in minorities and people of color.

“I’ve titled this series, ‘Unnatural Causes’ because the kinds of things that we’re going to be talking about — race, racism, socioeconomic position — these are not the kinds of causes we should be dying from,” Allen said. “So we’re going to be talking for the next few days about social inequalities as fundamental causes of health inequities.”

Day two consisted of discussions that focused on self vs. socially-assigned race, and its role in understanding social stress as an explanation for racial health disparities.

Lastly, Allen explored the various ways in which social inequalities make people sick. She also discussed the question of responsibility and accountability related to racial and socioeconomic health disparities.

Members of the Bestor Society and 1874 Society Fellows include Chautauquans who have donated $3,500 or more to the Chautauqua Fund each year, and those who join the Daugherty Society have included Chautauqua in their will or have made a planned gift. Since 1991, the Scholar in Residence program has been offered by the Chautauqua Foundation to express gratitude to these donors for their leadership support.

The Edward L. Anderson Jr. Foundation has underwritten the Scholar in Residence program for the past nine years. Dave Anderson, son of the late Ed Anderson, said the series is a great way to thank members of the leadership giving community for their contributions.

“It’s just really an opportunity for people to dig a little deeper into the topics that they care about and the opportunity to spend some more time with something that’s important to them,” Anderson said.

Anderson attended the program with his wife, Deirdre. He and his brother, Steve, who serves as president of the Edward L. Anderson Jr. Foundation, are dedicated to carrying on their father’s legacy and passion for learning.

For more information about special seminars like the Scholar in Residence program or giving opportunities at Chautauqua, please contact the Chautauqua Foundation at 716-357-6243 or foundation@chq.org.

Young Chautauquans fill Boys’ and Girls’ Club with the light hum of conversations. But today, young Chautauquans will replace the light hum of their daily activities with the booming sounds of opera.

“It’s a great opportunity to introduce kids to opera for possibly the first time — camp is an awesome setting for kids to try new things,” said Alyssa Porter, director of youth and family programs at Chautauqua.

At 10:30 a.m. Friday, July 26 at Club, kids will sing as loud as they can to compete in the annual “So You Think You’re Louder Than an Opera Singer?” Opera Invasion. Steven Osgood, Chautauqua Opera Company’s general and artistic director, is joined by four students in the Voice Program as they give young Chautauquans a taste of opera.

Osgood, Lydia Grace Graham, Gal Kohav, Mathieu Levan and Brandon Mecklenburg will teach the kids about opera as well as the phrases they will sing from the third opera in Chautauqua Opera’s Figaro Trilogy Festival, The Ghosts of Versailles. The four singers play the roles of the opera box ghosts in The Ghosts of Versailles.   

For the Opera Invasion, the kids will be split up into two groups and attend a 45-minute class. Osgood said the sessions will introduce kids to the fundamentals of opera, similar to the educational session conducted during a tour of local schools prior to the summer season.

“It’s a time for us to dig in more deeply with what opera means to us,” Osgood said. “We will talk about the musical devices that opera uses to express emotion — pitch, timbre and dynamic.”

To inspire young Chautauquans, the quartet of singers will perform a piece from The Ghosts of Versailles.

After learning about opera and musical devices, Osgood and his team will teach the kids phrases from The Ghosts of Versailles, which they will perform in an end-of session competition.

In the last 15 minutes of the session, the kids will face off with their freshly rehearsed phrases to see who is louder than an opera singer. The group will be split into four sections; each section will be organized by one of the four voice students.

“They’ll figure out who is the loudest from their group,” Osgood said. “And there will be a competition from there — from the two big groups there should be four winners.”

Osgood said this Opera Invasion is a chance to bring opera to kids, hopefully sparking some passion about opera and music.

“If we weren’t to do it, we would be doing everybody a disservice,” Osgood said. “There’s relatively so much less arts in the schools nationwide, and yet here we are with an opera company and this age group who are hungry for activities. We have to do it.”

Hidden behind Boxcar Barney’s ice cream shop in Mayville, beyond the edge of the gravel driveway and over an old, uneven railroad bridge, a walking and biking trail stretches into the trees.

The dirt is a luscious brown color from Monday’s rain, and the grass that runs alongside the path and the trees that form living walls on either side are bright green. The whole scene is sun-dappled.

This little natural alley is part of the Chautauqua Rails to Trails system, which was transformed from abandoned railroad beds into multi-use trails by the Chautauqua Rails to Trails organization. The path continues south to Sherman and north to Brocton, comprising 30 miles total.

Chautauqua Rails to Trails will host its second annual Wine Walk fundraiser from 4 to 7 p.m. Friday, July 26 at the trailhead near Boxcar Barney’s. Waves of walkers will depart every 30 minutes.

Bree Agett, event organizer and vice president of the organization, said she overheard some people at last year’s event saying that they did not know about the trail, despite the fact that they lived in the Mayville area.

“Beyond fundraising, (we’re trying to build) awareness of the trails,” she said. “Hearing that people had never been on the trail before, that this was their first time, was really rewarding. It makes me feel like all of the work we do as a board matters.”

The walk will begin and end at the Nadine and Paul Webb Trail trailhead. Participants will walk down the trail to where it intersects with Morris Road and back.

Some tickets will be available at the door in the 4 p.m. to 5 p.m., and 6 p.m. to 7 p.m. time slots. Tickets are $30 at the door and $15 for designated drivers. Updates on ticket availability can be found on the group’s Facebook page.

The 2-mile walk features six wine stops. At each, there will be a sweet option, a dry option and a snack — including granola truffles from Jamestown-based Reach Organics and mini cupcakes from Westfield-based Cakes by Brandy.

Each stop along the route will feature selections from a different winery. Five of the wineries are local: Johnson Estate Winery, Woodbury Winery & Vineyards, Merritt Estate Winery, Five & 20 Spirits & Brewing and Liberty Vineyards & Winery. The sixth stop will have Barefoot champagne purchased from JB Liquor Shoppe in Jamestown.

All vendors either donated the wine or provided the event organizers with a discount.

“We’re very fortunate that they’ve supported us in this,” Agett said. “It’s going to really help us take the event further and make it fun and affordable for people, while helping us to maintain the trail.”

Agett said the proceeds from the fundraiser will be used for trail maintenance. The biggest enemies of the trail, she said, are beavers, whose dams can cause the trail to flood, and ATVs, which tear up the trail, and water, which can erode the trail or make it muddy.

“Our biggest cost is keeping water off of the trail,” she said.

Some culverts — big pipes that channel water under the trails to prevent it from running over them — need to be replaced, a project that will be extremely costly.

“We have bigger dreams as well that we’re not quite to the point of realizing,” Agett said. “We’d really like to try out a new surface on one of the sections of the trail, like a crushed limestone surface, that would decrease maintenance needs.”

The effort to create a Rails to Trails system in Chautauqua County began in 1991, as a movement started to sweep the country — turning abandoned railroads into productive public spaces.

As automobile and air travel became more common, and train travel fell to the wayside, an estimated 38,000 miles of rail lines were abandoned, according to the Rails-to-Trails Conservancy website. By 1990, 103,000 miles were abandoned.

“It was a national movement, so we jumped on it because of all of the abandoned railroad tracks in our county,” said Wendy Lewellen, secretary of Chautauqua Rails to Trails. “We had a lot of them due to the discovery of oil in Titusville, Pennsylvania.”

Lewellen said a number of local influential people —  including John Goodell and Robert Berke, a local doctor who later became president of the group — came together to create the trail system.

The founders of the organization had to embark on a complicated process of acquiring the railroad property where they could, and securing easements wherever the trail went through private property.

“It’s a hodgepodge,” Lewellen said. “Some places we own, some places we just have a gentlemen’s agreement, and everything in between.”

Once the logistics were set, the crew had to clean up the abandoned railroad sites, which in some parts had become a dumping ground for old refrigerators and other trash.

“It had become a no-man’s land,” Lewellen said.

In 1996, the first trail in the system opened: the Ralph C. Sheldon Jr. Trail, which runs about 7 miles from Titus Road in Sherman, to Summerdale Road in the Town of Chautauqua.

Six other sections were opened sporadically from 1998 to 2002, Lewellen said. In 2006, the Portage Trail, which extends about 3.5 miles from Route 430 along the old Jamestown, Westfield and Northwest railroad tracks.

Now, the trail system extends about 30 miles from Sherman to Brocton.

Hikers, runners, cyclists, horseback riders, snowshoers, cross country skiers and snowmobilers enjoy the trails year-round.

Lewellen said Chautauqua Rails to Trails collaborates with the Chautauqua Lake Snowmobile Club to help maintain the trail, which is a popular destination for snowmobilers in the winter.

Chautauqua Rails to Trails’ president, Jim Fincher, was originally hired as a trail manager in 2000.

“Ever since then, he has been the definition of Chautauqua Rails to Trails,” Lewellen said. “They’re synonymous.”

Now, the group is working on a new trail which will connect downtown Frewsburg at Main Street, to Riverside Road near the Audubon Community Nature Center in Jamestown.

Lewellen said the trails are a great place for anyone looking to get some exercise or enjoy nature.

“It improves the quality of life for visitors and people who live here because they can access nature; and it’s a place to get your exercise,” she said. “Most of our country is not great about having sidewalks and bike paths.”