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“If I were in Chicago today, I would ask you to turn to your neighbor,” said the Rev, Otis Moss III at the 10:45 a.m. Ecumenical Service of Worship and Sermon Sunday in the Amphitheater. “I am not in Chicago, but I am going to ask you to turn to your neighbor and say after me, ‘Neighbor, oh neighbor, we must bring those who are broken by life to God by any means necessary.’ ”

Moss’ sermon title was “By Any Means Necessary,” and the Scripture reading was Luke 5:17-26, the healing of a paralyzed man.

He read the Scripture again for emphasis. “Tina (Downey) read the New International Version, now I am going to read the OM3 translation,” he said. OM3, meaning Otis Moss III.

In the OM3 version, Jesus was lecturing to the Sunday school teachers, lawyers, scholars and anyone who thought they knew more than anyone else. A man, broken by life, was brought by his friends because they thought Jesus could help him. Everyone was blown away when Jesus told the man his sins were forgiven and to take his mat and go on home.

“I want to lift up that great cultural icon, el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz, also known as Malcom X, born Malcolm Little,” Moss said. “He revered the teachings of Marcus Garvey and then Elijah Muhammad, and he became the prophet of black self-esteem.”

Why lift up the voice of a Muslim icon? Moss asked.

“Because the truth is not exclusively heard in the Christian decibels,” he said. “God has a right to use whomever God chooses.”

Malcom X, Moss said, believed that oppressed people were declaring their right to be human beings, their right to respect as human beings, “by any means necessary.”

“No one can determine for you the conditions of liberation,” Moss said. “The status quo only wants to use orthodox means. It is a tragedy when only one way is the orthodox way. That means that there are some who are above and some who are below in the hierarchy. We must be willing to connect with God by any means. We humans love to place limits on God, to keep God in finite hands with limited vision. God can’t be boxed.”

God, Moss said to the congregation, is beyond anthropomorphic words.

“Our language can’t express all that God is,” he said. “If God is only male, we are only allowing God to work at 50% capacity.”

God has to be trans in nature, Moss said.

“God is mother to the motherless and father to the fatherless,” he said. “In the pathway to God we have to let go of our boxes.”

Moss returned to the text from the Gospel of Luke. He set the scene of Jesus teaching in the house to the “Sunday school teachers and scholars and those who thought they knew something.”

The focus of the story was on the people in the house.

“God is always lurking at the margins,” Moss said. “A group of brothers came along carrying another brother in deep need. The disinherited were trying to get into the presence of God.”

Moss warned the congregation not to adopt the “empire style of faith — capitalism in religious garb.”

The man on the mat had some faithful friends.

“He had been broken by life,” Moss said.

Although the text does not tell how many friends the man had, Moss said he thinks there were four of them. These friends thought it would be good for the man on the mat to meet Jesus.

“Let me give a word to parents: Sometimes you just have to expose your children to the right values, put them in the presence of the right values, and they will pick them up,” Moss said.

There was one friend on each corner: north, south, east and west.

“Each brother was working his corner,” Moss said. “That is a big challenge — there is too much corner conflict instead of working your own corner. Work your own corner, focus on what God called you to do. Work your corner and bring those who are broken into the presence of God.”

Moss said he knew the four friends were brothers “because they couldn’t get in the front door. Religious people blocked their access to the love of God. The church has these patterns of restriction for people who can’t get in the front doorway.”

The brothers were going to get in one way or another.

“From the colonizing perspective, there is only one way in, but God is always saying you can do it differently,” Moss said.

Jesus used a variety of methods to heal people, from just sending them on their way, to someone touching his hem, to spitting on dirt and applying mud to blind men’s eyes.

“We tend to deify the method instead of the message,” Moss said.

He asked the congregation to raise their hands if they remembered 78 records, then 45 records, 33 1/3 records, LP’s, 8-tracks, CDs, MP3s and streaming, Spotify and iTunes.

“Take the song ‘Amazing Grace’ — it is the same song no matter what method you use to play it,” Moss said. “But we have 8-track people in a streaming world who are focused on the method and not the message.”

There was no side or back door on the house, so the brothers decided to tear the roof off. They made their own door.

“There was a sudden noise, and now everyone in the house was looking up,” Moss said. “The brothers used a different method and they shifted the focus.”

The man on the mat was dropped into the front row because of the commitment of others.

“Jesus saw their faith and blessed the man,” Moss said. “Let me say that again. Jesus saw their faith and blessed the man. You are still not getting it. He saw their faith and blessed him.”

But the man had never asked to be blessed, Moss said.

“You have to hang out with the right people to get a blessing,” he said. “I call this a ‘bank shot blessing’ — you aim your shot over here and someone over there is blessed.”

Jesus saw the man at his feet and forgave his sins. The man was happy, but he wanted to get up and walk. Moss said that we need spiritual healing before we can have biological healing.

“If we change our theology, then we can change our anthropology, then our psychology, then our sociology so that those are not ‘illegal people’ coming over the border, but each is a child of God,” Moss said. “Then we can change our biology because the endorphins will begin to flow. Having the wrong theology messes up the whole chain. When we see these people as children of God, we can see our whole nation differently.”

Jesus asked the people sitting in front of him if it was easier to forgive sins or tell someone to take up his mat and walk. They said nothing.

“Jesus told him to take up his mat and walk,” Moss said. “His bed was a sign of his affliction, a symbol of his marginalized poverty. People would see how it is possible to get up from a life of begging. When they asked him how he could walk, the man could say, ‘I met a man named Jesus.’ ”

In Chautauqua, Moss said, you have queers sitting beside Quakers, Presbyterians sitting beside Pentacostals, Methodists sitting beside Muslims.

“Everything here is a tapestry of the nation,” he said. “You have to work your corner when you leave Chautauqua. If you can change your corner, you can change your neighborhood. If you can change your neighborhood, you can change your city. If you can change your city, you can change your county. If you can change your county, you can change your state. If you can change your state, you can change your region. And if you can change your region, you can change this nation.”

Moss told the congregation to work their corners “by any means necessary.”

“Work your corner and change the nation,” he said. “Work your corner and make this the nation is was meant to be. Work your corner.”

Before Moss finished his sentence, the congregation was on its feet, giving him a standing ovation.

The Rt. Rev. V. Gene Robinson, vice president of religion and senior pastor, presided. Tina Downey, director of the Chautauqua Fund, read the Scriptures. The Sanctuary Choir of Trinity United Church of Christ, Chicago, blessed the space singing “Every Praise to Our God,” under the direction of Marcus Griffith. They were accompanied by the Voices of Trinity Band. The Chautauqua Choir, under the direction of Jared Jacobsen, organist and coordinator of worship and sacred music, led the hymn-anthem “Holy God, We Praise Your Name,” arranged by John Ferguson. The Trinity Sanctuary Choir sang “Total Praise,” by Richard Smallwood, for the anthem. Peter Steinmetz served as cantor for the response to the morning prayers, “Return to God,” by Marty Haugen. The Chautauqua Choir sang “He Comes to Us as One Unknown,” by Jane Marshall, for the offertory anthem. The Chautauqua Choir sang “MLK,” arranged by Bob Chilcott, as a gift to the Trinity Sanctuary Choir. Peter Steinmetz and Jason Maynard served as soloists. The Gladys R. Brasted and Adair Brasted Gould Memorial Chaplaincy provides support for this week’s services.

Italian love songs, Renaissance melodies, and a “heretical” Psalm: these are the musical offerings of today’s chamber music group, New York Polyphony.

The quartet will perform at 4 p.m. today, July 22, in Elizabeth S. Lenna Hall as part of the Chautauqua Chamber Music Guest Artist Series. Unlike any other chamber music concert this season, the performance will be entirely vocal. While today’s program exclusively features music from the 16th century and earlier, NYP has in its repertoire a range of music styles, including more contemporary works.

The group performs a range of music, from Gregorian chants to brand-new commissioned pieces. Countertenor Geoffrey Williams said the quartet works to find connections between centuries of music.

“We’ve found that because we have a natural love for the earlier repertoire, especially sacred music and a capella singing, we’ve found a connection between the clarity and cleanliness of ancient repertoire and the way modern composers tend to write,” Williams said.

The quartet frequently commissions new music for performance. Williams said these pieces especially build connections between modern music and its ancient roots.

“So when we’re looking for composers to write new pieces for the group, we look for someone who can find parallels from the older repertoire — harmonic or melodic inspiration, similar texts — and that’s how we try to make programs work together,” Williams said.

According to Williams, these parallels do more than connect the pieces to one another — they connect them with the audience.

“We’re always trying to find that sort of connective tissue between centuries, so our audience has something to sink their teeth into,” Williams said.

NYP’s programs often feature ancient sacred music. While such pieces were not written with chamber music performance in mind, Williams said the pieces were designed for similarly intimate performances.

“Just because it’s largely music that was not intended for large publication — it was meant for smaller crowds and for church services — it’s still very viable chamber music,” he said.

Today’s performance features pieces from before the 1600s. Even within this timeframe, the pieces vary dramatically, Williams said.

“It’s entirely music from 1600 and before — there’s no new music in this program,” Williams said. “But it’s interesting because there’s sacred music, there’s secular music. Some of it is very light-hearted material, and some of it is very intense.”

That intensity, Williams said, begins with the opening piece: 16th-century Belgian composer Jacob Clemens’ “Tristitia obsedit me” (The sadness surrounds me), based on the final writing by the same name of 15th-century Italian priest Girolamo Savonarola. Savonarola spoke and wrote against corruption in the clergy during the tumultuous Medici reign. He wrote “Tristitia obsedit me” while awaiting execution in 1498.

“We open with a sacred piece that has a text from the very controversial priest, Savonarola,” Williams said. “He ended up being excommunicated because of his controversial writing; he was deemed a heretic. So the piece has a real sense of intensity.”

While Savonarola was executed before he could complete “Tristitia obsedit me,” the piece became one of his most widespread writings.

The program will also feature lighter pieces, including both secular and sacred music from France and Italy.

Williams said he believes that NYP, as a chamber group, has the ability to make even the oldest pieces new.

“You have the opportunity to take more risks: interpretation, dynamics and so forth,” Williams said. “It also means each performance is more spontaneous; you can come together and perform a piece that feels new every time.”

Great stories happen to those who can tell them. With a sense of humility and some self-deprecating humor, Ira Glass does not consider himself one of those people.

Glass, creator and host of NPR’s “This American Life,” spoke to his storytelling process with a mix of audio and visuals at 8:15 p.m. Saturday, July 20 in the Amphitheater. Under Glass’ editorial direction, “This American Life” has won the highest honors for broadcasting and journalistic excellence, including six Peabody awards.

“We all know people who anything happens to them and they tell you a great story,” Glass said. “I am not one of those people at all.”

Glass started at NPR as a 19-year-old intern and never looked back — except on Saturday to reflect on seven lessons he’s learned over the years. They’re not the only seven, nor are they the most important. Some were “hard fought knowledge,” others, just for fun. All were worthy of sharing.

His first lesson was “how to tell a story,” where Glass argued it’s not always the content of a story that matters — with a strong narrative and forward motion, banal events can become compelling tales.

“At the heart of what we’re doing is narratives; we’re telling stories,” he said. “In fact, the things that made us different from other public radio shows is that we were doing journalism, but the journalism was all narrative; we were telling stories about people where things unfold.”

Glass played the first example from “This American Life,” a story told by the mom of a 13-year-old girl who loved watching “Saturday Night Live,” which inspired her to want to dress up like Hillary Clinton for Halloween — the red blazer, make-up and all.

After seeing her daughter in make-up, the mom said, “Wow, you look so much better.”

Immediately understanding her words’ repercussions, the mom feared for the worst — everything from an initial meltdown to long-term therapy. Luckily, the outcome was none of the above. Her daughter simply replied, “I don’t think you’re supposed to say something like that to me.”

The story was complete at that point, but complete isn’t enough for radio.

“That’s really not enough if you want the story to be satisfying,” Glass said. “Somebody has to have a thought about what the thought means, some idea about what the story is. The thought doesn’t have to be the most profound idea in the world, it just has to be kind of interesting.”

Glass followed up with the teenage daughter in a phone interview to see if her mom’s comment left any permanent damage. She said although she doesn’t consider it a big deal, she would definitely use it against her mom as leverage, if needed.

Glass is not claiming this method is his own invention. When it comes to telling good stories, Glass is comforted to know that he and Jesus had the same set-up.

To journalists who feel like they get nothing out of interviewing kids, Glass said they are just asking the wrong questions. For his second lesson, Glass described the experience of interviewing Joseph “Joe No Love” Kendrick, a 14-year-old who refused to believe in love because he witnessed the downfall of one too many middle school relationships.

“I really don’t think it would be worth all of the pain,” Joe said in a recording of “This American Life.” “Some people commit suicide over it, and I just don’t think that’s a good thing to get caught up in.”

Glass then shared a video of interviews with some of Kendrick’s classmates. Just asking the students about their thoughts on love resulted in hours of unedited content.

“They just poured out their hearts; which I have to say points to why it is so much easier to interview kids than adults, why it’s actually better if you interview kids than adults,” Glass said. “With adults, it takes much longer to get to that point. Adults, we are guarded, we learn to be guarded, where as kids, they’ll say what they think.”

Children have a sense of urgency that can create a story out of nothing, Glass said.

“Kids are constantly getting into situations where they have this feeling of ‘OK, I’m doing this for the very first time and what happens now is going to affect who I am for the rest of my life,’ ” he said. “The stakes in their lives are just very, very high.”

Glass caught up with Joe 10 years later. With a girlfriend and a new outlook on life and love, the only thing Joe agrees with his younger self on is that “suicide is not a good thing to get caught up in.”

His next lesson, “How do you know if your kid will grow up to be a mascot?” was self-explanatory. If a child pretends to be a dog to the extreme that Navey Baker did growing up, there’s a good chance they will grow up to be a professional sports mascot. A really good one.

For his fourth lesson, Glass said “it’s normal to be bad before you’re good.”

When Glass started as an NPR intern in 1978, he was intimidated by his superiors’ skills.

“I remember thinking these people had some magic power that I didn’t have,” he said. “It was like they were on the other side of some wall that I was never going to get across. I just had no idea how you could get from where I was — incompetent — to where they were, which was grossly competent.”

Glass played a kitschy clip from his early years at NPR. He visited an Oreo production factory, and for the first time, he thought he nailed a story. Audio of his timid, 20-something self came over the Amp speakers, which ran through his visit in a condensed, lackluster fashion — something he now seamlessly describes in vivid detail.

“I bring this up to say it’s normal to be bad before you’re good,” he said. “I wish somebody had told me that. I felt terrible for years. All you can do is just make a lot of work. You have to be disciplined, you have to put yourself on a schedule, you have to make work regularly, you have to show it to people, get their reactions and think about their reactions.”

To improve, Glass paid NPR reporters $50 to read his work and tell him what he was doing wrong.

“There are things I learned, through that, that I continue to do to this day,” he said. “It was so much cheaper than grad school.”

For the record, he is still appalled some of the reporters actually took his money.

For the fifth lesson, Glass said his motto is “failure is success.”

According to him, the process of choosing stories and creating content for “This American Life” is utter “chaos.”

“We consider tons of stuff, it’s a mix of pitches from journalists and random people write us,” he said. “I would say most of the best things we do come when someone on staff gets obsessed with something and wants to know everything about it.”

Glass is often asked how he gets people to say such personal things on-air, and the truth is, most of the time, he doesn’t.

“Most stories we try die in the process; it’s inefficient by design,” he said. “We run thing after thing after thing waiting for lightning to strike and because we come out every week, we need lightning to strike every week. The fact is, lightning is not going to hit you unless you spend a lot of time in the rain.”

But because quotes are the most important element of any radio story, Glass keeps looking.

“In a radio piece, you are peculiarly dependent on the quotes,” he said. “In a print piece, you don’t need that, but in a radio piece, you really need the person to be able to talk about what happened to them and ideally, with feeling, because a story is an engine for feeling.”

In his next lesson, “amuse yourself,” Glass said the lack of humor in news stories is a “failure of craft.”

Sometimes a story delivers a laugh on a silver platter, like when a hotel clerk’s response to Beto O’Rourke running for president was none other than “Yas queen.” Other times it’s folded in the narrative, such as when one of Glass’ reporters, Chana Joffe-Walt, claimed a lawyer spoke in such a way one could “hear his bow tie through his voicemail.”

“Funny moments make a story more interesting, they keep you tuned in and also, if you travel the world, you’ll notice even in very sad and dark situations, weird, funny and inspiring things happen,” he said. “What it is doing is reaffirming that the world is a place where surprise and pleasure are possible — it makes things hopeful.”

In his final lesson, Glass candidly discussed the state of news media and the threat of the misleading, non-factual information plaguing the internet.

The radio example he played started with a political fight about immigration in Homer, Alaska, right after the 2016 presidential election. Liberals on the city council proposed a resolution that would welcome immigrants to Homer, including undocumented immigrants and Muslims, but Trump supporters on the city council took it as a direct threat.

“It became the most bitter political fight anyone in the town could remember,” Glass said. “It turned people against each other in a very ugly way. It led to a recall election. They had their own email scandal.”

Everyone in Homer took sides, except for 27-year-old Ben Tyrer. Before the disagreement, Tyrer had no interest in the news, so when he tried to educate himself on the immigration issues taking over his town, he found himself overwhelmed.

“His understanding was that publications like The New York Times and The Washington Post had a bad rap, so he didn’t really spend too much time there,” Glass said. “He would go to a site like the BBC, but worried maybe they were giving him a liberal bend. So then he’d go to a site like this conservative Canadian one he found, ‘The Rebel,’ but he knew he couldn’t fully trust that either.”

Tyrer read about “no-go” zones in France — neighborhoods where Muslims don’t allow non-Muslims — and about crime waves sweeping Germany and France due to Muslim refugees.

And after a week of this, Tyrer came to his conclusion: Allowing immigrants into Homer was too dangerous. However, thanks to Glass’ reporter, Brian Reed, Tyrer found out a majority of the stories he read were either exaggerated or completely false.

The no-go zones in France? They didn’t exist. Other than the crime of crossing the border or overstaying a visa, there was also no evidence of an increase in crime by immigrants in Germany in 2015.

“It had never hit me so starkly,” Glass said. “We all know that there is a massive machine out there that is churning out non-factual stories, but at the fact-based media where I work, we don’t even bother to check those out because there are so many of them and so they just stand there, uncorrected.”

Glass said “alarmed” doesn’t begin to capture how much the fake-news epidemic worries him, but feels people need to stop attributing the problem to the current administration.

“This is a seismic moment in our country that we are living through,” he said. “President Trump, like President Obama, is going to be out of the White House someday. As a non-partisan journalist, I have no position on that at all, but this information ecosystem I’m talking about, this will be around for the rest of our lives.”

The culprits of the misinformation see fake news as an information war. And the lesson, according to Glass, is that it’s time journalists did, too.

“We need to treat this as a war,” he said. “We need to flood the zone with money and new ideas about how to reach people and what to reach them with, and with new, original content that is targeting an audience that is not buying fact-based information right now. I believe this is a moment that requires a strategy that is yet to be inflicted by a team that has not yet picked up arms.”

But there’s good news. Television has “never been better.”

“You can’t even watch all the stuff your friends tell you to watch,” Glass said. “Television is so good. If the people who ran television ran our climate policy, it would be fixed. If the people who ran ‘Fleabag’ were running our Iran policy, they would have denuclearized eight years ago. I’m sure of it.”

Spencer McBride looks at American history through the lens of “the way that society impacts religion, and the way that religion impacts society.”

“I think about the Burned-over District as this very significant time and place,” said McBride, a historian, author and documentary editor for The Joseph Smith Papers. “What happened in terms of religious revivalism and social reforms in 19th-century America are still felt to this day. It was absolutely essential to the development of American society as we know it today.”

At 2 p.m. today, July 22, in the Hall of Philosophy, McBride will draw attention to this historical event through his lecture, “The Origins and Legacy of the Burned-over District,” part of the Week Five interfaith theme, “Chautauqua: Rising from the Ashes of the Burned-Over District.”

“For the Burned-over District, in terms of chronology, we’re talking about the years 1790 to 1860,” McBride said. “And we’re talking about Western New York, which includes the Adirondacks and the Catskill Mountains, but also to an extent Albany and the Mohawk River Valley.”

The Burned-over District refers to the state of New York during the Second Great Awakening, a Protestant religious revival that took place in the early 19th century.

“It was a time and place where the religious revivalism of the Second Great Awakening was happening in particularly high concentration,” McBride said. “This surge in church membership and religious participation throughout the United States was happening in a big way in Western New York.”

McBride said he plans on discussing how the Burned-over District came to be, why New York experienced such a high concentration of religious revivalism and the legacy of that revivalism — a legacy which McBride says Chautauqua is a part of.

“We see that along with the high concentration of religious revivalism in New York, there was a corresponding high concentration of social reform movements,” he said. “The revivals were happening across the country, not just New York. Same with social reform movements such as the abolition of slavery, women’s suffrage and the temperance movement.”

According to McBride, the establishment of Chautauqua was a result of larger, regional movements.

“Chautauqua started as a place to train Sunday school teachers,” he said. “The Sunday School movement was initially connected with the Methodist church, and the Sunday school movement originally was not so much about religious instruction. Today, we think of Sunday schools as teaching the Bible and teaching theology.”

But McBride said that in the 1800s, Sunday schools were mainly about providing literacy training and education for underprivileged people.

For his lecture today, McBride said he plans on using the history of the Burned-over District as a prologue to explain Chautauqua’s existence, and its origins in the Sunday school movement.

“This is not only a Western New York story,” he said. “That region epitomizes these broader movements.”

Review by Andrew Druckenbrod:

Think of the volume of a typical orchestral fortissimo and then double it. Then double it again. Now you have a good sense of the decibel level inside the Amphitheater Thursday night. The first amplification came with Igor Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring,” one of the loudest works in the Western canon. The second was due to the combination of the Chautauqua Symphony Orchestra and the Music School Festival Orchestra under the baton of Rossen Milanov.

The count was 164 onstage in a piece that already calls for heft, including multiple bass drums, timpani and eight horns. The musicians were elbow-to-elbow but not cramped, a reminder of how important it is that Chautauqua Institution built the new Amp. The dual concert is a significant part of the School of Music season — yet another step into professional life for the students — and the facility, with its expanded stage, did not hinder it.

Anyone who knows the level of the music students here is aware they also wouldn’t hold the concert back. And that was the case, with ensemble, pitch, phrasing — anything you want — in fine form. It was in such good taste that Milanov recognized Maria Fuller, the MSFO’s conducting fellow this summer, for her work preparing it for the concert, aided in this effort by its music director, Timothy Muffitt. But I chuckled thinking about what those in the audience who neither knew this, nor the deliberately off-kilter score of Alfred Schnittke’s “(K)ein  Sommernachtstraum” that opened the concert, thought of the performance.

Composed in the mid-1980s, the work is on one level a metaphor for lost innocence. An inviolate pseudo-Mozartean theme meets a buzz saw that sends splinters of dissonance everywhere until it returns, troubled and transformed, at the end. After the dainty theme arrives in a trio of piano, violin and flute, it fractures into what seems like the out-of-sync, out-of-tune jangle of an elementary orchestra.

“The quality of the student musicians at Chautauqua isn’t what it used to be …” If that misguided thought actually occurred, it would have been immediately recanted in the superb rendering of “The Rite of Spring” that followed. Stravinsky’s music for the ballet by Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, in 1913, may not shock like it did a century ago, but its story does. Here, Schnittke’s lost innocence is replaced by the loss of an innocent, as the “Rite” is an imagined virgin sacrifice in a pagan ceremony. Stravinsky didn’t portray this in mythical terms, but exposed its brutality, one very soon to be matched in the trenches of World War I. 

Awash with strident playing and ground-pounding rhythms, “Rite” is a fiendishly difficult work. Milanov often played the role of a marching band conductor, although he wisely held back the full force of the orchestra early on to allow for intensification as it progressed. The musicians, with students and professionals sharing each desk, attacked the work’s almost capricious accents with precision and its walls of sound with clarity. The percussion and timpani players admirably led from the back in the most cacophonous moments. The strings, handling plenty of forceful down bows, were smooth and cohesive.

But one measures the success of a “Rite” performance in its quieter episodes. Here, soloists and sections, especially the horns and woodwinds, were on form and Milanov had space to craft phrases and bring out color. It all began with bassoon player Jeffrey Robinson’s glowing tone as he made quick work of the opening solo. 

Guest critic Andrew Druckenbrod is a lecturer in the Department of Music at the University of Pittsburgh and the former classical music critic of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. He has contributed to many music publications, including Gramophone, BBC Music and Opera News.

Ever wonder what the world’s largest whoopee cushion sounds like? Trevor Cox knows.

At one point in time, he held the world record himself, deploying the record-breaking airbag for a crowd of delighted schoolchildren.   

Aside from his whoopee cushion knowledge, Cox knows a thing or two about sound. He holds a degree in physics and a doctorate in acoustics, teaches at Salford University in Manchester as a professor of acoustic engineering and has presented a number of sound-related documentaries on BBC.

Cox will be bringing his acoustic expertise to Chautauqua at 10:45 a.m. today, July 22, in the Amphitheater to open Week Five, “The Life of the Spoken Word.” His lecture will focus on the journey of the human voice throughout the ages, touching on the origins of speech as well as modern endeavors to teach computers to talk.

“Our relationship to speech, as we know it, is changing,” Cox said. “It’s important to know where we’ve been in order to understand where we’re going.”

Cox said audio technology continues to advance and improve each day. He said that, much like photos are able to be faked and altered through Photoshop, voices will soon be able to be recreated and mimicked by artificial intelligence. He said that alongside these advancements, there are a number of exciting opportunities for digital sound on the horizon.

But despite the looming presence of A.I. advancements, Cox said that the thing that most excites him about the field of acoustics is what goes on in the human brain.

“As a physicist, we’ve got some pretty good equations about how sound moves around and how sound behaves,” Cox said. “But the thing we still don’t understand — not by a long way — is what happens when it goes into the ears and is processed by the brain.”

Although the human brain is something most people are intimately aware of, knowledge and understanding of the complex organ is still far from complete. Cox said this applies to the field of acoustics as well.

“If we really want to understand acoustics, we need to understand what happens when people hear sound,” Cox said. “Because after all, sound that isn’t heard isn’t really all that interesting.”

But that’s easier said than done. As technology advances and scientists are able to build a more complete picture of the human brain, understanding of intricate mental processes and operations undeniably increases. But Cox said that there’s a lot left to discover.

“With all the new information we’re getting, the more we peel away the layers, the more we realize there’s still a lot we don’t really understand,” Cox said.

Cox said that he’s excited to share his knowledge of sound and acoustics with Chautauquans during his lecture today. The talk will feature several multimedia elements, including a video presentation and — since the lecture is focused on sound — a number of different sound effects.

Cox said that everyone, no matter their level of interest in science or sound, has a connection to the things he’ll discuss.

“What makes this topic engaging is that, ultimately, it’s about us,” Cox said. “We all have a voice, and it’s very central to our identity. I think one of the reasons this talk might be of interest to people is that it reveals a little about us individually, as well as us as a species.”

The staff at the School of Art and the Strohl and Fowler-Kellogg Art Centers spend their days at Chautauqua teaching, leading gallery tours, setting up exhibitions and ensuring Chautauquans, students and emerging artists have an enriching visual arts experience.

This afternoon, Chautauquans will get a glimpse of what they do when they’re off the clock.

From 1 to 5 p.m. Monday, July 22 on the front porch of Strohl Art Center, Visual Arts at Chautauqua Institution will be hosting the first School of Art and Gallery Staff pop up show.

More than 10 VACI staff members will be exhibiting and selling their pieces at the show, which has been coordinated by School of Art Manager Chip McCall and VACI Concierge Hannah McBroom.

“The objective in our mind was to provide an opportunity for some of the staff that work here to show what they do when they’re not working here,” McCall said. “Everyone who is involved with some level of administration or staff does have a practice and has a studio. … Basically, we’re all artists who also happen to work here.”

McCall, who will have some of his own pieces in the show, said his artistic influences are constantly in flux.

“(I enjoy) digging through subcultures that I either have experience with, or that I have observed,” he said. “I take a lot of notes, I print a lot of pictures. … My internet search history is probably criminal.”

He said that in his work, he tries to examine cultural contradictions around masculinity and identity, including his experiences growing up in North Carolina.

“I’ve always been interested in the weird contradictory relationship we have with the underbelly of our culture, … all these molds or structures that people build their identities around, (and) our relationship with the problematic aspects of that.”

Elise G. Renfrow is a Young Faculty in Ceramics instructor at the School of Art. She is currently earning her B.F.A. at the University of Cincinnati.

Renfrow will be selling a variety of ceramics and sculptures, including teapots, vessels, tumblers and mugs. She is excited for the opportunity to showcase her work.

“Having the chance to show off my own skills that I can’t always exhibit in my classroom is really great,” she said.

Much of her ceramic work utilizes geometric shapes, something she said has been an interesting challenge.

“How do you make geometric forms comfortable in the hand?” she said. “That’s something I’ve been really exploring this summer while I’ve been here, is how do I make (them) comfortable, stackable, functional.”

Besides exhibiting her own pieces, Renfrow said she is looking forward to seeing what the other VACI staff will bring.

“Especially (for) those that I’m not around all the time,” she said, “having that opportunity to see what they are doing, networking and getting inspired by the other faculty here — it’s great.”

Raoul Pacheco teaches ceramics at Augusta University. At the School of Art he assists the students and emerging artists as a ceramics specialist and visiting artist.

He will be selling a number of ceramic vessels today, including sculpted heads, thrown and altered bottles and ceramic cups.

“I started off as a potter,” Pacheco said. “I went to grad school; they turned me into a figurative ceramic artist, but I refused to let go of the potter’s wheel as my main tool because that’s where I could relax and focus.”

He said his work is inspired by the idea of “otherness,” something that has been pervasive in his life.

“My practice is usually dealing with a lot of personal narrative(s), a lot of social issues embedded in that personal narrative,” he said. “There’s always a sense of ‘otherness’ creeping into my work, what it means to be ‘other.’ ”

He is excited for Chautauquans to see his pieces and hopes that the show will inspire further conversations between VACI and the rest of the Institution.

“I think it’s a really cool opportunity for those of us that are working up here in the summer to get our work exposed to the Chautauquan community,” Pacheco said. “I don’t know if most of us will ever make it to the inside walls of the gallery, because it’s a really kick-ass gallery, … so I really appreciate the opportunity to even show what I do in proximity to it.”

Tonight the Music School Festival Orchestra will finish its trifecta; after performing with student vocalists in Week Three and with the Chautauqua Symphony Orchestra last week, the MSFO tackles a new challenge — accompanying dancers.

At 8:15 p.m. tonight, July 22, in the Amphitheater, School of Dance students and the MSFO will join forces in a mid-season variety concert, guest conducted by Kazem Abdullah, the 2005 David Effron Conducting Fellow at Chautauqua Institution, and by Maria Fuller, this year’s Conducting Fellow. Abdullah will conduct the first three pieces, and Fuller will conduct the last.

“Music is kind of based on two things: the voice and dance,” Abdullah said. “There’s so many different kinds of dance forms — polkas, waltzes, marches — and I think the challenge is just making sure that the orchestra understands each style of dance and is able to play that effectively, so that the dancers can react to it and do what they need to do.”

The students in the MSFO will not be able to see the dancers from their positions in the pit, and must rely on the conductor to keep them aligned with the movements of the dancers.

“There’s an external force that’s dictating a lot of the timing, because (the dancers) need it to be timed in specific ways,” said MSFO cellist David Fenwick. “The rhythm needs to be made clearer.”

The concert will begin with Dmitri Shostakovich’s Piano Concerto No. 2 in F Major, Op. 102, featuring School of Music Piano Program student Vincent Ip. This is not a typical ballet piece, but Abdullah said that of all concertos in the repertoire, this is the one to choreograph due to its musical variety.

“It has so many different kinds of wonderful dance styles and marches that are typical of that Russian ballet school and that Russian tradition of dance,” Abdullah said.

However, choreographer Mark Diamond’s interpretation of the music — titled “Shostakovich” — is an abstract, neoclassical piece, with influences of contemporary dance styles. The piece explores motifs of victory, power, glory and innocence, Diamond said.

“Most of the music is so programmatic that it is perfect for the ballet I want to create,” he said. “The themes and motifs are so strong that the movement will be very expressive. Upon viewing, interpretation of personal meaning will lend itself to the audience members.”

“The Triumph of Neptune Suite” by Lord Berners, on the other hand, is a classic ballet piece, Abdullah said, also with a variety of dances — such as a Scottish dance and Russian waltz — and music styles.

The suite has rarely been choreographed, according to School of Dance resident choreographer and faculty member Michael Vernon. His visualization of the music, “Sunday Morning,” abstractly and subtly references “Downton Abbey” and classism in its costuming and patterns. The piece is danced en pointe.

“The Chairman Dances” by John Adams is taken from the contemporary American composer’s opera Nixon in China. The piece is played during a part of the opera when a state dinner between Richard Nixon and Mao Zedong is interrupted by Mao’s wife. It is a work of minimalism, and Abdullah compared it to techno music, due to its use of repetitive, rhythmic notes.

“It’s very diva-like, and there’s lots of sounds of foxtrot dance going on, with sounds of modern-day China,” said MSFO violist Maya Fields. “It’s an interesting piece of music.”

School of Dance Director of Contemporary Studies Sasha Janes’ new work, also named “Chairman Dances,” is a 14-person ensemble — six men and eight women — danced en pointe and is rather physical, with foxtrot and ballroom-esque movements.

“Don’t overthink it, just enjoy it,” Janes advised attendees.

Finally, “Ballet Music” from Charles Gounod’s opera Faust returns to a more traditional style, as it follows the conventions of typical French ballet music. George Balanchine choreographed Faust in 1975 for the Paris Opera Ballet; New York City Ballet premiered it in 1980.

The School of Dance students will perform “Walpurgisnacht,” a divertissement from Faust. It features demanding solos and corps de ballet work, but requires the dancers to remain energetic and fresh, yet striking with their musicality, according to Patricia McBride, director of ballet studies and master teacher.

This is the first time McBride — a contemporary of Balanchine — has staged the ballet for the School of Dance in 20 years.

The School of Dance will return to the Amp stage Tuesday night for “Nutcracker in July” with the CSO. The MSFO will be joined by students of the Chautauqua Voice Program on Aug. 5, in the Amp, conducted by Timothy Muffitt, artistic and music director for the School of Music.

Review by Steve Sucato:

Proving their exceptional July 3 “International Series” program was a hard act to follow, Charlotte Ballet’s final offering this summer, “Made in Charlotte,” on Monday night in the Amphitheater, was an up-and-down affair choreographically.

It began with a trio of ballets by Charlotte Ballet company dancers that all had their premieres this past May in Charlotte, as part of the company’s Choreographic Lab program. First to the stage was Sarah Hayes Harkins’ “Essence of Numbers,” danced to an original piano score by Ballet West music director Jared Oaks. The 12-minute contemporary ballet for eight dancers — including Hayes Harkins, who was a last-minute replacement for Amelia Sturt-Dilley — opened with the ballet’s four women, stiff as planks of wood, being held up at an angle by their four male counterparts. Costumed in all white, the four male-female couples shifted to the dancers forming same-sex partnerships for a floor-work series of steps.

Playing into its numerical title, Hayes Harkins’ deliberately incorporated into the abstract ballet equal pairings and clusters of male and female dancers throughout. And while Hayes Harkins’ sharply-angled choreography was precise, it was also less than captivating overall. The ballet’s best moments came in a pas de deux between dancers Alessandra Ball James and Josh Hall in which Ball James, in an arabesque position (supported on one leg, with the other leg extended directly behind the body with a straight knee,) appeared to stretch upward as if to touch the Amphitheater ceiling. The pas de deux then morphed into a trio with the addition of dancer Ben Ingel that saw the two men lift and flip Ball James around in various positions.

Next, Juwan Alston’s “A Road To Pieces” appeared to be a chip off “Essence of Numbers’ ” block stylistically. The 2-minute pas de deux danced by David Preciado and Hayes Harkins also hitched its wagon to being an interpretation of the music, in this case, Francis Poulenc’s “Sonata for Four Hands 1: Prelude,” and was more sharply-angled and delivered contemporary ballet movement, only performed faster.

While both these ballets by emerging choreographers had merit, if the expectation was in seeing work on a world-class level as in Charlotte Ballet’s previous “International Series” program, they, and “Made in Charlotte” overall, fell short of that.

The most surprising and interesting of the three dancer works, Chelsea Dumas’ “Sonnet 116,” the first of two Shakespearian-themed works to round out the program, came next. It was danced to recorded, atmospheric orchestral music composed by Thomas Wander and Harald Kloser that included a dramatic reading of Shakespeare’s love Sonnet 116 by Judi Dench. In terms of dance style, Dumas went in a completely different way from her colleagues, choosing a syncopated contemporary dance movement language for the work. 

A promising choreographic talent, Dumas showed a level of craft and dance maker intuition that was impressive. In the piece’s opening duet between dancers Elizabeth Truell and Peter Mazurowski, Truell moved around a mostly statue-stiff Mazurowski touching, brushing against, leaning into and embracing him without touching him. It was an unconventional, yet moving portrait of love emotionally mirroring Shakespeare’s poetic verse spoken by Dench.

Dancers Raven Barkley and Maurice Mouzon Jr. soon replaced Truell and Mazurowski in a similarly-styled duet, whose movement rhythm matched the work’s music rhythm. The cast then expanded to a group of 11 as Dench’s voiceover came to an end, leaving only the fairytale-sounding music as a tide carrying Dumas’ pleasing unison group dance choreography to work’s end, the final scene being Mouzon Jr. slowly backing away from Truell to exit as the stage lights faded to black.

After an intermission, choreographer Stephanie Martinez’s marathon 45-minute ballet “Unsex Me Here” completed the program.   

Commissioned by Charlotte Ballet and premiered last January by the company as part of their “Innovative Works” program, Martinez, along with playwright, theater and dance historian Lynne Conner dreamed up the concept and direction of the ballet which explored four of Shakespeare’s leading female characters: Juliet (Hayes Harkins), Lady Macbeth (Ball James), Titania (Sarah Lapointe) and Kate (Shaina Wire) from The Taming of the Shrew.

Titled after Lady Macbeth’s cry to the universe to be released from the gender norms of her time in Shakespeare’s Macbeth (Act I, scene 5), the underlying theme of “Unsex Me Here” was an exploration of gender roles and gender fluidity paralleling Shakespeare’s time with our current social climate.

Performed to music by Johann Sebastian Bach, George Frideric Handel, Bernardo Sassetti and Antonio Vivaldi, along with original music composed for the ballet by Peter De Klerk and Johnny Nevin, “Unsex Me Here” was all over the map musically, in its mix of dance movement styles (ballet, contemporary, musical theater, social) and in its level of choreographic sophistication. It felt at times haphazard, as if it were the product of several different choreographers of varying skill.

The ballet opened with Ball James as Lady Macbeth dancing in spotlight to a voiceover of her lines surrounding the ballet’s title from Shakespeare’s play Macbeth. Full of theatrical drama, Ball James was striking in sleek and stalking dance movement that ate up the stage in anger.

A horizontally-moving partition then crossed the stage revealing from behind it as it went, the ballet’s three other female protagonists. At first, the women danced in a gestural manner hinting at their literary identities and then in unison as a group. Martinez’s choreography for them evolved and devolved from carefully crafted technical dance phrases that showcased the women’s skill and prowess, to toss-away social dance squirmings that had them looking like recreational dancers. This dichotomy of movement sophistication would appear and disappear at times throughout the ballet.

Similar in approach to choreographer Val Caniparoli’s better known treatment of Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen’s heroines in his 2008 ballet Ibsen’s House for San Francisco Ballet, Martinez also paired her famous female literary characters with their male counterparts from their respective stories — Romeo (Ingel), Macbeth (Rees Launer), Bottom (Mazurowski) and Petruchio (James Kopecky) — to explore their dynamics as couples.

The ballet’s characters also appeared to ping pong across time from their Shakespearean personas to perhaps those same people if they were of our time, somewhat complicating the viewing experience. And while Martinez’s choreography showed inconsistency, she managed to pack in some highly entertaining and top-notch choreographic wallops, such as a Broadway-esque, testosterone-fueled, acrobatic and competitive men’s quartet full of lifts, jumps, hoots and hollers along with several humorous sections, including Lapointe as Titania and Mazurowski as Bottom from A Midsummer Night’s Dream dancing in character in a slapstick duet to Judy Garland’s renditions of “You Made Me Love You” and “The Trolley Song.”

Wonderfully performed by Charlotte Ballet’s dancers, “Unsex Me Here” finished with a flourish courtesy of several carefully crafted and technically dazzling pas de deuxs between the various male-female character pairings that each ended with a voiceover line by the female protagonist; those ending pas de deuxs lifting the ballet’s energy and interest, giving rise to an enthusiastic standing ovation by the lightly populated Amphitheater audience.

Based in Painesville, Ohio, Steve Sucato is a contributing writer, critic and reporter. His work has appeared in such publications as The Plain Dealer, The Buffalo News, Pittsburgh City Paper and Dance Magazine, among others.

Throughout Week Four at Chautauqua, Fr. Richard Rohr, OFM, has led the Ecumenical Services in the Amphitheater. He has spoken on topics like the differences in the depiction of Jesus Christ between Eastern and Western Christianity and Pantheism.

At the 9:15 a.m. Friday Ecumenical Service in the Amphitheater, Rohr left Chautauquans with a note on the Gospel as a collective message, infinite love and putting some trust in God.   

His sermon title was “Christ is not Jesus’ Last Name,” and the Scripture text was 1 Peter 1:3-9.

The Gospel is a collective message, according to Rohr.

“Both goodness and evil are, first of all, understood in the entire trajectory of the Bible in a collective way,” Rohr said. “Starting with the covenants with Israel — all of them are formed maybe through David, through Abraham, through Noah, through Moses — but always with Israel.”

Rohr cited God’s covenant with Noah described in Genesis, which says “I am making this covenant with all of creation.”

But despite this message that encompasses all of creation, human beings have long understood the Gospel in an individualistic manner. It’s about “you getting saved,” and “you getting saved,” and “you getting saved” — this interpretation, according to Rohr, has led humans to be selfish.

“If you want to go (to Heaven) without ‘me,’ it’s not Heaven,” he said. “If I want to go there without ‘you,’ it’s not Heaven. … Salvation is a social, historical message for humanity, for reality.”

And it’s difficult to heal a person with a collective message that centers on threats. Rohr told the congregation that threats don’t heal or invite people — this collective, or in other words, the culture, “carries the illusions, the deceit and the darkness.”

He said that one aspect of his book, The Universal Christ: How a Forgotten Reality Can Change Everything We See, Hope For, and Believe, is that the Apostle Paul has a “code word” for the collective: en Christo, translated to “in Christ.” This term is used by Paul 134 times.

“We’re so used to hearing (in Christ), it slips off our tongue,” Rohr said. “It’s a participatory notion, it’s a collective notion; the Jesus train; the God train; the love train; the salvation train, is already in motion. And all we can do is agree to jump on or not.”

Infinite love, Rohr told the congregation, is something that many early fathers of the church said no one can resist. However, as he noted during the Service of Worship and Sermon on Sunday, people can’t conceptualize infinity, or something that is infinite.

“So we tried to parcel (love) out and decide who was worthy,” Rohr said. “Are any of us (worthy)? Are you worthy? Come on, don’t even go there. Don’t even play that game. All it can do is lead you into denial, and projection and pretend. Let’s not play the worthiness game. Let’s allow for the infinite gift of mercy that Peter just talked about in this reading.”

Throughout history, people have tried to quantify things like love and sin, according to Rohr. When people think of purgatory, for example, they conceptualize it in a literal sense — “this much sin (equals) this much burning.”

“(But) the only language possible to religion is metaphor,” Rohr said. “It’s the most helpful because it allows the soul to fill in the gaps with its own experience, to struggle with it like the Jewish people did with Midrash.”

Rohr returned to the concept of en Christo, and said that God is doing “to humanity, with humanity, in humanity, for humanity, largely in spite of us.”

“All it seems God needs is a little bit of ‘yes,’ a little bit of trust,” Rohr said. “A little bit of love. And from what I’ve experienced this week (at Chautauqua), there’s a lot of (love) here.”

And he said that love sustains the universe; it moves us toward “a future of resurrection.”

“Some of us, some of you, are carrying that love better than others, frankly,” Rohr said. “But we do not need to call it love — because then we’ll start measuring — or God or resurrection, for it’s work to be done.”

Rohr ended the service by sharing wisdom from a rabbi he heard speak at a conference in Santa Fe, New Mexico. The rabbi began with the question: Do you know why we cannot speak the name of God?

The rabbi demonstrated by not speaking the name of God, “Yahweh,” but by breathing it. On the inhale, his breath muttered “yah,” and on the exhale, “weh.”

He then answered the original question: “Because (God’s name) is not spoken, it’s breathed.”

“So really, you’ve been speaking the name of God since the minute you came out of your mother’s body,” Rohr said. “And the last word you will speak before you die is the unspeakable sacred name that cannot be spoken, but only breathed.”

The Rev. J. Paul Womack presided. Suzanne Adele Schmidt, ordained minister in the United Church of Christ and longtime Chautauquan, read the Scriptures. Barbara Hois, flute, and Matthew Cairns, soloist, played “Simple Song from Mass” by Leonard Bernstein as the prelude. The Motet Choir sang “O Thou the Central Orb” arranged by Charles Wood as the anthem. Jared Jacobsen, organist and coordinator of worship and sacred music, directed the choir. The Alison and Craig Marthinsen Endowment for the Department of Religion provides support for this week’s services. Mary Lee Talbot will resume writing the morning worship column in Monday’s Daily.

Even though people know that everyone dies, some people do not truly grasp the concept until death is upon them, said Fr. Richard Rohr, OFM.

“I’ve talked to some hospice workers and end of life care people, and they say a lot of people don’t get it until the last three days, three hours, even three minutes,” Rohr said. “The good thing — at least I’ve heard consistently — is most people do get it, what it means and what it doesn’t mean, because then you have no choice except to go for broke. The great surrender called death.”

Rohr, a Franciscan priest from the New Mexico Province and founder of the Center for Action and Contemplation in Albuquerque, New Mexico, concluded his lecture series in the Hall of Philosophy as part of Week Four’s interfaith theme, “Falling Upward: A Week with Richard Rohr.” His last lecture, presented on Thursday, was called “The Second Half of Life,” based on his book Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life.

“At the beginning of chapter 12, I start with a quote from the Dalai Lama, and he says, ‘Learn and obey the rules very well so you will know how to break them properly,’ ” Rohr said. “That’s at the heart of the matter.”

Rohr said that the second half of life is about knowing the rules and then realizing they no longer apply because they no longer work. This is the difference between knowledge and wisdom.

“Information itself can’t get you there,” Rohr said. “What wisdom is — one of the many wonderful definitions — is to know when the knowledge applies and when it doesn’t. It’s mercy; it’s compassion; it’s understanding.”

Rohr said that the first half of life is learning the Ten Commandments and following them, but by the second half of life, it is time to rely on one’s own judgement. That isn’t to say one should throw the Ten Commandments away, but they should also make decisions based on their own sense of morality.

“You’ll look like you’re coloring outside the lines, people who know the rules well enough to know when they don’t apply,” Rohr said.

Rohr said the real trouble, however, is people who arrive to the second stage of life not having learned and meditated on the Ten Commandments in the first half of life. Rather, they relied on their egos.

Rohr said that those who have relied on their ego grew up in the late 1960s and early ’70s.

Before the late 1960s, Rohr said people believed that through education and religion, rules would be followed and the world could be saved. Education and religion thus became a priority to everyone.

However, with stronger education and religious systems in place, Rohr said, countries with these systems helped produce World War II.

“And so, what our youngsters did in great part is throw out the whole thing,” Rohr said. “If there’s no order that works, let’s just live with disorder. So, we moved into a world of disorder after 1968.”

One way that Rohr tries to explain this to his students is with an illustration of three boxes. The first box is called “order” and represents the “conservative 1950s, law-abiding, church-going worldview.”

The second box represents the mid-1960s, when America began to involve itself in the Vietnam War; when people recognized that America’s largest sin was racism and started to address it; and when a cynical attitude toward authority, law and even some long-held truths developed. Rohr said this second box is called “disorder.”

“If you threw those out too, then the only absolute remaining was your own ego (structure) and you become the frame of reference,” Rohr said.

The second half of life is when one can put together in the third box — which is “reorder” — what is “good and essential” from the first and second boxes, Rohr said.

“Again, the Jewish prophets who modeled this, we called them radical traditionalists,” Rohr said. “They knew the tradition well enough to critique the present by the sources and the values and the documents of the tradition. That’s the only way you can reform anything.”

“That’s the good thing about being Catholic… if you get authority on your side they can’t touch you,” says Rohr.

— The Chautauquan Daily (@chqdaily) July 18, 2019

This reform is what takes place with the good and essential in the third box. And, to be able to handle such intricacies within the box, maturity in the second half of life is key.

“There is a common consensus on the direction of a mature person,” Rohr said. “In the second half of life, if you grow up without major dysfunction, major violence, major disillusionment, you will become less violent, more non-dual, more compassionate and more inclusive.”

Rohr said that a mature person can hold those two opposing forces — those two boxes — together and live with the contradictions. A person like this, Rohr said, will confront a dark period in the second half of life, according to Rohr’s colleague, Cynthia Bourgeault, an Anglican priest. Bourgeault, Rohr said, learned about this “dark period” from George Gurdjieff, the Russian mystic.

“Whenever there’s a new arising of consciousness, Gurdjieff says, a new quasi-consensus about how things are … he calls that holy arising, (in which) there will be holy denial,” Rohr said. “Then, Gurdjieff says you have to wait for a holy reconciling, and he describes it as an x-force. We would call it in the Christian world, grace. It’s a gift from God … and we’re in that period of waiting for the x-factor.”

Rohr said that this is a time of darkness, waiting for the x-factor, but those who wait and those who will receive it are those who do not need an answer for everything, who can hang in the “balance by unknowing.” These people, Rohr said, are modeling what is at the core of faith.

“The new idea that begins to be broadly received (is) holy reconciling,” Rohr said. “According to Gurdijeff, if you want to believe him, (reconciling) becomes the new holy affirming and we start all over again. … It’s not a straight line. It’s three steps forward, two steps backward, three steps forward, two steps backward.”

Rohr says, “In this time of darkness it feels like there’s not a lot of hope… the only people who have it.. are people who are somehow held by grace.”

— The Chautauquan Daily (@chqdaily) July 18, 2019

Rohr said that everyone will start all over again because there needs to be a new arising or consensus that continuously moves closer toward inclusivity and nonviolence, a worldview where “we don’t have to be imperial in right to be happy,” Rohr said.

Rohr then concluded the lecture with a poem by Thomas Merton. Rohr was first exposed to the poem while in retreat at Merton’s hermitage. The poem is called “When in the Soul of the Serene Disciple.”

“When in the soul of the serene disciple / With no more Fathers to imitate / Poverty is a success, / It is a small thing to say the roof is gone: / He has not even a house.

“Stars, as well as friends, / Are angry with the noble ruin. / Saints depart in several directions.

“Be still / There is no longer any need of comment / It was a lucky wind / That blew away his / halo with his cares, / A lucky sea that drowned his reputation. / Here you will find / Neither a / proverb nor a memorandum. / There are no ways, / No methods to admire / Where poverty is no achievement. / His God lives in his emptiness like an affliction.

“What choice remains? / Well, to be ordinary is not a choice: / It is the usual freedom / Of men without visions.”

The Gospel, Rohr said, is not idealism; it is utter realism. Everyone wants a “happily ever after,” which is understandable, but that isn’t how life works. One doesn’t get to create their second half of life, Rohr said.

“You just drop into it,” Rohr said. “Don’t take yourselves too seriously. Make sure you can laugh. … Laugh at yourself and let other people laugh at you. What it is to be a mensch, as the Jewish people say, a human being, (is to be) one who can hold together all the contraries, all the paradoxes, all the mysteries, even without understanding them.”

Rohr ends with, “Laugh at yourself, and let others laugh at you.” @RichardRohrOFM

— The Chautauquan Daily (@chqdaily) July 18, 2019

Asthe clouds parted and the sun peeked through, Groupers took off at light speed to capture new records at the 2019 Boys’ and Girls’ Club Track and Field Day Thursday, July 18. Starting at Club’s soccer field, Groupers from Groups 4-8, as well as those in the Senior Athletic Club, gathered to warm up and take off for a 50-yard dash. But that was only the tip of the iceberg, with more activities to come as the day progressed.

After the end of the 50-yard dash, the distance was expanded, first to 100 yards, then to 220 and ending out at a final 440-yard dash. Groupers refused to lose enthusiasm, however, with chants, whoops of encouragement and music floating around the runners as they ran for the finish. Simultaneously, other events were taking place above the hill around the baseball field and basketball courts. Concentration was the name of the game in field events, with Groupers going for distance in discus, softball and baseball throws and a basketball shoot-out, with a shot-put throw happening at Club’s volleyball course.

Even younger Groupers in Groups 1-3 were included in their own series of events around the back of Beeson Youth Center. Participating in relays and a water balloon catch, nobody was left out of the fun. Closing the day of competition, everyone gathered to watch the most anticipated event: the staff relay. A classic send-off for Track and Field Day, Club staffers participated in a high-energy relay race on the soccer field. After all events were finished, the air of competition melted away, but the fun remained with swimming and continued activities.

Review by Howard Halle:

In his seminal treatise, Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes notes that photography’s power to fix a subject in seeming perpetuity links the medium to death. For example, he calls the photo “a figuration of the motionless and made-up face beneath which we see the dead,” a form of stasis that makes an image seem alive in the present, when in fact, it records the past, or a “this-has-been” already lost in time.

So, if photography represents “a kind of abrupt dive into literal death,” as Barthes also writes, Daisy Patton’s current show, “Lineages in Bloom,” in the Strohl Art Center’s Arnold and Jill Bellowe Family Gallery, could be described as a long-forgotten graveyard overgrown with the foliage of untended memory. Patton, who cites Barthes as an influence, presents 22 photographic portraits of women, each overpainted with stylized flowers whose petals and winding stems creep and crawl across the photo, framing and obscuring the person underneath. Perfumed with decay, the images possess a gothic floridity not unlike that of the Pre-Raphaelite paintings of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who teased intimations of mortality out of glossy renderings of legendary figures such as Proserpine and Ophelia.

But while Rossetti drew inspiration from Roman mythology and Shakespeare, Patton locates hers in old photographs sourced from eBay, thrift stores and antique shops. Here, they are hung in an array of anonymous mothers, wives, daughters, etc., varying in age, ethnicity and race. Judging from the quality of the originals, the images appear to date from the era before digital cameras, primarily from the early to mid-20th century. Sporting reflexive smiles, Patton’s subjects stare at you like ghosts haunting family snapshots in which familial bonds have long since dissolved.

Having rescued these images from a musty purgatory, Patton reproduces them as prints laminated to a board-like substrate called Dibond. She then applies pigment in thick brush strokes that fill in backgrounds and articles of clothing, though she reserves a lighter touch to cover faces with transparent veils of color. The profusion of flora curtaining the compositions are limned in precise outlines with raised textures (which are sometimes bolstered with abstract dots and dashes). But there is no discernible relationship between plant and subject — or, for that matter, between flower and nature, as Patton’s designs are based on late-19th-century wallpaper patterns, particularly those by William Morris, the founder of the Arts and Crafts movement.

These surreal trellises could be construed as an attempt to deflect the temptation to connect with the pieces nostalgically, and they succeed up to a point: The bold overlay of blossoms is the first thing you notice about the work, after all, but there are other components within the images that allow you to gauge their vintage, and perhaps stir a sense of longing. These include dress, obviously, but also another — previously mentioned — element linked to photography itself: film. There are examples of images taken as daguerreotypes and Polaroids, or with cameras such as the Brownie and Instamatic, all marking the leap from black-and-white to color that divides the first and second halves of the 20th century.

Somehow, within this larger frame of history, Patton attempts to reconstruct the specific families attached to these images — and maybe the idea of family itself — by superimposing untethered memories onto our own. The remembrance of things past, however, can be a slippery business, and in this respect it is worth noting something Marcel Proust, Barthes’ compatriot, wrote on the subject: “The images selected by memory are as arbitrary, as narrow, as elusive as those which the imagination had formed and reality has destroyed.” Patton’s work acknowledges as much, but wishes it weren’t so.

Howard Halle is editor-at-large and chief art critic for Time Out New York.

This week, Chautauqua Opera Company will undertake the unprecedented.

In celebration of its 90th anniversary, this week will be Chautauqua Opera’s first time holding an opera festival. Over the course of three days, the 24 Young Artists and four guest artists will perform a festival trilogy of operas based on Pierre Beaumarchais’ three Figaro plays.

At 7:30 p.m. Thursday, July 25 in Norton Hall, Chautauqua Opera will open the festival with Gioachino Rossini’s Il Barbiere di Siviglia. At 4 p.m. Friday, July 26 in Norton Hall, the festival continues with Vid Guerrerio’s ¡Figaro! (90210), adapted from Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro. The festival closes with John Corigliano’s The Ghosts of Versailles at 8:15 p.m. Saturday, July 27, in the Amphitheater.

Steven Osgood, general and artistic director of Chautauqua Opera, said the Figaro Trilogy has never been performed in sequence in the span of three days.

“That is something that no company has ever done before,” Osgood said. “They have been within the same calendar or the same season, but not on subsequent nights.”

Planning for the festival started last year, and opera crews got their feet on the ground a few weeks before the summer season opened.

Days before the opera festival, Chautauqua Opera’s costume shop whirled with the sounds of sewing machines and the faint scent of hairspray seeping in from the wig shop next door.

Many of the opera singers have several costumes they wear either in the same show or different shows. Costume designer B.G. Fitzgerald said he and his crew are working as fast as they can to get everything ready for three operas in three days, which required singers to be fitted as soon as they arrived on the grounds.

“Some of them did their fittings before they even did their singing,” Fitzgerald said. “It’s because of time.”

The Ghosts of Versailles is in the thick of production and will only get one night on stage. While the other two operas continue to have brush-up rehearsals, the crew is, right now, primarily focused on Versailles.

Fitzgerald said he and his crew have built about 25 costumes from scratch, along with altering the stock costumes.

“So we are dealing with about 150 to 175 costumes with that one show,” he said.

In the wig shop, Martha Ruskai and her team also received head measurements early in the season. Each singer receives a wig so they can best represent the time period in which the opera was written — except the cast of  ¡Figaro! (90210), which is set in 21st-century California.

Ruskai said each opera required special attention, but ¡Figaro! (90210)’s modern setting made production a bit easier.

“As soon as we got here, we started doing wig fittings,” Ruskai said. “While I was doing Barber of Seville fittings, we were taking measurements and planning (for the next opera).”

She said since opera roles are chosen primarily by voice type, the wigs and makeup are essential to matching the singer with the rest of the character.

“We are called upon to make them look differently,” Ruskai said. “Danny Belcher is blond but he is playing a brunet (Figaro in ¡Figaro! (90210) and The Ghosts of Versailles).”

On the stage, set designer Alan Muraoka brought the set together by first listening to the music. Then, he created a sketch of the set and modified it according to each director’s vision.

Since audiences will ideally see the operas in order, Muraoka wanted to tie the shows together, showing character development through the sets. The set features a white archway that represents the progression of chaos in the characters’ lives.

“I liked the idea of possibly tying all three operas together thematically,” Muraoka said. “So I knew this archway existed. … In Barber, it will be vertical, but when we see it in ¡Figaro! (90210), it’s collapsed.”

Amid the sets, costumes and various production tasks, the Young Artists are rehearsing the libretto and stage direction. Many of the Young Artists are in more than one opera, which requires them to attend brush-up rehearsals.

For soprano Lauren Yokabaskas, she had to keep track of her character. She plays Roxanne in ¡Figaro! (90210), and then returns to the late 1700s as the same character in The Ghosts of Versailles.

“¡Figaro! is set in the present day, so we are just playing normal people,” Yokabaskas said. “But in Versailles we are playing these people who had all of these rules and all of these ways about how you can move.”

She said they rehearse in corsets, and had to learn about the everyday rituals for a typical 18th-century woman. Yokabaskas said she enjoyed experiencing her character’s development.

“It’s been interesting to see the arc of the character,” she said. “I think to put up with the things that Almaviva has put her through, throughout the arc of the plays — she has to really love him.”

As she transitioned from her ¡Figaro! (90210) cast to her Versailles cast, Yokabaskas said being a part of a dedicated group of musicians has helped her grow as a professional.

“It’s just wonderful to get everybody’s perspective,” Yokabaskas said. “Everyone is so professional and well-prepared, but it is like forming a whole new family after your initial cast.”

Last week, young writers gathered on the second floor of the Literary Arts Center at Alumni Hall and learned that, in certain instances, it might be OK to cheat.

Under the tutelage of Kim Henderson, a returning faculty member for Chautauqua’s Young Writers Institute, the students explored the abecedarian, a poetic form structured according to alphabetical order. Usually, each line or stanza begins with each letter of the alphabet — a feat that gets trickier as poets approach letters like “Q” and “Z.”

“I did have to cheat with (the word) ‘extremities,’ ” one student admitted.

“I think with ‘X’ that’s allowed,” Henderson said.

Encompassing two five-day writing camps for students ages 14 to 18, YWI has wrapped its second and final week of the 2019 season. Henderson, author of The Kind of Girl and chair of the Creative Writing program at Idyllwild Arts Academy, and Kenyatta Rogers, a Cave Canem Fellow and creative writing faculty at the Chicago High School for the Arts, both returned during Weeks Three and Four to teach at the YWI in its second year.

Billed as a “multi-genre” writing experience for high school students, the curriculum Henderson and Rogers implemented covers fiction, poetry and nonfiction. Henderson reserved Monday and Tuesday of Week Three for the essential elements of fiction — character development, dialogue, setting, plot and “lots of sensory detail discussion” — and moved into free verse poetry on the following day.

July 11, the day of the abecedarian and the fickle “X,” was devoted to poetic forms with a pause to attend Elizabeth Rush’s Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle Author Presentation on her book Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore. On her cohort’s final day, the students delved into nonfiction while also wrapping up pieces, receiving feedback and creating a class chapbook.

Although Henderson described this year’s young writers as “generally younger,” she appreciated the blend of those who are “trying something new” and those who “seem pretty serious about (writing).” During the fiction portion of the week, Henderson remembered how students reacted to the short story “Orientation” by Daniel Orozco, written in the second-person.

“I really enjoy seeing students kind of blown away by something that they read, and this particular story had that effect,” Henderson said. “That was exciting.”

In addition to providing the opportunity to attend lectures and Brown Bag craft talks, Chautauqua yielded inspiration in other unlikely ways. Walking by the dining room in Alumni Hall, Henderson saw the overflow of stuff to be sold at July 14’s Silent Auction — the event that raises capital earmarked to facilitate the all-expenses paid YWI scholarships for teacher-recommended Chautauqua County students. As an improvised exercise, Henderson took her students to the space and had them craft a story about a found treasure. 

Rogers, too, expanded his classroom out from the designated YWI room at Alumni Hall. On Monday, he and his Week Four cohort toured the Fowler-Kellogg Art Center and wrote an ekphrastic work after a discussion about the meaning and measurement of art, including a reading of “Enlightenment” by Natasha Trethewey. On Tuesday, when they were reading a piece set in the 1950s on Bestor Plaza, the class encountered a group of kazoo players and the newsies hawking issues of The Chautauquan Daily.

“I thought, ‘(this time period) is really enacting itself right now,’ ” Rogers said.

Armed with a background in poetry, Rogers created a more interdisciplinary curriculum with an emphasis on thinking deeply about language through word games and prompts. He hoped, by the end of the week, to see growth in student confidence.

“(In the beginning), no one really wants to share anything,” he said. “I hope that they learn it’s OK to be different, and it’s OK to have your own perception of things and to write about those things. I want to build a community, even if it’s very, very small. Because that helps people with their art.”

Atom Atkinson, director of literary arts, said that this year the YWI participant demographic is “perfectly balanced” between scholarship recipients and young writers on the grounds with their families.

Arianna Taylor, 15, is a student at Southwestern High School and one such scholarship recipient. She prefers poetry — Charles Bukowski is her favorite — but dabbles in prose; during her week at Chautauqua, she wrote a prose piece based on the tabloid headline “Man gets rushed to the emergency room when coins burn holes in his pocket,” as well as a poem titled “Crave.”

When Chloe Smith, 17, wasn’t busy discovering that poetry “isn’t quite as hard” as she thought, or writing a short story that she hopes to expand into a book, she was navigating a packed schedule of Week Three extracurricular events: a piano recital, two orchestra concerts, Chautauqua Theater Company’s The Christians, a ballet and the Opera Invasion “Opera Open Book” on Odland Plaza.

“I’ve done more things here in one week than I’ve ever thought I would,” said Smith, also a scholarship recipient. “I wouldn’t be able to do as much without my amazing host family.”

Leaving YWI and returning to Westfield Academy and Central School in the fall, Smith wants to use more uncommon similes and metaphors to make her creative work stand out.

“In English class, we learn how to write some creative writing, but it’s mostly learning how to write a paper for school so that we’re prepared for college,” she said. “I just think that this is such an amazing program, and I wouldn’t have even heard about it if a girl from my school hadn’t gone last year and the school newspaper wrote a little piece about it. Otherwise I wouldn’t have even known.”

Taylor’s scholarship made her feel like she “earned” her place.

“That gives me a lot of pride that I don’t always get in terms of my (high school) English class,” she said.

After experiencing the scholarly atmosphere on the grounds, Taylor said she is grateful to her host family — “some of the nicest people” she’s ever met — and sees a tangible improvement in her writing.

“I’m so proud of the poems and prose I’ve written here, and I’m really excited to get back and show my mother,” she said.

The personal is indeed political for Shara McCallum, a Week Five poet-in-residence at the Chautauqua Writers’ Center. However, within the context of her lived experience as an award-winning poet and a mixed-race, Jamaican-born woman who identifies as black, she finds the popular protest slogan lacking when called upon to affect tangible change.

“Politics operate best in a communal setting,” McCallum said. “I think the idea, that every personal action is political, is hollow. If the personal is political for the poet, he or she or they can engage with personal subject matter and see the way in which it has ramifications for politics, culture and history.”

Returning to Chautauqua — she was last a writer-in-residence in 2017 — McCallum will lead the Week Five advanced poetry workshop, “Going Beyond the Personal,” in which she and her workshop participants will bring together conversations about personal histories and “innovative” poetic forms to “further the poem’s reach.” McCallum will read from Madwoman, her most recent collection, alongside readings from fellow poet-in-residence Abraham Smith and prose writer-in-residence Jimin Han, at 3:30 p.m. Sunday, July 21 in the Hall of Philosophy. 

Although she encourages students to move their work outward from themselves, McCallum likes to think of memoir and autobiography as “a starting point for literature.” She also acknowledges that literary forms can “give shape to our experiences” — and that writing a solely self-reflective poem can limit the poem’s openness.

Citing Native Guard, Natasha Trethewey’s Pulitzer Prize-winning collection on race, memory and place, McCallum characterized her workshop as striving to find the avenues in which poets can engage personal truths with a wider social history.

“There are impulses to write about the self, while at the same time developing a connection to the world and to others that the poem can engage,” McCallum said.

For Smith, who will lead the poetry workshop, “Performing the Poem,” a poet’s body is a foremost vehicle for meaning.

The author of five poetry collections — most recently, Destruction of Man, from which he will be reading on Sunday — Smith is a full-throated proponent of a “more embodied poetic” inspired by dynamic slam poets like Patricia Smith. He described his week-long workshop as a “playground in which to tinker with and explore poetry performance” by watching YouTube clips of spoken word poetry, and investigating different performance personas — mimicking moves and “window dressing” their bodies.

“Over the span of the last decade, poets who are known for their performances have trickled into academia,” Smith said. “But for the longest time, poets of academia talked about poems as something constructed for the page only. And yet a fundamental aspect of hospitality or generosity is figuring out how to best give the poem to the audience.”

Poems are “lightning of the body,” according to Smith, and the body is like “the whiteness of a page.”

“When we sit down to write, poems are conveyors of the fundamentals of the entire somatic system,” he said. “They’re something that happens imaginatively, that isn’t coming from just the knee or just the toe or the hip or the head. There’s no border between the poem and the body.” 

Han is also interested in porous borders and elastic literary frameworks, both concepts she will unpack in her workshop, “Story, Plot, Structure: Telling the Difference and Telling It Well,” and Brown Bag lecture “Going Home Again: Memory and the Fiction Writer.” Upon her Week Five return to Chautauqua — Han spent a decade of her childhood in Jamestown, New York, and served on a panel at the 2018 Writers’ Festival — she will read from her debut novel A Small Revolution.

“I’ve talked to people who haven’t read a novel in years, but they read this book because of the way it’s written in these segments,” Han said. 

She looks to Cristina Henríquez’s short story “Everything Is Far from Here” and Mary-Kim Arnold’s book, Litany for the Long Moment, as potent examples of creative interplays between story, plot and structure, though she endeavours to let the needs and  interests of her workshop participants guide the readings she selects. Once, after Han asked for reading recommendations to improve her own writing, a professor told her she “must” seek out and read a certain short story. Later, Han discovered that the professor had recommended that story to more than half the class.

“That just killed me,” Han said, noting that, though the story “was illustrative of many craft issues,” she hopes to take a more individualized teaching approach in her workshop.

“I want them to leave knowing that there isn’t one way to do something or one way to pursue their work,” she said. “What is it that you envision? Who do you see yourself as? We have to examine all of those things in order to get to material where we say the things that are true.”

Han was a “chatty” 4-year-old when she moved from Seoul, South Korea, to the United States. Learning English, she thinks, contributed to her fascination with “all the different ways of saying something.” She rebuffs a rigid interpretation of the “show, don’t tell” methodology — sometimes exposition can be helpful — and instead favors a writing landscape less governed by rules.

“Who told you that this was good writing?” Han asked. “All of those things get in the way. I’m looking for a new way of telling things. Especially, right now — there’s an urgency to do that.”

In her teaching life, McCallum, who earned her doctorate in poetry and African American and Caribbean literature from Binghamton University, and is now a professor of English at Pennsylvania State University, wants first to ensure she heeds the oath taken by medical doctors: “do no harm.”

“I’m going on three decades of writing and reading poetry seriously, and it truly doesn’t get easier,” McCallum said. “Every time, you’re facing a new challenge and the blank page. More than anything, I want to leave people better in their desire to contribute and engage, and confident in themselves as poets.”