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“Why do people who hate get a microphone, while those who love die early?” asked the Rev. David Anderson at the 9:15 a.m. Friday Ecumenical Service. His sermon title was “The Power of ‘Attitude,’ ” and the Scripture text was Luke 17:11-19.

Anderson said he has a letter on his desk from someone who heard him tell his story about moving into a new neighborhood as a 9 year old, and having a cross burned on the lawn the first morning.

“It was a four-page, handwritten letter, which used the n-word and wished me great harm,” Anderson said. “And you wonder why pastors need a security detail?”

On his wall, Anderson has a letter to his father from Martin Luther King Jr., reminding him of the power of love in the world.

“When people like you welcome me,” he told the congregation, “you stand for grace, you preach love and you make love louder than hate. That is what Chautauqua is all about.”

Luke 17 includes a story about 10 lepers who were healed by Jesus. They stood back from the crowd and called to Jesus, begging to be healed.

Jesus told them to go and show themselves to the priests in the temple, as required by law, and on the way they were healed.

“They were walking by faith,” Anderson said. “Faith your fears, because without faith, it is impossible to please God.”

All 10 were healed, but only one came back to thank Jesus; he was a Samaritan. Jesus turned to his disciples and asked, “Weren’t all 10 healed? And only one, a foreigner, comes back.”

“This is so different from the way we do it in our country,” Anderson said. “We see how mean we can be. It was Jewish custom to welcome the stranger, but our hate deepens the divide. Maybe you will be the 10% tithe who gives back to Jesus. If we give one-tenth back to God, grace will be overflowing.”

Don’t try to account for the nine who did not come back. Following the crowd leads to a point of dissonance, he said.

“Sometimes you are asked to align with some purpose and you say, ‘I’ve got to follow the Lord on this one — me plus the Lord equals a majority and I will not be pulled by another ideology,’ ” he said.

The “attitude of gratitude” can help in all kinds of situations.

“An attitude of gratitude demonstrates humility; it shows you are part of a community and not completely independent,” Anderson said.

An attitude of gratitude leads to the indwelling of the Holy Spirit and the spiritual fruits of love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.

Third, an attitude of gratitude demonstrates healing over hurt and hate.

“There has got to be a better way and we can’t just fight injustice — we have to show justice, give comfort to others, display all the spiritual fruits,” Anderson said.

He closed his sermon with the story of a group of frogs walking down a road. One frog fell into a hole and kept trying to jump out. The more he tried to get out, the more the frogs at the top told him to not use up all his energy, to give in.

The frog kept hopping and finally grabbed a twig sticking out of the Earth and slowly climbed to the top. The frog was deaf. When the other frogs were telling him to give up, he thought they were saying, “you can do it.”

“Sometimes we have to be spiritually deaf to the negative voices to get to gracism,” Anderson said. “Let all Chautauqua say ‘amen.’ ”

Anna Grace Glaize, Christian coordinator for the Abrahamic Program for Young Adults, presided. Zoltán Halász from Ukraine, a scholarship student with the International Order of the King’s Daughters and Sons, read the Scriptures in Hungarian and English. He completed four years at Ferenc Rákóczi II Transcarpathian Hungarian College where he majored in English language and literature. The Motet Choir sang “Fresh Fire,” by Robert Benson with text by Michael Hudson, under the direction of Jared Jacobsen, organist and coordinator of worship and sacred music. This week’s services were supported by the Mr. and Mrs. William Uhler Follansbee Memorial Chaplaincy and the Jackson-Carnahan Memorial Chaplaincy.

Who: Courtney Stennett, Chautauqua Theater Company conservatory actor.

Stennett plays Hermia in CTC’s traveling production of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. She said performing at a variety of venues as the show moves around Chautauqua County keeps the process fresh and fun.

“I absolutely love that we travel to different spaces,” Stennett said. “Finding interesting ways to interact with the architecture and scenery at each location keeps you engaged and active.” 

For example, Stennett recently performed at Children’s School and had to climb in and out of windows in the pouring rain to make her entrances on time.

“It keeps you on your toes,” Stennett said.

She will also be playing guitar as part of the musical ensemble in the upcoming New Play Workshop, Agent 355.

Where she’s from: Originally from Eagle, Idaho, Stennett said she grew up jumping between her hometown and Los Angeles for her parents’ jobs.

Growing up, she would tag along with her mother as she performed in community theater and eventually decided she wanted to audition herself. At an audition for The Sound of Music, she sang in front of a crowd of people for the first time.

“I went up, in front of this full room, and I started and it was fine until halfway through when I just started bawling because I realized that everyone watching me was terrifying,” Stennett said.

But where many might be put off by such an experience, Stennett was resolute.

“I remember thinking in that moment, at like, 5 years old, ‘Next time, I’m not going to cry,’ ” Stennett said. “I was so disappointed that I couldn’t work on that show, but next time I auditioned, I didn’t cry.”

Since then, Stennett has stuck to theater. She’s currently in her third year in the M.F.A. program at Case Western Reserve University Cleveland Playhouse.

Favorite theater memory: Each and every impactful relationship she’s made with her fellow actors. Stennett said that growing up, she knew theater was enriching her life and broadening her horizons, and that she was always thankful for each interaction.

“I think the theater is full of people who are fascinated by humanity,” Stennett said. “You walk into a theater and know that people care about stories and they care about people. It gives you this common ground to really invest in one another.”

Favorite food: Sweet potatoes.

In any form or style, Stennett said she loves sweet potatoes more than any other food.

“They’re so versatile,” Stennett said. “They can be savory, they can be sweet, they can be chopped and they can be mashed. They’re just so good, and they complement everything.”

What she’s reading: She just finished Letters from Max: A Book of Friendship.

The author of the book, Sarah Ruhl, will be speaking during Week Seven as a part of the Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle, and Stennett said she wanted to be prepared to attend the talk.

She’s also reading The Drifters by James A. Michener and is preparing to start City of Girls by Elizabeth Gilbert. 

What she’s watching: “The Office” on Netflix.

Since the popular show will shortly be removed from Netflix and added to NBC’s separate streaming platform, Stennett said she’s trying to get through the series on Netflix before it’s too late.

“It’s been fun to go back to ‘The Office’ and really dig into all the characters that I’ve known for a while,” Stennett said.

Favorite part of Chautauqua: The bevy of programs offered throughout the season.

Stennett said that, fortunately, her schedule is such that she’s able to attend most of the performances she wants to see.

“I have a whole ton of them highlighted to go to,” Stennett said. “I’ve been absolutely loving it.”

Stennett also said that the kindness and acceptance shown by Chautauquans, particularly the members of the Friends of Chautauqua Theater, has been something she greatly appreciates.

Plans for the future: For the upcoming year, a residency at the Cleveland Playhouse.

Stennett will be performing a number of shows on the main stage there, including The Merchant of Venice.

After that, she hopes to move to New York City to immerse herself in the robust creative community in the Big Apple.

“I think that will be a great launchpad, just because it’s such a creative space,” Stennett said. “We’ll see where it goes from there.”

Who: Alexander De Vasconcelos Matos, Chautauqua Theater Company conservatory actor

Matos is taking on the role of Lysander in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. He said that playing a character who is so earnestly, deeply in love was both interesting and challenging.

“It can be hard because he’s so archetypal, you know?” Matos said. “It can seem like just a projection of what love is, or it’s easy to be jaded and laugh at him, but taking that on and trying to find the open, pure-hearted joy of a first love has been difficult, but fun.”

He will also be performing in CTC’s upcoming production of One Man, Two Guvnors as a handful of supporting characters and as part of the live musical ensemble. He will be playing rhythm guitar, harmonica and potentially the accordion.

Where he’s from: Matos grew up in two very different parts of the world.

Until he was 6 years old, Matos lived in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, running around in the forest and enjoying nature.

“I just chilled in the forests a lot,” Matos said. “There was so much color and so much warmth and life.”

After the first six years of his life, Matos moved to Los Angeles, where he lived until he went to college. In L.A., Matos said his interest in theater was nurtured through the vibrant Hollywood film scene.

He initially studied music in his undergraduate studies, majoring in music with an ethnomusicology and composition focus while minoring in theater. He then doubled down on theater and now holds an MFA in acting from Brown University/Trinity Rep.

Favorite theater memory: Instead of a single, favorite role, Matos said he enjoys the small pockets of family he builds with each show he’s in. He said that no matter the show or role, connecting with his fellow actors is a highlight of the experience.

“Because the theater community can be so small, each time you do a show, you’re building that family more and more,” Matos said.

Favorite food: Rice and beans.

The simple dish is Matos’ comfort food. He said since he’s vegan, the dish provides him with a quick and easy plate of hearty enjoyment.

Before becoming vegan, Matos said he’d enjoy his rice and beans with finely chopped collard greens and a steak. He’s had to get creative since giving up meat.

“I don’t do meat anymore,” Matos said. “Now it’s all about the tofu.”

What he’s watching: “Stranger Things” and “Spiderman: Into the Spider-Verse.”

He said that “Into the Spider-Verse” was the most recent in a series of superhero movies he’s been binging.

“I’ve always loved superheroes and wanted to be one,” Matos said. “So starting last summer, I watched all of the Marvel movies to be prepared.”

Favorite thing about Chautauqua: Before the season started, Matos enjoyed the peace and quiet of the relatively empty Institution.

“When I was younger, I kind of wanted to be a monk,” Matos said. “I’ve always appreciated serenity. So I was like, ‘Oh, this is so nice. I can just work and relax and enjoy this quiet.’ ”

Now that the season is in full swing, Matos said he enjoys the myriad of musical offerings he’s been able to experience. He particularly enjoyed seeing Diana Ross, and the Chautauqua Symphony Orchestra performance of “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.”

Dream vacation: Matos said that despite growing up in Brazil, he’s never spent extensive time in the Amazon.

He said he’d love to fuse activism and relaxation on a trip to the Amazon; he’d take the time to kick back and enjoy the forest, but also take some time to take photos and try to spread awareness of the deforestation that is occurring in that part of the world.

Plans for the future: Returning to sunny Los Angeles.

Matos said it’s been around seven years since he’s been home for any considerable period of time. He hopes to involve himself in film or TV in California, while still staying entrenched in live theater from the East Coast as much as possible.

“I definitely know that I need the sun,” Matos said. “And I have a really strong community in L.A. That’s where my home is, and I just feel a lot more like myself when I’m there.”

At the talkback sessions and in further discussions that followed performances of Chautauqua Theater Company’s The Christians, a number of audience members expressed awe for the similarities between the church set in the theater and an actual house of worship.

“It felt like a call-and-response church,” said Patt Defendorf, hostess of Chautauqua’s Catholic House. “I felt like I should be participating.”

According to Ruth Becker, a Motet Choir member and the show’s associate music director, amidst the meticulously crafted, lavishly carpeted set and the passionate actors that take the stage, a major reason the show feels so real is the inclusion of the Motet Choir.

“Using a live choir is much more organic, much more real than with canned music,” Becker said. “In fact, I don’t think this show would work, really, if you didn’t have that live choir.”

The Christians, which closes its run at 2:15 p.m. Sunday, July 14 in Bratton Theater, is the first show to include a collaboration between CTC and the Motet Choir. The play is set in a massive megachurch, and follows the congregation’s charismatic pastor as he deals with the repercussions of dropping a major ideological bombshell on his church.

The choir members sang authentic spiritual music, including “It Is Well with My Soul,” by Horatio Spafford, and “God’s Unchanging Hands,” by Jennie Wilson. Choir members who participated in the process said the experience was an informative and engaging one.

“This was all new to me coming in,” said Lucy Rider, a tenor in the choir. “I had no idea what went into putting a play on. It’s huge, and it’s been hugely interesting to see that process unfold.”

Joseph Musser, bass, agreed, saying even though one of his daughters minored in theater and he’d had some prior experience with the process, he learned a lot about the level of detail and precision required for bringing a show to its feet.

“I used to tell my daughter that theater people used to strike me as obsessive-compulsive,” Musser said. “She would say, ‘Well they have to be, there’s so much to pay attention to and figure out.’ I understand a little more of what she meant now.”

However, Becker, Rider and Musser weren’t just there to learn and observe. Members of the choir sang in every one of the show’s many performances, providing a lively backing track to the actions that unfolded each night.

Musser said that, while the songs and presentation were similar to a typical choir performance, there were some key differences when bringing their voices to the theatrical stage.

“One big difference is that, instead of practicing for half an hour, performing and then moving on, you do these songs over and over and over again,” Musser said. “It makes a huge difference in how you approach the music and how you approach rehearsing.”

According to Musser, another notable difference is the audience’s level of focus.

“Playing in church, when you’re doing the prelude, people are all talking to one another and not listening,” Musser said. “Here, people actually pay attention. It really is rewarding to have an audience with that level of attention.”

And while the attentive audience was something the choir members enjoyed, both Rider and Musser cited the bonds they formed with their fellow singers, as well as with the CTC actors, as the best part of the process.

“Everyone has been so wonderful and so patient,” Rider said. “The actors have accepted us so warmly, and working together as a group to complete this task was so rewarding.”

Becker said that, due to time constraints, she would be hesitant to leap into another theater performance anytime soon, but that the experience was an overwhelmingly positive one nonetheless.

Rider, however, didn’t hesitate.

“Yes, yes, I absolutely would,” she said. “I enjoyed myself immensely.”

Review by Vicky A. Clark-

Two of the three exhibitions at the Strohl Art Center celebrate variety. Choosing broad categories as her organizing principle gave Judy Barie, the Susan and John Turbin Director of VACI Galleries, the freedom to mix and match small sculptures in one and works on paper in the other, highlighting different approaches and materials. This diversity is especially evident in “Small Sculptures: Big Impact.”

There is something for everyone in this show from colorful glass vessels to formal arrangements of geometric shapes; from ritualistic ceramic pots to narratives captured in small capsules. The success of the show is aided by an installation that allows for an initial impression of the group, but then allows each object to stand on its own. While weighed heavily toward clay and glass, the objects are quite different in intent, technique and form, making for a fun show.

Bringing an “Alice in Wonderland” magic to ceramic and porcelain pieces is Korean-born Ahrong Kim. In “Let it Rain,” she stacks three faces, a human with a brightly flowered hat, a dog — don’t miss its backside — and a sad figure in a boat wiping away tears. A large, puffy rain cloud hovers over it. What does this odd juxtaposition mean? Has something happened to the dog or the human? Who knows? The piece is like a dream without a clear narrative, allowing for an imaginative interpretation. Kim works from her own emotions, “the voices we hear from inside,” to create a visual diary. Similar cartoony characters with bright accents populate her other pieces. She adds decorative objects and patterns, but this patchwork effect actually derives from a traditional Korean fabric technique, jogakbo, where scraps are reclaimed and reused to create new cloth. Kim melds both aesthetic and narrative disparities into fun, innovative pieces reminiscent of fairy tales and literature with pop-cartoon characters in cross-cultural improvisation.

While Kim imagines personal, emotional states, John Sharvin, who lives and works in Pittsburgh, imagines different worlds in his small-scale dioramas in glass capsules. He is fascinated by memories, real and imagined; and his pieces, like Kim’s, require close looking. “Crystal Dream Capsule” contains two competing landscapes separated by a wooden disk. Like an hourglass, it is tempting to turn the sculpture upside down, and interestingly in 2011, Sharvin made a series of hourglass pieces filled with sand. While the upper part contains miniature trees, the lower part resembles a cave with crystal formations that could be stalagmites or stalactites, depending on your orientation. Spelunking figures — two tiny HO railroad figures — animate the scene, adding a dose of storytelling. Despite calling this a dreamscape, Sharvin based his piece on an actual crystal cave he read about in National Geographic, so he is combining fact and fiction in a fun narrative.

The artist has a great sense of humor in “Scenic Overlook,” which features a glass upper torso that supports a tiny deck where a man, another HO figure, sits on a tiny bench. He reflects on nature, perhaps contemplating how small he is in this “natural” world, by enjoying the view of trees that sprout from the head and shoulders of the torso.

Sharvin’s ability to fabricate small glass objects to combine with the HO figures adds even more interest. His capsules become miniature natural history dioramas, containing a hint of social history or scientific presentation. By mixing the real and the imagined, he makes us think about the relationship between fact and fiction while we marvel at his inventiveness.

Sharif Bey brings a whole other level of meaning to his work in the show. His two “Ceremonial Vessels” speak to ideas of power and history, especially by referencing the contested history of the colonization of Africa. His vessels begin life as typical vase-like forms that are then pierced with shards, creating a rough surface that hints at danger. The smooth, stylized bird atop the pieces is elegant in contrast, and the two parts suggest the sky over earth. Bey brings his interest in African ritual vessels to his work, referencing both personal identity and a cultural collective in objects of power and ritual. These kinds of objects, usually seen out of their original context in museum and private collections, have a contested history. Prized by colonizers and traders, they were stripped from their original use to become consumer goods, materialistic possessions, paralleling the power imbalance of colonization. Artists like Bey are influenced by that history as they reclaim the forms as part of black culture. In other works, he was influenced by the popular Central African nail fetish figures, joining artists such as Renée Stout, Vanessa German and Pascale Marthine Tayou in making artifacts for a new generation. His work could easily have placed in another Chautauqua exhibition, “Reconstructing Identities.”

Bey grew up in an African American family in Pittsburgh, and earned a doctorate with a dissertation titled, “Aaron Douglas and Hale Woodruff: The Social Responsibility and Expanded Pedagogy of the Black Artist.” He brings his understanding of race and global politics to not only his art but also to his teaching at Syracuse University, and he uses his knowledge to add an ideological rigor to the work in this show.

An interesting aspect of this exhibition is the title itself. Some of the work would usually be seen in a craft context while other pieces question the boundaries of traditional craft forms. Some works look and feel like sculpture on a small scale. This leaves open the definitions of sculpture and craft. These categories have been questioned and stretched for the last half century, and the gap between art and craft in general is slowly narrowing. By including such a variety of work in this show and using the word “sculpture,” Barie seems to advocate for an expansion of the definition. Many curators would have used the more generalized category of “objects,” so her choice is interesting. These terms, like almost every aspect of contemporary art, are undergoing a critical reevaluation, something that adds another level of interest to this show. 

Vicky A. Clark is an independent curator, critic and teacher based in Pittsburgh. Throughout her 30 years in the Pittsburgh art scene, she has served as a curator for the Carnegie Museum of Art, the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts, and curated “The Popular Salon for the People: Associate Artists at the Carnegie Museum of Art” exhibition.

When marriage counselor Jim Walkup wrote an article for his website titled, “12 Topics You MUST Discuss Before Getting Married,” he didn’t expect it to lead to a book deal. Hundreds of thousands of shares later, he was approached by Althea Press to put his more than 40 years of experience as a licensed marriage and family therapist to paper.

“It was a delight to try to make a difference in helping couples figure out how to get into the right habits and build a relationship for a lifetime,” he said.

Walkup will be holding a talk and signing for his new book, I Do! A Marriage Workbook for Engaged Couples, at 1 p.m. Sunday, July 14 in Smith Memorial Library.

The book includes seven chapters of exercises designed to give engaged couples a more in-depth understanding of one another.

During his talk, he will discuss the habits that lead to strong relationships, such as the importance of love languages.

Walkup said his talk is fitting for Week Four’s theme, “The New Map of Life: How Longer Lives are Changing the World — In Collaboration with Stanford Center for Longevity.”

“Since the topic of the week is on longevity and lifespan, I would raise the question: Do marriages make you live longer?” he said, “I have some scientific research (on) that.”

Walkup credits his wife for helping him get through the whirlwind process of turning his marriage counseling experience and advice into a book.

“(She) was the wind behind the sails that said, ‘I want you to get this legacy to happen and pass on this good stuff that you have,’ ” he said. “So that was incredible support.”

Walkup’s wife introduced him to Chautauqua Institution near the beginning of their marriage and the two have been visiting ever since.

“I think Chautauqua is such a special place,” he said.

He hopes his talk can be beneficial to Chautauquans in all stages of relationships.

“My audience is not just engaged couples,” he said. “It’s anyone who might want to figure out the questions … to ask before they get married, but it’s also for anyone who might want to learn a bit more about what makes a relationship thrive.”

Marcelo Hernandez Castillo thinks he might be afraid of the long poem.

That is a somewhat provocative admission from the Week Four poet-in-residence, especially because his time at Chautauqua is in part devoted to exploring this fear further. Titled “Poetry of Abundance: Exploring the Contemporary Long Poem,” his week-long workshop will invite participants to think about “how poets hold our attention” and “the turns and progressions they make for sometimes pages and pages,” Castillo said. 

He hopes to approach the long poem “with curiosity,” learning the conventions from a student’s perspective.

“It’s something I can teach but not something that I can do yet,” he said. “One of my former professors, who has been a mentor to me, used to say, ‘Good teachers become good writers.’ ”

The award-winning poet will give a reading from Cenzontle, his first book of poems, and his forthcoming memoir Children of the Land, at 3:30 p.m. Sunday, July 14 in the Hall of Philosophy. He will be joined by prose writer-in-residence Robert Glick, associate professor of English at Rochester Institute of Technology, who will read a chapter from his forthcoming novel The Paradox of Wonder Woman’s Airplane — a surreal story of “suburbia gone wrong.” Excerpts of Wonder Woman’s Airplane have won national competitions from Summer Literary Seminars and the New Ohio Review. Glick replaces previously announced Debra Magpie Earling, who had to cancel her week at Chautauqua due to illness.

Although Glick chose his reading selection in part because of the “exigencies of timing” — he prefers to read a piece that is “self-enclosed” and “voice-driven” — he doesn’t usually like to abide by the conventions of linear time. His workshop endeavors to “undo the tyranny of linearity” to explore other modes of association. 

“So much print fiction is dependent on forward-moving time as a way to organize a book,” Glick said. “Not to say linear time is a bad thing, but it is such a paradigm. It lets us off the hook creatively. … I’m interested in other ways we can make connections between things.”

Doing so, he explained, gives writers “a new way of looking at complicated aspects of fiction writing,” like emotion and structure. He hopes his workshop participants will learn to be more “self-aware” of their work and the conventions that guide it so they might develop its themes in a non-linear way. This writerly mindfulness is a personal philosophy of Glick’s, and a concept he will expand upon in his Brown Bag lecture on Friday.

“I write a lot of drafts,” he said. “It’s really important for writers to think about editing as a creative space and not a reductive space.”

This is a methodology he borrows from Melanie Rae Thon, a fiction writer with whom he studied as he pursued his doctorate in literature and creative writing at the University of Utah. Thon preaches “touching the work” every day through extensive editing, and Glick is happy to oblige.

“I don’t want to put a number on it, but most of my time is spent on the revision process,” he said. “I wish creating and editing wasn’t considered such a binary.”

While Glick will spend his week at Chautauqua focusing on collapsing the line between writing and revising, Castillo will focus on contrasts.

In a world obsessed with minimalism, the poet will concentrate on maximalism and distinguish between a long poem, a prose poem and prose itself. He knows workshop participants might find it “daunting” to write a very long poem in such little time, and he plans to encourage them to “mimic” the structure of long poems, like “Song” by Brigit Pegeen Kelly and excerpts from Larry Levis’ Elegy. It is in the act of reading that Castillo finds inspiration.

“I can’t imagine myself reading a book cover to cover — I can’t imagine doing that without a pen and paper in my hand,” he said. “I’m lulled out of memory when I’m not writing, and every time I read something, it suddenly jolts me and triggers other things and associations.”

He hopes, at the very least, to “get the wheels turning on some of the mechanics” and to help students — and himself — “not shy away from the long poem just (because of) its length.”

“I want participants to walk away with actual work that they’ve produced,” he said. “It might get cut down to a much shorter poem, but that’s OK. I want them to leave with a better appreciation for the poem of length.”

As opera singers advance their careers, they constantly audition for shows and roles. At their side, a book helps them through — their audition book.

An audition book is a collection of songs they have rehearsed that best showcases their skills. When opera singers walk into an audition with their book in hand, they wait for the director to call out the repertoire they must perform in that moment.

“Opera singers have to have a notebook of arias that they can sing with absolute refinement at the drop of a hat,” said Steven Osgood, Chautauqua Opera Company’s general and artistic director.

The audition process is more intense than audiences realize. At 6:15 p.m. Friday, July 12 in Odland Plaza, Young Artists will perform in the third Opera Invasion of the season, in which selections will be requested by the audience, much like an opera audition. The Young Artists who will be performing are soprano Lindsey Chinn, mezzo-soprano Timothi Williams and tenor Brian Jeffers, accompanied by pianist Emily Jarrell Urbanek.

The idea for this invasion sparked from the simple fact that opera singers, particularly freshly graduated singers, go through this audition process all the time.

“That is a very unique experience — what it means to be an opera singer forging a career — and I realized that our audience had no clue about it,” Osgood said. “That’s why we created this Opera Invasion.”

In an audition, singers must be prepared for anything. Osgood said opera singers usually pick their first piece to sing. Then, the director will usually ask, “Do you have anything else?” The opera singer must continue through their audition book and sing the selections that the director chooses.

“The typical audition book is five arias that show a variety of different languages — something in French, Italian, German and English — and something contemporary and possibly something musical theater,” Osgood said.

During this Opera Invasion, the audience will choose from a list of songs the Young Artists have prepared. As the program progresses, Osgood will ask the audience the selections they would like performed.

“The audience is in control of where the concert goes,” Osgood said.

The Opera Invasion is intended to draw people lining up for Under the Streetlamp’s 8:15 p.m. performance in the Amphitheater.

Urbanek said this is important for people to understand how hard opera singers work to land a desired role in the field.

“I don’t think people understand how the nuts and bolts of things work, and the process that singers have to go through in order to be considered for roles,” Urbanek said.

Taibi Magar is unabashed in her fondness for The Christians.

“I absolutely love the play,” she said.

But Magar’s admiration for the show doesn’t only come from her role as the show’s director for the Chautauqua Theater Company’s production this season.

Magar said the show is unique and gripping; that it asks audiences to be active listeners. It isn’t just a piece designed to entertain — it’s a work that brings up questions about the nature of faith and community. Magar thinks it’s deeply worthwhile.

“The show is an incredible, incisive, well-written, beautiful investigation,” Magar said. “It makes you think, and it makes you talk. It perfectly aligns with what I love about theater.”

The Christians runs through Sunday, with performances at 4 p.m. Friday, July 12 and 2:15 p.m. Sunday, July 14 in Bratton Theater.

When it was decided that the show would be a part of CTC’s 2019 summer lineup, Magar said she was excited to be a part of it. 

“I’d always heard about Chautauqua, and I really wanted to check it out,” Magar said. “I’ve tried to make it work in past summers, but the timing is always really hard. But when The Christians came my way, everything seemed to dovetail perfectly.”

Magar thinks the show is a perfect fit for Chautauqua. She said the thoughtful examination of the play’s deeply faithful community seems intrinsically Chautauquan.

“Honestly, when (CTC Artistic Director Andrew Borba) sent me the email, I thought, ‘Oh, this is so perfectly aligned to the spirit of Chautauqua,’ ” Magar said. “ ‘Why hasn’t anyone done it here before?’ ”

Magar has worked all across the country and internationally, taking on both classic pieces and cutting-edge shows. She said her favorite thing about directing live theater is that things are never dull.

“Theater demands your presence,” Magar said. “Your body and mind are required in the present moment. It’s always new and fresh. Nowadays, where everything is online and person-to-person contact is getting rarer and rarer, I think the theater only becomes more important.”

Magar is the recipient of a Stephen Sondheim Fellowship, an Oregon Shakespeare Festival Fellowship, a Public Theater Shakespeare Fellowship, the Theatre for a New Audience Actors and Director Project Fellowship and won an Obie Award in 2018 for her role as director of Is God Is.

Among the multitude of other shows she has directed, Magar said working on The Christians and bonding with the cast and crew has been a rewarding experience.

“I’ve gotten to create a family with this show,” Magar said. “It doesn’t always come together and work so perfectly, but this time is has.”

Jamison Jones, CTC guest artist and Pastor Paul in The Christians, said working with Magar has helped him grow as an actor and truly delve into his role.

“Having Taibi leading the charge as director has, in the best way possible, made analyzing and understanding my character even harder,” Jones said. “She never let me make a choice that was just the first thing that came to me. We challenged everything and dove so deep into this, and I appreciate her role in that.”

And while Magar was encouraging and pushing her actors, she said the show was pushing and challenging her. Magar said she never realized how directly the show’s questions — and how they’re raised — apply to the world beyond the theater.

“We’re in an extremely tense time; it feels very divided,” Magar said. “We aren’t listening anymore. … (This piece) is really important. Instead of lashing out at each other, the characters in this play try to deeply listen to each other and that’s something very admirable.”

Amidst the volatile conversations and monumental issues plaguing the world, Magar said that The Christians feels like a breath of fresh air.

“The spirit of the play is one of genuine, un-reactionary, thoughtful debate and conversation,” Magar said. “It’s something I think we could really use in our world right now.”

Review by Christopher H. Gibbs:

Chautauqua Institution is uniquely positioned to connect various aspects of its programming over the course of a day, week or summer. The theme of the morning lectures this past week has been “A Planet in Balance,” presented in partnership with National Geographic Society, and on Tuesday evening, the Chautauqua Symphony Orchestra took the opportunity to make some connections between nature and music. Because the concert was part of the “Into the Music/After the Music” series, Music Director Rossen Milanov spoke briefly before the first two compositions to explain some of the intersections.

The concert opened with the marvelous “Cantus Arcticus” by the eminent Finnish composer Einojuhani Rautavaara. For much of the 20th century, audience’s principal association of music and Finland was most likely the towering figure of Jean Sibelius. But in recent decades, the phenomenally active musical life of this small nation has vastly expanded as conductors, singers and instrumentalists crowd the world stage and composers like Magnus Lindberg, Kaija Saariaho and Esa-Pekka Salonen attract ever greater acclaim. Rautavaara, who died in 2016 at age 87, was the elder statesman of the group.

Sibelius himself was the one who selected the young Rautavaara to come to America in the 1950s to study at Tanglewood and Juilliard. Like Sibelius, Rautavaara was deeply connected to the landscape and soundscape of Finland. In 1972, he composed “Cantus Arcticus: A Concerto for Birds and Orchestra,” which went on to become his most-frequently performed and popular piece.

From the Middle Ages to the present day, composers’ attraction to birds seems natural — because it is. While most worldly depictions in music are not immediately obvious (how often, really, do we recognize a particular story in a programmatic work unless we are tipped off by a title or program note?), nature’s own melodists pose few such problems. Whether in a Renaissance madrigal, a Haydn string quartet, a Beethoven or Mahler symphony, or a Wagner opera, bird songs and calls stand out. Some composers — the great French composer Olivier Messiaen, most notably — present these sounds with almost scientific accuracy. Recordings in the modern age expanded the possibilities. In his “Pines of Rome,” Ottorino Respighi introduced a quite extraordinary innovation for the mid-1920s: a phonograph recording of a nightingale.

“Cantus Arcticus” makes use of taped birds, chance techniques and a harmonic language of extraordinary beauty. In three slow movements lasting some 20 minutes, the recorded birds heard on tape are imitated by the instruments of the orchestra. The evocative piece needs to be heard live to appreciate fully the interaction between recorded sound and live orchestra. The Amphitheater is the perfect place to encounter such a piece, connected as it is so organically to nature (granted, we more often hear barking dogs than chirping birds as ambient sound in the Amp, but the open-air setting nonetheless places everyone within a natural space). The CSO is playing extremely well this summer, and under Milanov presented the majestic work most effectively.

The fantastic Nordic landscape then shifted to a Bohemian one: the fourth symphonic poem of Bedřich Smetana’s six-part orchestral masterpiece “Má vlast” (My Country). Although Smetana is generally recognized as the first great Czech Romantic composer (he was born nearly two decades before Antonín Dvořák), much of his aesthetic was actually German — Franz Liszt served as his mentor and model. “Má vlast” displays his native Czech roots as well as his Germanic musical inclinations. Liszt was a pioneer in the single-movement symphonic poem, but I don’t think any of the 13 he composed quite match the six of “Má vlast” in their seamless exploration of different moods.

Vltava (Die Moldau in German) — the cycle’s second part that depicts the river running through the heart of the Czech lands — is much better known than its companion pieces that altogether touch on various aspects of the country’s vistas, history and mythology. What the CSO performed — “From Bohemia’s Forests and Meadows” — is the one most related to nature, to what Smetana called “the rich and beautiful land of Bohemia.” Milanov led a well-balanced and joyous performance, especially in the polka section near the end.

An obvious way to conclude the program would have been with Beethoven’s “Pastoral” Symphony, but Milanov chose a less familiar piece by the composer — the Triple Concerto — and delivered a spirited performance with three terrific young soloists known as the JCT Trio. Although the concerto has no overt connection with nature, Beethoven was one of those composers (Mahler was another) for whom nature was crucial to his existence and creative process. He once remarked in a letter: “No one can love the country as much as I do. For surely woods, trees and rocks produce the echo which man desires to hear,” and he despaired when Napoleon’s troops occupying Vienna meant he could not leave the city: “I still cannot enjoy life in the country, which is so indispensable for me.”

Beethoven communing with birds and flowers may seem at odds with the eccentric genius shaking his fist at fate, but the two images are complementary sides of his personality. The Concerto for Violin, Cello, and Piano in C Major, Op. 56 — to give its official title — shows the composer in a kinder, gentler mood as he looks back in time as well as geographically sideways in its Polish finale. The Triple is a relatively unusual 19th-century concerto in having multiple soloists, something that was common in the 17th and 18th centuries. It is the least performed of his seven mature concertos and is sometimes used as an excuse to bring together star soloists who don’t necessarily have a particularly unified vision of the piece. But the young JCT Trio, consisting of violinist Stefan Jackiw, cellist Jay Campbell and pianist Conrad Tao, not only delivered an engaged and vibrant performance, but also a fully integrated one despite this being the first time they had performed the work together (as they stated in the post-concert discussion). Expertly partnering with the CSO, they were by turns bold, elegant and in the dazzling coda to the final movement, really thrilling.

During the introduction before the concert, Deborah Sunya Moore, vice president of performing and visual arts, and Owen Lee, the CSO’s principal bass, took the opportunity to acknowledge the retirement of bassist Patricia Dougherty, who had played with the orchestra for over 40 years.   

Christopher H. Gibbs is the James H. Ottaway Jr. Professor of Music at Bard College, artistic director of the Bard Music Festival, executive editor of The Musical Quarterly and program annotator for The Philadelphia Orchestra. His books include The Life of Schubert, which has been translated into six languages, and the College Edition of The Oxford History of Western Music, co-authored with Richard Taruskin.

Kevin Hand zoomed out and put planet Earth in cosmic context to tackle one of the universe’s oldest and most profound questions: Is anybody out there?

Hand, astrobiologist and National Geographic Emerging Explorer, addressed that question at 10:45 a.m. Thursday in the Amphitheater, continuing Week Three, “A Planet in Balance: A Week in Partnership with National Geographic Society.”

Hand found his place in the stars as a child. While growing up under the constellations in the Vermont sky, he realized the search for life beyond Earth is guided by the understanding of life on Earth.

“Planet Earth is teeming with life,” Hand said. “North, south, east, west, high, low, hot, cold — wherever you find liquid water on planet Earth, you generally find life.”

Various space missions have given scientists good reason to predict that vast, global liquid-water oceans exist beyond Earth. Those oceans are trapped beneath icy shells of moons orbiting planets like Jupiter, Venus and Saturn, and are changing the idea of what it takes for a world to be habitable.

In the early days of astronomy and planetary science, the idea was that in order for a planet to be habitable, it had to be at the right distance from its parent star for liquid water and oceans to exist on the surface.

“If you are too close, like Venus, you were too hot and you boiled off any water that you once had,” Hand said. “If you are too far away, like Mars, you were cold and you froze out or lost any water to space. There was this kind of Goldilocks scenario: You had to be just the right sun- and Earth-distance, so as to have a liquid ocean on the surface that could sustain life.”

Hand calls that scenario the “old Goldilocks.” The “new Goldilocks” describes habitability in terms of tidal energy, or the tug and pull that moons experience as they orbit planets.

The best example of the “tug and pull” can be seen on the moons of Jupiter: Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto. Liquid water is not a possibility on Callisto and Io, but Hand believes Europa has the perfect combination of tidal energy dissipation to sustain life and a surface-level ocean.

“Again, one of the key aspects of these oceans is that by merit of having liquid water, we think that they could harbor life,” Hand said. “If we have learned anything from life on Earth, it’s that where you find liquid water, you generally find life.”

However, the diversity of life on Earth depends on both liquid water and biochemistry.

“All life on Earth is connected by the same tree of life,” Hand said. “What I’m curious about is whether or not there are other trees of life, separate origins of life on worlds beyond Earth, worlds like Europa, worlds like these ocean worlds or possibly even on planets beyond our solar system. Is the origin of life easy or hard? Does life arise wherever the conditions are right? Do we live in a universe that is teeming with life?”

Hand said life itself has three components: liquid water; periodic elements; and energy, the most important of the three.

“Even though (some moons) have liquid water, they don’t necessarily have sunlight that can help power the food chain,” he said. “When we look around the surface of our planet, the energy from the sun not only contains liquid water, it also powers photosynthesis, helping to serve as the base of the food chain.”

To prove that oceans do exist on other planets, Hand referenced evidence from Enceladus, one of Saturn’s moons. Using pictures from NASA’s Cassini-Huygens spacecraft, Hand discovered that the north side of the moon’s icy shell was covered with craters — a sign of impact and age on a moon’s surface.

Alternatively, there are cracks instead of craters on the south side of the shell. Scientists discovered that water was jetting out and fracturing the ice.

“The ice of Enceladus is maybe 10 or so miles in thickness, but the tidal tug and pull that Enceladus feels as it orbits Saturn causes that ocean to be contained,” he said. “But it also fractures the ice shell and those cracks allow water to seep on up and essentially boil off into space and jet into space.”

Europa has no signs of liquid water due to its average temperature of minus 280 degrees Fahrenheit, but there is evidence of salt and a fractured ice shell. Scientists believe Europa, similar to Earth, has an iron core and a rocky mantle, but the ocean underneath is estimated to be 60 miles deep.

“It’s a global ocean and if you do the math, it turns out that the volume of liquid water within Europa’s ocean is about two to three times the volume of all the liquid water found in Earth’s oceans,” he said. 

Since Hand is unable to explore extreme conditions on moons throughout the universe, he looks to Earth’s extreme conditions in northern Alaska. For more than a decade, Hand and a team of scientists have studied microbe survival and the methane gas that is seeping out of Alaska’s permafrost.

“In the summer, the lakes are open to the atmosphere and photosynthesis can occur, but during the winter, the lakes freeze over and the sun goes away because it’s too far north,” he said. “The microbial ecology takes over, and the microbes that are generating methane start to do their job.”

Hand only studies in Alaska for a few days each fall and spring, but he is working with a team of engineers to create a robot that can stay in the water all winter. Hand is working on a submersible rover that would roll upside down under the ice for increased mobility.

Exploring Alaska helped Hand imagine conditions on Europa, but the water was not deep or representative enough to make any direct comparisons. To experiment with another extreme environment, Hand explored hydrothermal vents, or hot springs, at the bottom of the ocean.

“What was astonishing was back in 1977, when these were first discovered, geologists were anticipating finding active regions that were perhaps chemically interesting, but they did not expect to find the biology that was there,” he said.

Around the vents, scientists found microbes that were feeding off the chemical energy and minerals from the hot water.

“It’s super heated, but the chemically rich composition of it allows microbes to eat it and then the crabs, the shrimp and the other creatures that we see are able to use those microbes as the base of the food chain,” Hand said.

To understand the pressure of Europa’s ocean, Hand attended a National Geographic trip to the Challenger Deep, the deepest known point in the Earth’s seabed hydrosphere. In addition to a human-occupied submersible, the team released robots that could remain underwater for long periods of time, meaning the team could attach bait to the robots and see what they attracted. 

“In the deepest, darkest, most extreme environment in our planet’s ocean, we see life not just seeking out a living, we see life thriving,” he said. “What you are seeing are hundreds to thousands of little shrimp-like creatures called arthropods that came out of the darkness to feed on a fish head in a trap that we set up.”

The exploration of Europa is Hand’s “dream of dreams” mission. Once a spacecraft enters the ice-ocean interface and makes contact with life, Hand said the understanding of life beyond Earth will “change forever.”

Hand closed his lecture by sharing a 400-year-old sketch by Galileo, what he calls his “favorite image of the universe.”

At the center of the sketch is Jupiter.

“Galileo turned his telescope to the night sky, pointed it at Jupiter and he saw not just Jupiter, but these four little points of light around Jupiter,” he said. “Those four little points of light, he initially thought were just stars.”

Galileo quickly realized the lights couldn’t be stars because their positions constantly changed. According to Hand, by discovering the moons of Jupiter, Galileo helped put the “final nail in the coffin of Aristotelian cosmology.” 

“With the idea that the Earth is at the center of the universe and everything revolves around the Earth, (Galileo) really opened the doorways for the Copernican Revolution, which set the stage for the Earth going around the sun, our sun being a star, the stars that we see being suns in their own right and potentially being host to planets of their own,” he said.

In the decades that followed Galileo’s lifetime, Hand said humans would come to appreciate that the laws of physics, geology and chemistry work beyond Earth. The role of the fourth major science on other planets — biology — is still unknown.

“We don’t yet know whether the science of us —  whether life — exists beyond Earth,” Hand said. “Does biology work beyond Earth, or is life on Earth the only singularity for biology in this universe?”

According to Hand, there is no better time than now to add biology to the list.

“We can send out the robotic spacecraft, do the experiments, search for signs of life and see whether or not we are alone,” he said. “In doing so, we can potentially bring the universe to life.”

Women in New York State won the right to vote in 1917, and women across the country gained the right to vote in 1920, when Congress ratified the 19th Amendment.

At the time, leading suffragists, including Susan B. Anthony, made appearances at Chautauqua. Now, almost a century later, Linda Ulrich-Hagner is bringing the movement back to Chautauqua.

At 3:30 p.m. today, July 12, in the Hall of Christ, Ulrich-Hagner, retired teacher and docent of the Roycroft Inn and the Roycroft Campus, will present “Alice Hubbard and the Roycroft Women’s Fight for Suffrage” as part of the Oliver Archives Heritage Lecture Series.

Elbert Hubbard originally came to Buffalo following a business venture for the Larkin Soap Company, and after 20 years of working for LSC, he decided to switch careers. In 1895, Hubbard created the Roycroft Press in East Aurora, New York, where he and his second wife Alice edited and published two magazines: The Fra and The Philistine.

In addition to the Roycroft Press, Elbert and Alice Hubbard were members of the Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle.

After retiring in 2002, Ulrich-Hagner wanted to keep working and felt being a docent was an extension of teaching. She is currently a docent for the Roycroft Inn and the Roycroft Campus, as well as a member of the Aurora Historical Society. Ulrich-Hagner had originally planned to do a presentation on the Women of Roycroft, but her research, on both The Fra and The Philistine, led her to discover the connection of the Suffrage Movement, so she created a brand new presentation. Along with Alice Hubbard, Ulrich-Hagner added the work of great women suffragists such as Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, author of The Woman’s Bible, to her presentation.

“What (Stanton) did was she took the Bible apart and took out all the derogatory comments about women; ones like women were a second thought, and she rewrote the Bible,” Ulrich-Hagner said. “These women that fought for suffrage were just incredible and smart.”

In her research, Ulrich-Hagner had read an article about Anthony that named her the “most famous lesbian of the 19th century.”

“She had many relationships with many of the suffrage women,” Ulrich-Hagner said. “Every time Elizabeth Cady Stanton got pregnant, and she had seven kids, Susan B. Anthony just was crazy about it. She just was so aggravated because she felt as though Stanton’s mind was not working as well because she got married to a man and had kids. (She) just felt that a woman was much better off single or with another woman, and (those women) were better for the suffrage fight.”

Anthony spent time at the Roycroft Campus and even gave a lecture at the United Methodist House on the grounds in 1888, on “Moral vs. Political Power,” a lecture Ulrich-Hagner thinks Chautauqua could still host in the present day.

“Chautauqua is always ahead of the curve in terms of discussions and what is going on,” Ulrich-Hagner said. “The fact that we had to fight for suffrage for so long — it’s really hard to believe it took so long back then.”

Ulrich-Hagner said women’s suffrage is especially timely since the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment’s ratification is coming up in 2020.

“(There is an) importance of the fight for suffrage,” Ulrich-Hagner said. “Many of these issues are still in place. Women are not treated equally in many settings … so the suffrage fight, even though we are voting, is still not over.”

For Chautauquans who have recently visited the Fowler-Kellogg Art Center, a lecturer this evening may look familiar.

In “Four Seasons,” a photo series featured in the “Reconstructing Identities” exhibition, artist Wendy Red Star wears a traditional Crow elk-tooth dress — she is a member of the Crow, or Apsáalooke, Nation — and poses in four diorama-like artificial nature scenes.

“The piece is (an) institutional critique,” she said. “(It’s) critiquing the way indigenous people, our material culture, has been put on display.”

Red Star is a core faculty member this season at the School of Art. She will be speaking at 7 p.m. Friday, July 12 in the Hultquist Center, as part of the Visual Arts Lecture Series. As far as records show, Red Star is the first Native American woman artist to teach at Chautauqua Institution.

In her talk, Red Star will discuss her research-based artistic practice through an in-depth examination of several projects, including “Four Seasons.”

She works with a number of mediums, including photography, sculpture and video, and uses her work to explore Native American ideologies in historical and modern contexts. Red Star draws inspiration from her childhood living on the Crow Reservation in Montana.

“A lot of the work comes from having the space both in distance, but also in time, from where I grew up,” she said.

“Four Seasons” in particular was inspired by a trip she took to the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County while a grad student at UCLA.

Homesick, Red Star was searching for some element of Crow culture in the city.

“I did find some Crow moccasins,” she said. “But that was the first time that I realized … everyone who is looking at these cultural material objects is thinking that these people no longer exist or that way of living, of culture, doesn’t exist anymore. I had this moment of realizing, ‘Wow, I have my entire traditional outfit here in Los Angeles … and these people are thinking that we don’t exist.’”

The piece intends to show the disparity between generalized ideas about Native American culture and the reality of Red Star’s current, specific cultural identity.

“I’ve known growing up that I’m Crow, and to me when someone says ‘Native American,’ my reference is Crow,” she said. “It’s not a Lakota person, it’s not a Seneca person, but we’ve been put under the same umbrella.”

During her time at the Institution, Red Star will work with the students and emerging artists at the School of Art to help them create historically inspired, research-based pieces. She will encourage them to work with Chautauqua Institution Archives.

“I’m super curious about everything, and I want the students to work from a place of curiosity and questioning,” she said.

Roy Speckhardt believes human empathy and compassion can direct the arc of history toward a better place.

“There exists great harm in this world, and people who have bad motivations — they exist,” said Speckhardt, an author and executive director of the American Humanist Association. “We should do what we can to overcome these problems as a world community. We need to address these topics and concerns in ways that can lift everybody up.”

At 2 p.m. today, July 12, in the Hall of Philosophy, Speckhardt will give Chautauqua’s third Interfaith Friday lecture on humanism and the problem of evil. Speckhardt will be in conversation with the Rt. Rev. V. Gene Robinson, vice president of religion and senior pastor.

“I’m coming from a humanist perspective,” Speckhardt said. “We’re not theistic, we don’t have God beliefs. That kind of puts a twist on discussing why a loving God would allow evil in the world.”

Speckhardt said he plans on talking about how people of faith and goodwill can work together to make the world a better place.

“In fact, looking at history, there are bigger reasons for optimism than we’re seeing in current politics,” he said.

Speckhardt was raised Catholic in a suburb of New York City, and said he very quickly began to explore other religions.

“I did quite a bit of exploration into Eastern religions and other types of faiths before I decided humanism would be best for me,” he said. “Humanists get their source of knowledge from scientific processes, which basically leads us to the best of modern knowledge. We go to what our experts say is the best information on a given subject. We don’t look for divine revelation or ancient texts.”

Speckhardt has helped lead recent policy initiatives in the AHA, including a few high-profile lawsuits involving Christian symbols that were placed in public areas.

“We see that a government has installed a Christian cross in a way that we think is inappropriate,” he said. “One of (the cases) that we just lost was in the Supreme Court in Maryland. They decided that this memorial from World War I could continue to stand, in what was a fairly narrow decision.”

According to Speckhardt, it’s the AHA’s position that government “shouldn’t be in the religion business — and putting up a Christian cross is getting in the religion business.”

“When we drive past a town that has a giant Christian cross on the outside, it looks like that town is more welcoming to Christians than people of other faiths,” he said. “And when it’s used as a memorial, that compounds the problem from our perspective because not all veterans are Christian. Putting up a memorial and saying that it represents everyone when it only represents the Christian fallen is just not fair.”

Yet the courts aren’t the only avenue for pursuing the AHA’s agenda, according to Speckhardt.

“Our organization does advocacy in the halls of Congress and in the public realm, too,” he said. “We try to get the word out about humanism and about our perspectives to people all across the country.”

Though founded in 1888, National Geographic Society has experienced some major “firsts” in 2019.

Launched earlier this year, Sea to Source: Ganges Plastics Expedition became the first in a series of expeditions planned as part of National Geographic’s Planet or Plastic? initiative, and the largest all-female led expedition in National Geographic history.

Co-led by National Geographic Fellows Heather Koldewey and Jenna Jambeck, the Sea to Source: Ganges team endeavored to collect plastics data along the Ganges River — from the Bay of Bengal to India’s western Himalayas — in June for the pre-monsoon season phase of research. The expedition team was divided into three groups, focused on land, water and people, and comprised of partners in India and Bangladesh, as well as National Geographic Explorers, including multimedia journalist Lillygol Sedaghat.

Koldewey and Sedaghat will deliver the morning lecture at 10:45 a.m. today, July 12, in the Amphitheater, as part of Week Three, “A Planet in Balance: A Week in Partnership with National Geographic Society.”

“Heather and Lilly’s work on plastic pollution demonstrates the power of research and storytelling — and partnership — in providing a holistic view of a problem, raising awareness, sparking conversation and driving solutions,” said Matt Ewalt, vice president and Emily and Richard Smucker Chair for Education.

Koldewey and Sedaghat plan on discussing the Sea to Source: Ganges expedition and the broader context of ocean plastics; relationships between plastic, people and poverty; and storytelling as an agent of change.

The Ganges is among the world’s top rivers contributing to ocean plastic pollution, Koldewey said. But data describing plastic pollution has mostly been based on models, examining variables like population size and waste management infrastructure — until now.

“What we wanted to do was to look at some empirical measurements, on-the- ground measurements,” Koldewey said. “Understanding the source, the load and the type of plastics going into a river like the Ganges, is really going to enable us to unlock solutions.”

Currently the Zoological Society of London’s senior technical adviser, Koldewey said she has followed a “meandering path” throughout her career, first joining the ZSL in 1995, and filling various roles since. With collaboration and conservation at the core of Koldewey’s work, she has helped launch OneLess, a movement that asks, “What would it take to make London a city free of single-use plastic water bottles?” And in 2012, she developed Net-Works, which has created a new supply chain for discarded fishing nets to be recycled into nylon yarn for carpet and clothing.

“Since we’ve set up (Net-Works), we’ve managed to collect and export over 200 metric tons of nets; and to visualize that, that’s enough to go around the world five times with functional fishing nets,” Koldewey said. “In all cases, my work is very much focused on looking at solutions.”

This type of solutions-minded work, Koldewey said, will hopefully carry over into the second phase of Sea to Source: Ganges, which will commence in October when monsoon season ends. Until then, “there’s a lot of work to be done,” and the team will be analyzing data and preparing for the next phase.

“We’re looking at the next expedition to be the changemaker expedition — where we look at how we can support our local partners in India and Bangladesh, and set them up for success, find solutions and implement those,” Koldewey said. “I think there is inspiration everywhere, and that’s what gives me hope. … There’s so many people working hard and trying to make a difference — that’s in all aspects of society. And that, I find very motivational.”

During the expedition’s first phase, which began on the ground in Bangladesh in early May, Sedaghat had two roles. She tracked riverbank waste as part of the land team, and she documented Sea to Source: Ganges for National Geographic’s Open Explorer platform, Instagram and National Geographic Society.

Sedaghat’s latter responsibility acts as a bridge between non-scientists and scientists; science and art; and people of different communities and cultures.

“I get out of bed each morning with the hope that I can use certain words, certain images, to be able to package science in a way that is accessible and understandable to people,” Sedaghat said. “In creating those bridges by means of storytelling, then we can create a more nuanced understanding of each other, and therefore, a better world.”

Chautauqua will take a trip back in time when retro cover band Under The Streetlamp takes the stage to perform some of the 20th century’s greatest hits. Under the Streetlamp will rock ’n’ roll at 8:15 p.m. tonight, July 12, in the Amphitheater.

The band is all about breathing new life into songs, primarily from the 1960s and ’70s, though they have performed music from as far back as the ’20s, and as recent as 1980. Under the Streetlamp takes all their music from what founding member and choreographer Shonn Wiley called “the American radio songbook.”

“(It’s) music that was prominent and on the radio anywhere from the ’50s all the way to the 1980s,” Wiley said.

Under the Streetlamp got started when Wiley and the other original members met during a Chicago production of Jersey Boys, a musical about Frankie Valli and The Four Seasons. Wiley and the others decided to dive into ’60s music outside of the show, performing around Chicago and  gaining traction within the city’s scene. They filmed several shows that aired on PBS, and received an enthusiastic response from many new fans. They have toured all over the country, including Chautauqua twice before in 2012 and 2015.

The name of the group comes from “a sense of where this music was first created,” Wiley said. Decades ago, musicians and singers would play and sing in the streets of large metropolitan areas, especially on the East Coast and in Chicago and New Orleans, while others watched from door stoops and street corners. As night fell and the streetlights lit up, the performers would go on playing under the streetlamps. This, Wiley said, was the birth of doo-wop, rock ’n’ roll, jazz and rhythm and blues.

It also comes from a line in Jersey Boys, Wiley said, when Valli ruminates on his fame and what the high point of it all was, and concludes that it was not the fame at all, “But four guys under a street lamp, when it was all still ahead of us, the first time we made that sound, our sound. When everything dropped away and all there was, was the music. That was the best.”

Whereas Postmodern Jukebox, who performed at Chautauqua in Week One, gives new music a vintage twist, Wiley said, Under the Streetlamp makes older music sound new by performing it live with high energy and dance numbers.

“Retro is in fashion,” Wiley said.

Though the music they play is from past decades, Wiley said it’s for everyone, especially when played live. It is not uncommon to see people from three different generations at their concerts.

“It’s a testament to the music,” Wiley said. “Great melodies, awesome harmonies, really great groove (and) exceptional songwriting during that period of time. There’s really something for everybody.”

Though some of the original members have left the band to do other things, the spirit of the group remains the same. The band is currently comprised of three other main singers: Eric Gutman, David Larsen and Brandon Wardell. The personalities and preferences of all four members make the show more varied and exciting, as each performer gets to sing some of his own favorites.

“When you get an opportunity to bring new folks in, it’s not necessarily replacing the people who were there before but adding to the energy and the culture, and we’ve done that every time a member has left,” Wiley said.

Under the Streetlamp’s shows are more informal than not, and the group encourages the audience to dance, sing and lose themselves in the music.

“We take the music seriously, but we don’t take ourselves too seriously,” Wiley said.