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With centuries of history on her side, Nikole Hannah-Jones argues that America was founded on a lie, and has spent 250 years trying its best to cover that up.

That lie originated with the slave trade of 1619, a year she said rivals in importance with 1776.

“It was the year 1619 that our decision to become a ‘slaveocracy,’ which is what we decided, is as important as our decision in 1776 to become a democracy,” Hannah-Jones said. “You can’t disentangle those two from the identity of our country, who we would ultimately come to be and who we are as a nation right now.”

Hannah-Jones, MacArthur Genius Grant Fellow and reporter for The New York Times Magazine, spoke at the 10:45 a.m. morning lecture Tuesday, June 25 in the Amphitheater, continuing Week One’s theme, “Moments That Changed the World.”

In 1619, a ship brought 20 African slaves ashore in the British colony of Jamestown, Virginia; this summer marks the 400th anniversary of forced migration to North America.

“It’s an amazing story of intrigue that lands this ship here,” Hannah-Jones said. “The slave trade of taking Africans of European powers, of taking Africans across the Middle Passage into the colonies of the Caribbean and South America, had already been going on since the late 1500s by the time this ship lands on the shores of North America.”

The slaves on the ship were from Angola, which, despite the popular narrative,  was a “highly advanced” society.

The Africans were stolen by the Portuguese and as they sailed to Virginia, the ship was robbed, overtaken and other colonial powers took the slaves on board. The slaves were traded for supplies.

“So, they traded these 20 human beings who managed to make it across the Middle Passage and into the Virginia colony in order to get supplies, and then they sailed down south to drop off the rest of those enslaved people, who they treated as cargo, into the Caribbean,” Hannah-Jones said.

The decision of those original settlers to purchase human beings and force them across the ocean has left “nothing in America untouched,” according to Hannah-Jones.

“You can look across the spectrum of American life and see that that very early decision that we were going to join the African slave trade has had ramifications across every aspect of our society,” she said.

Hannah-Jones said most people are unaware of the extensive history of slavery because the majority of American textbooks only devote a few pages on the issue.

“That’s intentional,” she said. “W. E. B. Du Bois called this ‘the propaganda of history,’ that in trying to make the mythology of America, we had to downplay the role of slavery because slavery is incompatible with democracy.”

Because of that “propaganda of history,” Hannah-Jones said she still hears people make the argument that since many countries practiced slavery, the United States was not unique in its wrongdoing.

“There was no system of slavery that the world had ever known like the trans-Atlantic slave trade,” she said. “The trade went from Europe to Africa, where Africans were either stolen, kidnapped or sold into slavery, and then they were traded into the new colonies that European countries had settled in both the Caribbean, South America and the United States.”

Over the course of the slave trade, there were more than 36,000 slave voyages.

“Think about that sheer number of ships going to Africa and robbing Africa of its youngest people — 36,000,” she said. “The best number that we have is that 13 million Africans were brought across that Middle Passage. Some go as high as 20 million.”

The magnitude of slaves transported resulted in the reformation of the entire Western Hemisphere, Hannah-Jones said.

“Those countries that you are vacationing on are all black because of the slave trade,” she said. “We completely remade new countries, new black countries because we transported so many millions of Africans across the ocean to build these lands.”

Hannah-Jones told the story of Olaudah Equiano, a slave who, once free, wrote a book about his experiences being transported on the Middle Passage.

“He talked about the shrieks of the women and the groans of the dying and wishing, wishing that he would die too,” she said. “(He was) actually feeling that he wanted to join them, that he would rather die than have to endure this passage to a place that they did not know. They could only imagine how terrible the place would be where they were going if this was the way that they were getting there.”

The ironic connection to 1776 begins with Thomas Jefferson’s famous line in the Declaration of Independence, “We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among those are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

“We believe this to our core,” Hannah-Jones said. “This is what makes America an exceptional country, except what we also know is even as Thomas Jefferson was using his quill pen to draft those words on parchment, he was holding more than 200 human beings in bondage himself, including his own children.”

Hannah-Jones said people try to excuse the behavior of Jefferson and the other Founding Fathers, stating they were simply men of their time who didn’t know any better.

“They know that it is wrong and they know that it is hypocritical to say that you are going to start a nation based on the individual rights of men, a nation that would be the freest and most libertarian country the world has ever seen, while holding a fifth of your population in bondage,” she said.

To deal with the conflicting nature of the issue, Jefferson wrote about slavery in the original Declaration of Independence, blaming it on the king of Britain for bringing slavery into the Colonies in the first place.

“He is attempting to have clean hands, he is attempting to say that the Colonies did not want slavery, it was forced upon them,” Hannah-Jones said. “That passage is not in the Declaration of Independence that you can go see in Philadelphia and that is because, already by this time, the economy of the United States is intrinsically connected to slavery.”

In addition to the idea that the Founding Fathers didn’t know any better, Hannah-Jones has also been told these men were unaware that “black people are human beings,” another misconception she found easy to discredit.

“Twelve of our first presidents engaged in human trafficking… that’s 1/4 of every man that has ever served in the office of presidency” @nhannahjones

— The Chautauquan Daily (@chqdaily) June 25, 2019

“One does not believe that Africans are not human beings, but make it illegal for them to read,” she said. “You don’t have to make it illegal for animals to read. You don’t have to spend so much time trying to legislate against people who are running away and rebelling and resisting if they’re not actually human beings.”

To further understand American slavery, Hannah-Jones said one has to understand how it differed from slavery that functioned in other parts of the world. Unlike slavery outside of the country, slavery in the United States fell under five different categories: It was racial, it was heritable, slaves were treated as property, they operated under social deaths and, lastly, slavery was permanent.

“We are an exceptional country in that we invented an exceptional institution of slavery,” she said.

But the discrimination of Africans did not end with slavery itself. Even people opposed to slavery were opposed to black equality.

“Most abolitionists wanted to end slavery and then they wanted to get rid of the black people who were here,” she said. “We actually believed as a nation that black people were incompatible with democracy. Once black people could no longer be used as free labor, black people should cease to exist in the United States.” 

The racism that developed to justify the trafficking of human beings became an irreversible part of America, according to Hannah-Jones.

“The institution of slavery can end, but it can’t end this belief about the inherent inferiority of black people or the problem of people who are forced to live under that system,” she said.

Hannah-Jones said the most ironic thing about the history of slavery is that black people were actually the “most American of all Americans.”

“Africans were made black,” she said. “They were shorn of any of those connections, they were forced to create a country anew here in this country. There are no countries to go back to. The names of black people are the names of people who enslaved them. There is no tongue that you could learn, there is no connection you can make. Those who were considered the least, actually ended up being the most.”

That irony echoes that of the lie Hannah-Jones said America was founded on: America was founded on the inalienable rights of men, rights that 20% of the population could not and would never possess.

“I always say that black people are the most inconvenient people in America because we are the constant reminder of that lie,” Hannah-Jones said. “We only exist because of that lie.”

Even today, it is on the backs of black people that “we get as much democracy as we have,” Hannah-Jones said. For example, black people are involved in the armed services at the highest rates of any other group in America.

“Imagine such a belief in the ideals of a country that didn’t even include you, that you would die for a country and for beliefs that you hoped would one day include your own people,” she said.

“Those who were considered the least… actually ended up being the most” @nhannahjones pic.twitter.com/psk8xBgWln

— The Chautauquan Daily (@chqdaily) June 25, 2019

Because of the suffering black people have endured, Hannah-Jones said they often play the role of trying to assure rights for everyone, a role she saw play out in the 2016 election.

“The black vote was not split on Donald Trump,” she said. “More than 90% of black people voted against Donald Trump, more than any other group. They did not get caught up in the wave of anti-immigrant sentiment. They didn’t buy into any of that rhetoric because who knows better the cost of xenophobia than black Americans.”

According to Hannah-Jones, data shows that black people are the most progressive of all Americans, consistently voting for issues that push America toward the common good more than any other group. However, she said that this is not to say black people are more progressive because there is something “magically great” about them, but that because of their particular experience in American history, black people are “extremely empathetic to the suffering of others.”

“If we really want to be a democracy, if we really want to be a country who cares about all of our citizens, not just ourselves, if we want to live up to those founding ideals, follow the lead of your most American of Americans,” Hannah-Jones said. “Trust black women, starting with this one.”

The Hurlbut Church Meal Ministry is going green.

Chautauquans who attend the church’s weekday lunches or Sunday lemonade stand and barbecue will notice that the styrofoam takeout containers and plastic straws previously used by the church have been replaced with more environmentally-friendly alternatives.

“We really are trying to do our part for the environment,” said Debbie Caruso, ministries coordinator at Hurlbut.

Hurlbut Church started the transition last year, using biodegradable plates at the weekday lunches and giving people the option to utilize reusable plates and glasses. This year, styrofoam takeout containers have been replaced by ones that biodegrade. The church will hand out paper straws instead of plastic ones.

“This year, the leaders at the church decided that they really just wanted to jump in and go all green,” Caruso said.

The meal ministry has been serving food to Chautauquans for about 30 years, Caruso said. During the summer season, lunch is served Monday through Friday, dinner is served on Thursday nights and a lemonade stand and barbecue take place on Sundays.

The proceeds from the meals — about $35,000 to $40,000 per year — are donated to a number of organizations, including Habitat for Humanity, Chautauqua County Rural Ministry and food pantries in Ashville, Mayville and Westfield.

Thursday night turkey dinners at the church have always been served on traditional dinner plates and with metal silverware.

Plastic utensils are still used at the weekday lunches, although customers can request metal silverware, Caruso said. The church is decreasing its use of non-biodegradable materials as more and more restaurants and other establishments have been moving away from the use of plastic straws. The push came after images of sea turtles with straws up their nostrils went viral last summer.

Maine Gov. Janet Mills just signed a bill that will ban restaurants, caterers and grocery stores from using styrofoam takeout containers beginning Jan. 1, 2021, and since January of this year, restaurants in California are not allowed to give out plastic straws to customers unless they explicitly ask for one. A prohibition on plastic straws and utensils in Seattle restaurants and bars went into effect last summer.

Plastic never decomposes, instead breaking into smaller and smaller pieces called microplastics that pollute the ocean, leach harmful chemicals into the environment and can end up in drinking water. A study published in the journal Current Opinion in Environmental Science & Health in 2019 found microplastics in 81% of 159 samples collected from tap water in 14 different countries.

Many types of plastic can be recycled, but only for a limited number of times as the material becomes weaker each time it is reprocessed. 

Styrofoam is made out of a petroleum-based plastic, an unsustainable resource. The production of Styrofoam involves hydrofluorocarbons, a chemical compound that is harmful to the ozone layer. Styrofoam also does not decompose.

The meal ministry kicked off with a lemonade stand and barbecue on Sunday, and will continue throughout the nine weeks of the summer season.

Lunch is served from 11:45 a.m. to 1:15 p.m. on weekdays and includes menu options such as quiche, taco salad, turkey, salad plates and vegetable wraps. Each meal comes with a cookie and a beverage.

A turkey dinner, including stuffing, mashed potatoes, vegetables, cranberry sauce and dessert, is served from 5 to 7 p.m. on Thursdays.

The lemonade stand is open from 9:30 a.m. to 2 p.m. on Sundays. Pastries, coffee and dog bones are available before the morning service in the Amphitheater begins. In the late morning, volunteers fire up the grill and serve hamburgers, hot dogs and Italian sausages.

Lunch and dinner are served in the church’s dining room on long tables covered in gingham-patterned tablecloths. The lemonade stand and grill on Sundays can be found outside in front of the church. Takeout is available for all meals.

The purchase price of the green products for the church is about twice that of the less sustainable alternatives, Caruso said. The lunch price was raised from $8 to $9 this year to help compensate for the greater expense of the paper products, as well as rising food costs.

Caruso said the church typically serves about 100 people during each weekday lunch, and 200 people during the Thursday night dinners. She said she loves seeing Chautauquans connect over a meal.

“We have a really welcoming, friendly atmosphere,” she said. “We love it when people come here because, even though they don’t know each other, they sit at the tables and have lunch together.”

According to Galician bagpipe player Cristina Pato, one rhythm connects a diverse set of cultures — and in “Latina,” those rhythms will unite in an exploration of Latin music.

In its second Chautauqua performance this season, the Cristina Pato Quartet will perform “Latina” at 8:15 p.m., Tuesday, June 25 in the Amphitheater. The four instrumentalists explored migratory journeys Monday, June 24. Tuesday, they will turn to the 6/8 — a time signature used in places from the Italian peninsula all the way to the Pacific coast of South America.

The 6/8 is a set of six quarter notes that create a fast, waltz-like tune. Pato said that Italy’s tarantellas use the time signature, as does the Afro-Peruvian style landó. She and another member of the quartet, Edward Perez, created “Latina” as a creative journey through the diverse iterations of the 6/8.

“They sound totally different, and they are named differently,” Pato said. But, she added, these diverse styles connect through their shared rhythm.

Pato said she and her quartet members were trained in different musical traditions. The four instrumentalists will explore those traditions — both their differences and their connections — during the performance.

“‘Latina’ is very much connected to all of our work together,” Pato said. “(The performance is about) understanding the beauty of difference — embracing the idea that all these regions are interconnected and are not so far away from each other, and showcasing that through the music that we play.”

Pato is one of the world’s foremost Galician bagpipe, or gaita, players. She and the rest of the quartet are experienced musicians who have studied and played music from diverse cultures.

Perez, who plays double bass for the quartet, has performed across four continents. The New York City-based jazz musician is also experienced with Latin jazz and various traditional South American styles.

Mauricio Zottarelli, the quartet’s percussionist, is a Brazilian-born New Yorker and a recipient of various musical awards and scholarships in both the United States and Brazil.

Finally, French-born accordionist Julien Labro has studied and performed in Europe, the Middle East, North America and South America. He has led projects for 10 albums and collaborated with a long list of musicians, groups and orchestras.

Tonight’s performance will be Pato’s fourth time on the Amp stage. She first visited as a member of the Silkroad Ensemble and as a soloist with the Chautauqua Symphony Orchestra. As with Silkroad and its mission of cross-cultural collaboration, Pato said that she and her quartet hope to create a different understanding of cultural traditions with tonight’s performance.

“It’s a combination between sharing something that you are passionate about, but also learning a little deeper about other people and communities around the world,” Pato said.

Deborah Sunya Moore, vice president of performing and visual arts, said that Pato’s message of cultural sharing is right at the heart of Chautauqua’s aim for diversity and inclusion on the grounds and in its work.

“I think the sounds of joy from the four of us on the stage — the shared experience every time we play together — that’s something I hope the audience can take with them,” Pato said.

Annie Griffiths likes to refer to herself as an “accidental photographer.”

The plan was always to be a writer, but two years into college, she realized it wasn’t the medium she wanted to use to tell her stories. That’s when she found photography. And if it’s true that a picture is worth a thousand words, she now has more in her collection than authors whose ranks she once aspired to join.

Griffiths, one of the first female photographers at National Geographic, spoke at the 10:45 a.m. morning lecture Monday, June 24 in the Amphitheater, opening Week One’s theme, “Moments That Changed the World.”

“What I did was: I tripped over a camera and fell completely in love with it and then threw my entire heart and soul into trying to catch up and become a strong enough photographer to be published,” Griffiths said.

“I needed to show to the women that follow me, and the men, that you can do this job without abandoning your family.” – @AnnieG_Photo

— The Chautauquan Daily (@chqdaily) June 24, 2019

Griffiths would spend her days lying behind her parents’ couch, a place she chose to read and learn, uninterrupted.

“I was laying on my belly with National Geographic and Life magazine and Look magazine and there were these indelible images that reflected moments in time,” she said. “I remember the exact images, I remember the feel of the paper and I remember being brought into worlds I really didn’t understand or know existed.”

Among the historical moments in the photos she continues to gather inspiration from, there was one she also experienced firsthand: 9/11. Griffiths lost three friends that day.

“So it was, for me, very personal and very tragic,” she said. “What I didn’t understand at that time is the ripple effect of these horrific things, the unintended ripple that then flows through the rest of the world and has powerful, sometimes disastrous and sometimes fabulous impact on the world.”

On the impact of 9/11- “the biggest byproduct is global fear… if you break hate down, you’ll find fear every time” –@AnnieG_Photo pic.twitter.com/aVfM7A7Z11

— The Chautauquan Daily (@chqdaily) June 24, 2019

But before Griffiths felt she could tell the audience that story, she needed to go back to the beginning of her own.

Her story begins with that of her mother, a midwestern, “good Catholic” girl whose life was shaped by the day she was born: May 20, 1927, the same day Charles Lindbergh, American aviator, began the first-ever solo flight across the Atlantic. Her mom was told that story her entire life and eventually, she too wanted a career in aviation.

“When she finished high school she went to the Pan Am office,” Griffiths said. “She went to see if she could get a flight attendant job and they wouldn’t even interview her. So, my mom, being the woman she was, said ‘Thank you very much’ and she packed her disappointment, left and became a pilot. This is what we can all do. We can be bitter or we can be determined.”

Griffiths took that message of perseverance with her throughout her own career, which started in her home state of Minnesota.

“Fortunately, my first stories were kind of in my own backyard,” she said. “So, I didn’t have to worry as much about language and disease and passports and visas and all of that stuff.”

Shortly enough, Griffiths fell in love with exploring her own country and culture. As much as she enjoyed working with wildlife and wide open spaces, it was always the people she met who made the greatest impact.

“The people are hardworking and solid and not the people who usually make the news, and that is important to me,” she said, “not just in our country, but everywhere I go. I don’t feel like I have been to a place unless I can get the heck out of the city and into the countryside to really experience the culture.”

When her career at National Geographic began, Griffiths started traveling internationally, something she never had the opportunity to do growing up. In that, she discovered what her purpose as a photographer was.

“I started traveling, and the job at Geographic really was to take you to all of the places that maybe you had never been, or take you to places you’ve been and show them in a new light,” Griffiths said.

Along the way, Griffiths had two kids: Lily and Charlie. Because her assignments lasted around three months a year, she decided she couldn’t leave them behind.

“So, I packed them up and I took them on my assignments,” she said. “I didn’t mention it at the office, but I figured they weren’t asking the guys about their day care situations. I recognized that I needed to show, for the women that might follow me, and the men, that you can do this job without abandoning your family.”

Griffiths made sure to only travel with her kids to locations that were guaranteed to be safe. These locations included Europe, New Zealand and to much of the audience’s surprise, the Middle East.

“(The Middle East) was so safe,” she said. “I mean that from my heart. Because it was so safe, I could take my kids there and they would be safe. We lived in Aqaba, Galilee, we traveled up to Syria. These were beautiful, beautiful places that were safer than any American city.”

While in the Middle East, she was drawn to Arab women, specifically Bedouin women. The more she photographed them, the more she realized the similarities they shared could benefit them both.

“I recognized that because I was a woman, there were all of these underreported stories that I could have access to,” Griffiths said. “It was the most wonderful thing for me to realize, that so many people are underrepresented in the media or misrepresented, and the biggest misrepresentation is usually of women in the developing world.”

Then Griffiths had an epiphany: She wanted her stories and her photos to be more than beautiful. She wanted them to make a difference.

In order to work toward that goal, she started making herself available to aid organizations. She focused mostly on environmental work, capturing issues such as deforestation, the destruction of salt marshes and the melting ice in Antarctica.

“This conservation work helped me feel like I was at least part of moving issues forward,” she said.

The exposure to world issues she gained from traveling brought her back to the concept of unintended consequences she experienced with 9/11.

One day, Griffiths was photographing a mother and daughter in a refugee camp of 70,000 people. The head of the camp told her hardly any of them would ever make it out because of 9/11.

“It just broke my heart and I thought ‘Well, what am I doing?’ ” she said. “ ‘I should just give up, I should walk away. I can’t make a dent in this, this is just too hard, too awful.’ ”

Two years later she was in a refugee coordinator’s office when she saw her photo of the mother and daughter on the wall. The man she was meeting told her they were doing great, and that the woman and her husband now both had jobs.

“I thought, ‘We can’t ever give up,’ and I didn’t get her out of that refugee camp,” she said. “I take pictures. But, if my pictures can help people who can get her out of a refugee camp, then that’s what I want to spend the rest of my life doing.”

That moment is where her nonprofit, Ripple Effects Images, was born.

The seven areas Griffiths and her team try to tackle in their coverage are health, food, water, education, economic empowerment, energy and climate change. She has captured content of positive impact in all of those areas, but the examples she shared started with health.

“Women are also really smart, and if you teach them how to keep their kids healthy, they’ll do it,” she said.

Griffiths once traveled to an indigenous community in Vietnam where she said the women had little to no access to health information.

“They didn’t know about washing to keep their kids healthy, and once they learned, the incidents of infection dropped dramatically,” she said. “It’s not rocket science, it’s information.”

In terms of education, Griffiths said she’s never talked to a poor mother who didn’t want her kids to be educated more than anything else of monetary value.

“Mandatory education for all children is imperative for any country to lift itself out of poverty,” she said.

Griffiths showed a photo of the poorest woman she had ever met. It was a woman in Kolkata, India, who had lost seven children to malnutrition. When she got a $25 micro-loan, she started a food business on the side of the road. One day, an orphan walked up to her stand. The woman took her in.

According to Griffiths, the first thing the woman did when she saved enough money was buy her daughter a school uniform so she could attend classes. After Griffiths took her photo and listened to the woman’s story, the daughter asked for her pen and notebook and brought it over to her mother. To Griffiths’ delight, the woman’s daughter had taught her how to read and write.

“That’s the ripple effect,” Griffiths said. “That’s it. And women who haven’t had the luxury of going to school are smart as can be, and they can be taught.”

Griffiths said agriculture is one of the most important things for women to be knowledgeable about.

However, this field in particular is not something she sees women entering on their own.

“They are gathering together in co-ops,” Griffiths said. “The solution for women globally is groups, a safe place to gather and learn from each other.”

On an assignment, Griffiths met a group of women in an agriculture co-op. In this co-op, the farmer brings her crops in instead of taking them to a middle man, and the other women weigh, sort and test the product for quality. Then there is a “commodities broker,” who asks the market what the going rate is for specific items and lists hers for less.

“These women will never, ever go back to the middle man,” she said. “They just won’t.”

Griffiths closed her lecture with a story from a trip to Pakistan, one she said “brings me to my knees.”

Griffiths was in a small village in the desert, and the hosts brought out their best cots and blankets for the guests to sleep on. The women made them soup, and as it was getting dark, one of the women asked Griffiths if she would like music. Griffiths said yes, and out came a group of elderly men with homemade instruments who would play for them until they fell asleep.

“I promise you, they had never heard of National Geographic,” she said. “They didn’t know who the heck this crazy white lady was who landed in their village, but they did what my mother always taught me people do. She said, ‘People with the least, give the most.’ So how could I not spend the rest of my life giving back?”

She concludes with a quote her mother always told her, “The people with the least give the most” –@AnnieG_Photo

— The Chautauquan Daily (@chqdaily) June 24, 2019

Theworld has “The Brady Bunch” to thank for the existence of Ball in the House.

The Boston-based a cappella group, which will be performing at 8:15 p.m. Moday, June 24 in the Amphitheater, and at 5 and 7 p.m. Tuesday, June 25 in Smith Wilkes Hall, received some unconventional assistance when coming up with the group’s name.

“Years ago, during our first show, we realized we didn’t have a name for the group,” said Dave Guisti, one of the group’s founding members. “We took a break to try to come up with a name, and everyone just hated each other’s ideas.”

Guisti said that during the volatile brainstorming process, “Brady Bunch” reruns flashed from a muted TV in the background, and when they unmuted it, they heard the character Peter Brady arguing with his mom about being able to play ball in the house. Over and over again the phrase came up, and it stuck in the heads of the group members.

Ever since that day, Ball in the House has stuck with its moniker, taking the act across the United States and delighting audiences with tightly-woven harmonies and upbeat energy. Over the years, they have opened for acts like The Beach Boys, Lionel Richie, The Jonas Brothers and Blondie.

Now the group is bringing its percussive performance to Chautauqua Institution, performing both as part of the Popular Entertainment Series and Family Entertainment Series.

Over the course of these back-to-back shows, Ball in the House will be playing for two very different audiences during the group’s Chautauqua visit. But group member Wallace Thomas said he’s confident the group can entertain young and old alike by adjusting their performance style.

“With kids, we get to be a little bit sillier, to move around and be really energetic,” he said. “And with adults, we try to be smoother, more refined, you know? But we’ll give everyone a chance to come in, put aside whatever they’ve been dealing with and just have a good time.”

Ball in the House specializes in rhythm and blues, soul and pop music, layering multi-part harmonies over rhythmic beatboxing to mimic the dynamic nature of a full band. They cover well-known songs like “Happy” by Pharrell Williams and “Uptown Funk” by Mark Ronson, but also write their own songs, and have produced five albums as a group.

Jon Ryan, another of the group’s founding members, said the nature of a cappella means that everyone, not only those who enjoy R&B or pop music, can find something to enjoy in the group’s performance.

“Above all, the show is fun,” Ryan said. “Even if people don’t think they like a cappella or our music, there’s an attractiveness to the harmonic nature of (the performance) that tempers nearly any song into something that older people can enjoy just as much as younger people.”

Ball in the House comes at each show with the goal to deliver a satisfying and exciting performance. Each show is a new chance to engage and connect with audiences, and Thomas said he applies this mentality to his daily life as well.

“I say a prayer every day, and it’s that this is a day I’ve never seen before and that I will never see again, and that’s exciting,” Thomas said. “Even though it’s the unknown, it’s exciting — not scary — because I can make the best of it.”

So although the members of Ball in the House took their name from a sitcom from the 1970s, their eyes are fixed firmly ahead; on the next show, the next audience and the next experience.

Check them out on YouTube – https://www.youtube.com/user/bithvideo

A play workshopped at Chautauqua Institution in 2017 will soon be taking center stage on Broadway.

Birthday Candles by Noah Haidle is a show that distills 100 years into 30 minutes as it follows one woman from her 17th birthday all the way until her 117th. In a 2017 story in The Chautauquan Daily, Haidle said the show deals with how to lead a meaningful life, and examines how family, tradition and time mingle with one another to create human experiences.

“It’s life, but more curated,” Haidle said in 2017.

The show was originally commissioned by Detroit Public Theater, where Chautauqua Theater Company Managing Director Sarah Clare Corporandy co-founder and co-producing artistic director.

After its inception, Birthday Candles came to the Institution as part of the New Play Workshop where it was staged and altered based on each night’s performance.

Through the NPW, recently written plays come to Chautauqua to find their feet. Instead of simply being read aloud in a writing room, the plays are staged with some technical elements and costumes in order for their writers and directors to get a better idea of what they look like during a real performance.

Now, just two years after its workshop at Chautauqua, the show will begin running on Broadway in the 2019-20 season.

“It’s like a dream come true,” Corporandy said.

Birthday Candles will be directed by former CTC Artistic Director Vivienne Benesch, who left Chautauqua in 2016 to step into the role of producing artistic director at the PlayMakers Repertory Company at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Benesch has been involved with this play from the start. She took the helm as director when the play first came to Chautauqua, then followed it to Detroit for its world premiere at DPT in 2018.

Now that the show is set to appear on the Broadway stage at the Roundabout Theater Company, Benesch will remain in her role as the production’s director.

Not only will the show be taking the stage in New York’s most prestigious theater district, it will also star Debra Messing, best known for her leading role in NBC’s “Will and Grace.” Birthday Candles will be the second on-Broadway production Messing has appeared in after performing in John Patrick Shanley’s Outside Mullingar in 2014.

CTC Artistic Director Andrew Borba was just as excited about the show’s success as Corporandy.

He said he appreciates the opportunities the NPW provides both writers and CTC staff.

“Because of the amazing resources and talents we have (at Chautauqua), we’re in a unique position to actually shepherd and work and stretch and challenge these plays before they go on to full productions,” Borba said. “That’s something special because it usually doesn’t happen.”

And while Birthday Candles’ rapid rise to the Broadway stage may seem implausible to some, Vice President of Performing and Visual Arts Deborah Sunya Moore doesn’t think so. She has believed in both this show and the NPW program all the way.

“I’d almost say it’s unbelievable, but it’s not, because we believed in this work,” Moore said. “I would say it is an incredible affirmation about the power of the work that the Chautauqua Theater Company is doing.”

In light of this success, both Borba and Corporandy expressed a desire to keep the NPW program going strong.

“It’s really one of our top priorities right now,” Borba said. “There are many ways we’re going about supporting it, whether it’s giving more time and resources to these shows, or the conversations that we’re in with outside theaters to build those bridges for these shows to carry on.”

CTC will once again be staging plays as part of the NPW this season.

How the Light Gets In by E.M. Lewis will run July 18-20; On the Exhale by Martin Zimmerman will run Aug. 14-18; and Agent 355 by Preston Max Allen and Jessica Kahkoska will run Aug. 15-18.

As a young woman, Rabbi Sharon Brous spent a weekend walking around the Old City of Jerusalem searching for the answers to life’s questions. When she found out that the answers were “facile and unconvincing,” she decided to devote her life to wrestling with the questions.

Brous, the first-ever rabbi to serve as chaplain-in-residence at Chautauqua, will preach at the 10:45 a.m. Ecumenical Service of Worship Sunday in the Amphitheater and will speak about her faith journey at the 5 p.m. Vespers Sunday in the Hall of Philosophy. She will preach Monday through Friday at the 9:15 a.m. Ecumencial Worship service in the Amphitheater.

In her 2016 TED Talk, “Reclaiming Religion,” which has been viewed 1.3 million times and translated into 20 languages, Brous noted that religions of all faiths were waning.

“Across the board, churches and synagogues and mosques are all complaining about how hard it is to maintain relevance for a generation of young people who seem completely uninterested, not only in the institutions that stand at the heart of our traditions but even in religion itself,” she said.

“And what (the institutions) need to understand is that there is today a generation of people who are as disgusted by the violence of religious extremism as they are turned off by the lifelessness of religious routine-ism.”

Brous sat down with a friend and sent out emails to about 20 people to join them on a Friday night to see what they could make of their Jewish inheritance before they “bailed on religion.” Over 135 came and the result of that wrestling is a community, IKAR, founded in 2004. IKAR means “the essence of or the heart of the matter.”

“The challenge today is to be animated by both gratitude and unrest, by humility and audacity, and to feel the exodus from Egypt — our people’s journey from slavery to freedom, from degradation to dignity — in our guts,” Brous wrote on IKAR’s website. “Our Jewish story calls us to become agents of social change whose fiercest weapons are love, faith and holy hutzpah.”

“Religious Moments that Changed the World” is the theme for the Week One Interfaith Lecture Series, and this is a moment that is changing Chautauqua’s religious life.

“I asked a variety of people why we had never invited a rabbi to serve as our chaplain and preacher of the week,” said The Rt. Rev. V. Gene Robinson in the 2019 winter Chautauquan.

“Other than ‘we’ve never done it that way,’ there was no good answer.”

Robinson noted that Methodist Bishop John H. Vincent said that “the theory of Chautauqua is life is one, and that religion belongs everywhere.” 

That Vincent said “religion” is a key element and not “Christianity” alone is important to Robinson.

Perhaps Vincent’s statement was a “precursor to what would become Chautauqua’s interfaith work,” Robinson said. He said that as long as he and Director of Religion Maureen Rovegno are  responsible for the spiritual and religious life and programming at Chautauqua, the morning worship services will remain Christian “albeit very welcoming of people from other faith traditions.”

“Let’s remember that the only ‘Bible’ Jesus ever knew was the Hebrew Scriptures,” he said. “It seems to me, that if it was good enough for Jesus, it ought to be good enough for us, too. Who better to teach us about God’s self and God’s will in those books than a rabbi.

“I wanted to ensure that our first rabbi chaplain was a sure ‘hit’ — Rabbi Sharon Brous is as close as I am going to get to ‘a sure thing.’ ”

With the goal of reinvigorating Jewish practice and inspiring people of faith to reclaim a moral and prophetic voice, IKAR quickly became one of the fastest growing and most influential Jewish congregations in the country. Today it is credited with sparking a rethinking of religious life in a time of unprecedented disaffection and declining affiliation.

Brous is in the inaugural cohort of Auburn Seminary’s Senior Fellows program, which unites top faith leaders working on the frontlines for justice. Brous also sits on Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti’s Interfaith Collective and on the faculty of the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America and REBOOT, and serves on the International Council of the New Israel Fund and the national steering committee for the Poor People’s Campaign. In 2013, she blessed President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden at the Inaugural National Prayer Service, and Garcetti at his inauguration in 2017.

She spoke at the Women’s March in Washington, D.C., in 2017, and at the national launch of the Poor People’s Campaign and the opening of the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in 2018. Brous was named No. 1 on the Newsweek/The Daily Beast list of the most influential Rabbis in America, and has been recognized by The Forward and the Jerusalem Post as one of the 50 most influential Jews.

Brous is a graduate of Columbia University and was ordained by the Jewish Theological Seminary.

As Chautauqua’s gates swing wide this opening weekend, legendary folk artist Judy Collins returns to the Amphitheater stage, and jazz singer-songwriter Madeleine Peyroux makes her Chautauqua debut bringing Leonard Cohen’s 1992 “Anthem” to life and relaying the fitting lyrics: “The birds they sang at the break of day/Start again I heard them say.”

In a double bill performance at 8:15 p.m. Saturday in the Amphitheater, the two artists will bring distinct styles — Peyroux’s rich jazz sound and Collins’ timeless folk spirit.

“I love having this double bill of two outstanding female artists,” said Deborah Sunya Moore, vice president of performing and visual arts. “The fact that we can have both jazz and folk represented is really exciting to me.”

Because each artist attracts a different set of fans, Moore said she hopes each audience member will be introduced to a new sound — a jazz complement to Collins’ folk, or a folk complement to Peyroux’s jazz.

While Peyroux comes to Chautauqua as a first-timer, Collins has been a guest performer on Chautauqua stages for decades, and both said they want to play their respective classics as well as newer material. Such material includes Peyroux’s 2018 album Anthem, on which the title track and cover of Cohen’s hit appears, as well as Collins’ 2018 single “Dreamers,” recorded as a dedication to all dreamers and asylum seekers.

Produced during the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign cycle, Anthem is the collaborative work of Peyroux and four other writers and musicians: Larry Klein, Patrick Warren, Brian MacLeod and David Baerwald. Together, the team covered two songs and wrote and recorded the remaining original tracks to create a collection inspired by political and social realities.

Collins said she had worked on “Dreamers” privately, and with encouragement from her husband, began performing the then-unrecorded “Dreamers” on her 2018 tour and eventually recorded the song a capella that year. A “Dreamers” music video featuring photographs of immigrants is now available to view online.

Chautauqua marks the first stop on Peyroux’s 2019 tour, which will take her to jazz festivals across North America and Europe in the coming months to perform selections from Anthem and her 23-year career since her debut album Dreamland. After Chautauqua, Collins will continue her national tour into the fall. 

“Sometimes I don’t want to go out and perform, but whenever I do get on stage and begin, I get lost in it, and I enjoy it more than anything in the world,” Peyroux said.

Peyroux recalled performing on a double bill with Collins at New York City’s Town Hall venue in 2012. Getting to any stage, evolving their sounds and sharing their voices took years of work, and for both artists, that work began in their teenage years.

For Peyroux, it began in the 1980s on the streets of Paris where she traveled as a busker developing her sound and style. For Collins, it began at the piano with classical compositions and moved into the world of folk music.

“Keep practicing,” Collins said, offering advice to young musicians and artists. “Practice actually does make perfect, and it can get you to Carnegie Hall. But you have to keep at it.”

Traditionally, the first Sacred Song Service of Chautauqua Institution’s season welcomes old and new Chautauquans to the grounds. Returners will find that a few elements of the program remain the same — “Day Is Dying in the West” opens the service, which culminates with “Now the Day Is Over” and the postlude “Largo.”

But from there, Jared Jacobsen, the Institution’s organist and coordinator of worship and sacred music, said he has creative freedom when planning the rest of the program. He picks a theme that doesn’t necessarily coincide with the Institution’s programming. For example, Jacobsen planned last season’s opening service to fit the week’s theme, but also had the Parkland High School shootings in mind.

For the opening service this season at 8 p.m. Sunday in the Amphitheater, Jacobsen and the Chautauqua Choir will take Chautauquans more than 50 years back to the Apollo 8 moon landing in recognition of the Week One theme, “Moments That Changed the World.”

“(The astronauts) sent back that iconic photograph on Christmas Eve of the earth as a blue marble,” Jacobsen said. “It’s that photograph, which I’m reproducing on the front of the service leaflet, that informs everything we’re going to do (in the service).”

“This Fragile Earth, Our Island Home” is a performance layered with 11 pieces of music; it first focuses on the earth as seen from outer space, then gradually narrows its focus to its inhabitants and finally zeros in on Chautauqua and the Amp.

So after the traditional “Day Is Dying in the West,” which, according to Jacobsen, was written specifically for Chautauqua by a Chautauquan, the performance starts with that “blue marble” view of the earth presented by the Apollo 8 photograph. The program features a short reading by Russell “Rusty” Schweickart as he tries to explain how his perspective of existential topics like love, death and birth changed after seeing the earth from outer space.

From there, the Massey Memorial Organ will “boom” at the opening of the hymn, “Praise to the Lord, the Almighty.” The Massey Organ can finally flex its muscles to an Amp audience after being damaged by overheating on Aug. 21, 2018.   

After featuring a medieval piece from Mother Julian of Norwich, whose poetry speaks of “a little thing round as a ball” shown to her by God, Jacobsen includes the Anthem “Musick’s Empire,” which he said embodies the goal of the Sacred Song Service.

“It’s all about creating, as he says, a mosaic in the air of music,” Jacobsen said. “And that’s what the Sacred Song Service is all about — we are creating out of the air of this place the vibrations of which we call music.”

As the performance continues, pieces like “Too Splendid for Speech but Ripe for a Song” help transition the program from the “blue marble” perspective of the earth to its inhabitants.

“(The piece) is very picturesque,” Jacobsen said. “It’s almost cheesy but not quite. … We love it, and the congregation gets to chime in on the last verse, which I love doing that. Chautauquans love to sing, anyway.”

The remainder of the program includes an anthem, “Within This Tent,” adapted by Jacobsen and blessings from the Muslim, Jewish and Christian traditions, before a few other pieces and the postlude, “Largo.”

Sunday, and every Sunday of the season, Jacobsen gets to do his two favorite things in the world: Help people sing and help people worship, two things he has been doing since his parents first brought him to the Institution at 5 years old. Being the resident organist for the Institution was the dream job he always wanted.

“I’m over-the-moon excited for (this Sacred Song Service),” Jacobsen said.

Jacobsen’s excitement for this season’s opening Sacred Song Service came after the Massey Organ’s trials and tribulations last season. In January 2018, a custodian discovered that the Massey Organ’s keys had been damaged by snowmelt. Luckily, new keys arrived from England and were installed just before the season started, and the Massey Organ was operable for the first Sunday service and throughout the season. 

However, at this point, Jacobsen described the Massey Organ as “unreliable” because of the accident.

“I just didn’t know that it would work from Sunday to Sunday, or from morning to morning,” Jacobsen said. “It was different every single morning that I played it in church.”

When the internal computer of the Massey Organ was damaged again — this time due to overheating — after a morning worship two months later, Jacobsen left the grounds unsure of the instrument’s future.    

Earlier this year, the Massey Organ was sent to Massey Organ Supply Industries in Erie, Pennsylvania, for restoration and repairs. Jacobsen said they discovered multiple aspects that needed restored after the snowmelt and fire damages.   

“They totally rebuilt the Massey Organ console, which is the control desk,” Jacobsen said. “And in the process figured out that the computers up inside the Massey Organ also needed to be replaced.”

But other restorations were made during the 2019 off-season as well: Dimmers for the lights on the console were added, the music rack was made adjustable, further improvements were made to the keyboard, and the wood on the shell of the console was refinished, among other repairs that Jacobsen said “were the right thing to do (for the Massey Organ).”

Jacobsen also said the control desk was completely enhanced for the first time since the 1990s, and the computers in the chambers have been replaced.   

Last year, Jacobsen was dreading the opening Sunday of the season. Thanks to the aforementioned improvements, he is looking forward to this one. He recognizes that challenges may arise, but after spending time with the Massey Organ in the days leading up to Week One, is optimistic.

“The Massey Organ works by moving the molecules of the air in (the Amp) around your head,” Jacobsen said. “There’s nothing like that.”

Even on a micro-level, the very act of reading — of trusting an author, of connecting with a protagonist, of discovering the secrets cached between sentences — is a collaborative exercise.

At Chautauqua, a community already devoted to literary-minded conversation, the Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle’s 2019 vertical theme “Collaborations” seems even more useful.

Atom Atkinson, who begins their second season as the Institution’s director of literary arts, admits this year’s theme is “pretty capacious.” But that’s not without a purpose.

Such a broad concept affords the CLSC flexibility to interpret the theme however it may best serve this season’s readership without confining a book’s resonance, Atkinson said.

It also means the selection process is more organic. Instead of searching for books amenable to a hyper-specific idea, Atkinson can follow what excites them and produce a balanced collection of genres, subjects and styles.

Next comes the books’ placement onto the sprawling season calendar, itself divided into themes by week.

“Once we are thinking about those books, then we are thinking about what would really be exciting at a particular time that would unlock avenues of thought inside that week that might not be unlocked elsewhere,” Atkinson said, “or might only be possible through something as durational as reading a long book.”

Week One, “Moments That Changed the World,” begins with two out of the 11 CLSC selections: The Death and Life of the Great Lakes by Dan Egan and Kindred by the late, great Octavia E. Butler.

“We’re going to spend a week sitting with some overlooked moments and thinking about why they are overlooked and what the ramifications are of their being overlooked,” Atkinson said.

The Death and Life was the first book announced at last season’s Bryant Day, a ceremony that unveils a few CLSC books for the following year. With this pick, Atkinson hopes to signal that the CLSC remains invested in science selections, as well as works that address the question of what has already passed and what we need to move forward.

First published in 1979, Kindred, too, approaches history differently. Though the majority of CLSC books are published within the past two or three years, Atkinson capitalized on former vice president and Emily and Richard Smucker Chair for Education Sherra Babcock’s practice of “historic selections” — classics with contemporary relevance — to make this pick, which John Keene will present on the lecture stage.

“You could pick any book that talks about the trans-Atlantic slave trade, chattel slavery and colonialism as ‘Moments That Changed the World,’ but (Kindred) … re-orients the way we think about what the past is, versus what the present is, and the ways we are comfortable situating the past in a static past,” Atkinson said.

Week Two, with community efforts at the forefront, features two nonfiction books. First up is Beth Macy’s Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company That Addicted America, a book Atkinson praised as “a journalistic masterpiece.”

“For a season where we wanted to look at collaborations, we were also deeply interested in the part of the book that talked about what is yet possible for how different institutions and individuals can collaborate differently, or in new ways,” Atkinson said.

In an instance of regional synergy, Macy will join individuals involved in mental health, medical care and poverty work in Western New York for a recorded roundtable conversation in Jamestown.

“(Sharing this resource) underscore(s) the fact that the CLSC’s educational value has always been in far more than the act of reading,” Atkinson said. “It’s about celebrating what’s possible because you have read it.”

That Thursday, David W. Blight will present his mammoth biography Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom on July 4, a fact made even more poignant given that Frederick Douglass first delivered his monumental speech “What to the Slave is The Fourth of July” on July 5, 1852, in Rochester, New York.

Week Three, “A Planet in Balance,” highlights another award-winning work of reportage in Elizabeth Rush’s Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore, a finalist for The Chautauqua Prize.

“We simply loved the book,” Atkinson said. They pointed to interactions between the coastal communities that Rush uplifts as evidence of this year’s vertical theme.

“(The book) takes a different approach, a different point of view, to show the tether of all of these things, which isn’t linear,” they said. “You’re not only thinking in a sort of direct way about the subject matter, but also about how a book is capable of rewiring a reader’s brain to think through a question in the first place.”

Aja Gabel’s The Ensemble is, according to Atkinson, an example of a much “looser” but “rewarding tether” to Week Four’s longevity theme.

“Some readers might not have considered the question of how someone maps their life out, but the book presents pretty clearly the endurance required and the physiological cost of a life in the arts and in this particular art form,” they said, “and the course that was set by not only being a musician, but being a musician in collaboration with three other people.”

In collaboration with Gabel, the Athena Quartet, made up of faculty from the School of Music, will perform pieces referenced throughout The Ensemble the day of Gabel’s presentation.

For a book that revolves around the constructed dichotomy of hearing and deafness, Ilya Kaminsky’s Deaf Republic was, for Atkinson, an easy choice for a week dedicated to “The Life of the Spoken Word.” A longtime fan of Kaminsky, they deemed the author “the most thrilling live performers of poetry I’ve ever encountered.”

“It’s not often you find a book that connects a reader not only to an experience that is relevant to the content, which is the experience of being at an Ilya Kaminsky reading, and simultaneously an intellectual and creative challenge to reimagine what you think the life of the spoken word is or what the absence of it — ‘so called’ — is,” they said.

Oyinkan Braithwaite’s My Sister, the Serial Killer is the book of Week Six, “What’s Funny?,” as well as a welcome, though no less worthy, bit of “brevity and punch between behemoths,” Atkinson said.

Letters from Max: A Book of Friendship, by Sarah Ruhl and Max Ritvo, follows Braithwaite’s take on hardboiled crime fiction. Situated in Week Seven, “Grace: A Celebration of Extraordinary Gifts,” Letters from Max is a collaboration of two authors that “kind of screamed Chautauqua to me,” Atkinson said.

It also occurs the same week as a seminar — Atkinson called it “a CLSC capstone opportunity” — taught by Elaine Miller, a philosophy professor at Miami University of Ohio.

“(The book) touched on grace on so many registers, and not just in the way we think of spirituality or the way we think of death, but also the way in which the deep human connection of your most important friendships can sustain you,” Atkinson said. “(Week Seven) really called out to us as the right time for that book.”

For Week Eight, “Shifting Global Power,” Atkinson chose to forgo reportage on international politics or historical tomes in favor of selecting Kanishk Tharoor’s Swimmer Among the Stars, a short story collection that, as Atkinson described it, “gives you a series of brief fictional encounters with both of those things.”

“It’s also exciting because of the unexpected surprise that (Swimmer Among the Stars) gets to live right alongside our Chautauqua Prize winner All The Names They Used For God,” Atkinson said. “(Both explore) the magical and spiritual, touching on things like faith and destiny in a far-reaching way that a short collection, a collaboration of individual works of fiction, makes especially possible in terms of juxtaposing genres and styles but also locations around the world.”

And finally, closing out Week Nine, seven days themed around race and culture, and the 2019 CLSC season, is Joy Harjo’s Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings. On June 19, Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden named Harjo the country’s 23rd poet laureate.

“Joy Harjo is obviously legendary, arguably the preeminent Native American poet, and among the foremost voices well beyond the poetry world (who is) sharing the history of Native American people in the history of jazz,” Atkinson said.

“(Conflict Resolution) is putting the question of what we consider to be a spiritual experience, what we consider to be our spiritual self, in direct conversation with our cosmic wrongs and how to address those,” they said. “And treating that challenge like the serious challenge it is.

This is a book for Chautauquans.”

America’s Big Band will return to Chautauqua when the Jazz Ambassadors perform at 2:30 p.m. Sunday, in the Amphitheater.

The Jazz Ambassadors are a versatile, 19-member ensemble whose concerts include instrumental and vocal solo features, patriotic favorites and much more. The band has received worldwide acclaim for its performances of America’s original art form: jazz.      

Formed in 1969, the Jazz Ambassadors make up one-fourth of the United States Army Field Band. Other components include the Concert Band, Six-String Soldiers and Soldier’s Chorus. Its mission is to connect the American people and the Army by honoring soldiers and veterans at home and abroad.

The ensemble has performed at jazz festivals and events such as The Berks Jazz Fest and The Norwegian Military Tattoo, and have toured all 50 states and perform around the world.

“The types of people that we meet all across the country, it’s really eye-opening,” said Sgt. 1st Class Thomas Davis, lead trumpet player for the band.

Davis became interested in music as a small child. His inspiration to get involved with music came from his older brother who played the trumpet. He wanted to play the saxophone, but it was not available, which led Davis to play the trumpet, too.

Davis has been a member of the Jazz Ambassadors for six years, and enjoys the various roles within the band and the variety of music they play. Davis has held several positions including composer, soloist, producer and currently as lead trumpet player.

“Before I joined the band I did primarily freelance work,” Davis said. “When the position opened up I decided to audition, and it all started from there.”

The ensemble plays contemporary jazz works as well as original arrangements and compositions of past and present members of Jazz Ambassadors. Many of these works are available for free download on their website.

“Primarily the music that we play is focused on jazz music from the early ’20s all the way up until today,” Davis said.

In celebration of its 50-year legacy of service, Jazz Ambassadors recently released a commemorative album, and implemented a new program during its fall 2018 tour: “The Greatest Generation.” This program is a themed concert that honors veterans of World War ll and the music of the Big Band Era.

During its Sunday performance, Jazz Ambassadors will present “The Greatest Generation,” which will feature letters written to and from men and women during the war, as well as famous quotes from the likes of Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Chautauqua Institution’s commitment to lifelong learning was on full display on Friday, June 14, in Elizabeth S. Lenna Hall as hundreds of elementary school students from all over Chautauqua County gasped and cheered in unison as they watched actors from the Chautauqua Theater Company perform a myriad of colorful and exciting plays — plays written by their classmates.

This event was the culmination of months of teaching, creating, writing and designing that all took place as part of the Young Playwright’s Project. The project, now entering its fifth year, is coordinated through a partnership between the Institution and CTC, and each year it encourages more than 500 elementary school students to create and write their very own plays.

“One of our primary goals is the planting of the seeds of artistic appreciation early on,” said Lisa Gierszal, project manager for YPP and executive assistant in the Performing and Visual Arts Office. “When you show these children that their voices are valued, you really start to see some amazing things.”

The plays performed on June 14 tackled a wide range of topics and tones. Giganta Cat and the Super Hero, by Connor Horner from Panama Central School, kicked off the show with a lighthearted clash between a wicked supervillain and his giant dog, and a superheroine and her unlikely feline ally. The Food That’s Alive by Annie Becker, also from Panama Central, saw two young students save their school from a vile school lunch come to life.

But for every fun, comedic offering, there was a play that grappled with more mature concepts. The Boy Who Wanted to See His Brother by Giovannie Jackson from M.J. Fletcher Elementary School shined a light on the hardship of losing a family member, and The Bullies That Turn Into My Friends by Kathrine Lundmark from M.J. Fletcher, showed audience members that not everyone who starts off mean has to stay that way forever.

Katie McGerr, the director of all 11 selected plays and a member of the committee who chose the winners, said she was impressed, as ever, with the emotions these children were able to distill.

“It’s always amazing to see the size of the feelings they write about,” McGerr said, “(and) some of the really imaginative solutions and observations they include. These things are so smart, so unique to them. We get to see the uncensored imagination of that age.”

The project itself is broken into three phases. The first takes place in the fall, when Institution staff and CTC members visited the students’ classrooms to teach them the basics of playwriting.

After that, in the winter, the students get to hear their plays read aloud by community volunteers and find out which have been selected as winners.

Now, the project is in its third phase, where members of CTC dive into the final 11 plays and bring them to life. With bright, simplistic costumes intentionally reminiscent of a child playing dress-up, and a minimalist, chalk-drawn backdrop of buildings, flowers and dinosaurs, CTC conservatory actors delighted the amassed elementary school students with an energetic performance.

Avery Cannon, from Chautauqua Lake Elementary School, one of this year’s winners and writer of a play about a sentient lightbulb trying to find its way in the world, said she loved seeing her work come to life.

“The most fun part was seeing (my play) on-stage because it was something I made up,” she said. “It was fun to see that I could do that.”

That confidence and excitement for the students is something McGerr thinks is endlessly important.

“If we can have kids come through this program and come away with the confidence that what they can imagine is valid, that what happens inside their heads and hearts is valid, that would be something incredible,” she said.

The project will be returning to Chautauqua’s grounds on July 2, at 5 and 7 p.m. as part of the Family Entertainment Series.

Oh, what a night: Frankie Valli & the Four Seasons are making their way back to Chautauqua for a third time.

The group was previously on the grounds in 1987 and 2004. And following shows in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Vienna, Virginia, the group will perform at 8:15 p.m. Saturday, Aug. 25, in the Amphitheater for the last popular entertainment event of the season.

Originally comprised of Valli, Bob Gaudio, Tommy DeVito and Nick Massi, the group went on to release 19 top 10 hits, including “Can’t Take My Eyes Off You,” “Who Loves You” and “December 1963 (Oh, What A Night).”

Frankie Valli & the Four Seasons sold more than 100 million records between 1962 and 1978. The group then went on to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1990.

This legacy is what convinced Chautauqua’s Vice President of Performing and Visual Arts Deborah Sunya Moore that the group was the right choice to wrap up the summer.

“Frankie Valli is a living legend,” Moore said. “He and the Four Seasons are one of the best-selling and best-loved musical groups of all time. I am so honored to have them closing our Chautauqua season.”

Valli has toured almost continuously since the group’s debut single, “Sherry,” premiered in 1962. From Nov. 26 through Dec. 6, Valli will be making seven stops in the United Kingdom as part of his “farewell tour” overseas. And he will continue to perform across the U.S. through March 1, 2019.

“It’s like taking drugs,” Valli said in a May 2015 interview with Dan Rather. “You get so into it. I don’t know what I would do with myself if I wasn’t touring. I’ve tried a few times where I’ve said that I’m going to cut my schedule for the year that’s coming, and I might take a month or so and I go crazy.”

Valli & the Four Seasons inspired the 2005 Tony Award-winning musical, Jersey Boys, which was adapted into a major motion picture in 2014. Its soundtrack includes the group’s biggest hits. Though the Broadway production closed in January 2017 after 4,642 performances, it is still currently on tour across the U.S. and U.K.

“I’m not sad,” Valli said in a 2016 interview with the Associated Press. “I never dreamed it would last 11 years. The beauty about this whole situation is it’s not over. It is now beginning to happen in other parts of the world.”

As for the performance in the Amp, Moore expects it to be an unforgettable night.

“Concert-goers can look forward to their favorite songs as we all celebrate the end of summer with an evening of unforgettable music,” Moore said.

The Three Taps of the Gavel Sunday night will mark an end to Chautauqua’s 2018 season as Chautauquans look toward colder months and Christmas celebrations. For Jared Jacobsen, Chautauqua’s organist and coordinator of worship and sacred music, translating this goodbye into a music service is a delicate process.                 

“At this closing service, we’re really torn at where is home for us,” he said. “If you’ve been here more than a couple of days, Chautauqua has become home, almost always. So you’re saying goodbye to home, but you’re also looking forward to going home. The energy is very strange. But the Sacred Song Service and President Michael E. Hill help us accept that.”

At 8 p.m. Sunday, Aug. 26, in the Amphitheater, Jacobsen, the Chautauqua Choir and Hill will present “Pilgrims’ Hymn — Final Chautauqua Thoughts” for this year’s closing Sacred Song Service.

Jacobsen will be playing the final service on a grand piano, due to a small electrical fire on Tuesday, Aug. 21, that left the Massey Memorial Organ out of commission for the last days of the 2018 season. No part of the evening’s repertoire will be changed; as a trained pianist, Jacobsen said he would “have to turn in my fingers” if he cannot do the selections justice. As always, Jacobsen promised, the service will include “Largo.”

The title for this service comes from one of the songs the choir will sing, “Pilgrim’s Hymn,” composed by Grammy Award-winning musician Stephen Paulus. Jacobsen said once he selected this piece, he built the rest of the service based on the idea of Chautauquans as pilgrims.

“Stephen Paulus wrote this piece and it caught fire in 1997, and it is used for all kinds of occasions,” Jacobsen said. “So that’s the title of this (service) because we are sort of pilgrims when we come here. Part of the word ‘pilgrim’ implies journeying from some place to get here and then going on out of here to some place else. I like the imagery of that.”

The text, written by Michael Dennis Browne in 1997, is not what Jacobsen would call “exceedingly Christian.” However, he said this final service is a celebration of all faith traditions and should reflect the many belief systems within the Institution.

“It’s a sacred text, but it’s not necessarily a Christian text, and that’s OK with me,” he said. “This is the night where all of our worlds collide for the last time. Even people with no faith tradition or people who are still looking for answers show up this closing night because we all want to say goodbye to this place.”

In addition to celebrating all Chautauquans as pilgrims, Jacobsen also intends to close the service with prayers from various faiths.

“At the end of the service, where we normally just do this Christian prayer, I realized it needed to be bigger than that,” he said. “This is where I also pull out a goodbye in Hebrew from the Jewish tradition, and a goodbye in the Arabic tradition. I think this particular night we need to pay homage to all those people.”

The service also includes “Heaven Hill,” a piece written and composed by Chautauqua Choir member Marjorie Thomas. Jacobsen said the song represents Thomas’ close connection to the Institution and its character.

“It really captures the seasons very well, about what’s Chautauqua like in the summer, winter, spring and fall,” he said. “It’s a nice piece of music, and the choir loves singing it. It’s a trademark of this closing night.”

Other musical works include “Beautiful City,” arranged by André J. Thomas, and “The Spheres” by Ola Gjeilo. Jacobsen selected these pieces to create balance in a service built around nostalgic farewells.

“I want the choir to have one more chance at singing just for fun,” he said. “It helps lighten the mood, because this service is pretty heavy duty and it needs a little comic relief.”

But even with lighter music, Jacobsen said the purpose of this service is to help Chautauquans reflect on the season and contemplate the uncertainty in the coming months until they return again in 2019.

“Nobody knows what’s going to happen to them in the next 10 months before you get back,” he said. “It could be happy, like a child or grandchild or wedding in the family, and it could be not-happy stuff, like a treatment that has to be repeated. A lot of life is going to happen in the next 10 months before we open Chautauqua again, and we don’t know what that is. So I’m trying to help people wrestle with that.”

In the final lecture on Week Nine’s theme, “Documentary Film as Facilitator: Storytelling, Influence and Civil Discourse,” filmmaker Grace Lee discussed stereotypes facing Asian-American women, the collective memory of the 1992 Los Angeles riots, and the roles of women in politics.

At 10:45 a.m. Friday, Aug. 24, in the Amphitheater, Lee talked about both the substance and style of her work with Ann Hornaday, The Washington Post’s chief film critic.

Lee was born and raised in Columbia, Missouri. She would go on to attend the prestigious UCLA Film School, and has now directed films in styles ranging from narrative fiction to documentary. Lee’s work often deals with stereotypes, identity and culture.

In her 2005 film, “The Grace Lee Project,” Lee interviewed women from all over the country that share the name Grace Lee. When Lee was growing up in Missouri, she was the only person she knew with her first name. To her surprise, when she moved to places like New York or California, she found that her full name, Grace Lee, was actually quite common.

“It’s like the Jane Smith of Asian-American names,” she said. “But more interestingly, when I started asking these other people about the Grace Lees that they once knew, they were always stereotypically perfect, overachieving Asian-Americans. They went to Harvard at age 15, were excellent violin players, they were devout Christians, and I was none of those things.”

So, Lee set out to test the validity of those stereotypes. She said she traveled the country and met with many different women named Grace Lee, trying to put together a picture of their actual identities compared to the stereotypically expected ones.

On that journey, Lee met Grace Lee Boggs, an elderly Chinese-American woman who for 50 years had lived and worked as an activist in a predominantly African-American community in Detroit. Boggs — described by Lee as an “incredible philosopher-activist-writer” — was in her mid-80s when Lee made “The Grace Lee Project.”

Boggs’ story stuck with Lee. A decade after “The Grace Lee Project,” Lee made a film that took a deeper look at Boggs’ life, titled “American Revolutionary: The Evolution of Grace Lee Boggs.” Boggs was 95.

Lee then played a clip from “American Revolutionary.” Lee and Boggs are in Boggs’ kitchen, and Boggs has asked Lee to trim the hair on the back of her head and neck, which Lee is doing. 

“You know, it’s very funny what happens to the hair of old people,” Boggs says. “You begin getting hair in your nostrils. Did you know that?”

The audience chuckled. Lee would go on to explain that she includes humorous moments because they help people from different backgrounds and perspectives to identify with the film’s subject.

Later in the clip, prompted by Lee’s questions, Boggs gives her perspective on identity and stereotypes.

“You said one of the reasons for you making this Grace Lee documentary, I’m paraphrasing, was that you wanted to refute the stereotype of Asian-American women as passive. The whole thing has different meaning for me,” Boggs says. “I didn’t think of myself so much as Chinese-American, and I didn’t think of myself so much as a woman, because the Chinese-American movement hadn’t emerged, and the women’s movement hadn’t emerged.”

Hornaday and Lee then dissected both the content and style decisions in the clip. First, Hornaday asked why Lee made the decision to include herself in the film.

“I did not want to be in this film, because I had already made a film called ‘The Grace Lee Project,’ ” Lee said. “How self-indulgent is that? And Grace Lee Boggs was only in it briefly, so I was determined that no, I’m not going to be in this film because (Boggs) has 70 years of movement and history in Detroit, and we need the time to get to it.”

However, Lee’s editor suggested that much of the footage of both women together was compelling, in part because it showed the relationship between Boggs and Lee. The hair-cutting scene, Lee said, is a prime example. Lee ultimately agreed with her editor.

Lee’s closeness with her subject, according to Hornaday, contrasts with the distance that “classicist” documentarians like Ken Burns often employ. Again using the example of the hair-cutting scene, Hornaday asked Lee about the intimacy in “American Revolutionary.”

“Grace Lee Boggs is somebody very personally important to me,” Lee said. “As someone who studied history in college, I studied the civil rights movement, I studied social history — how could I never have heard of this person? Another second-generation, Asian-American woman, daughter of immigrants, living in the Midwest like I was, but I had never heard of her.

“Seeing these kinds of same histories is something that really motivates me in terms of the kinds of stories I want to tell. I have to be personally engaged. That’s what’s going to motivate me through the many years of trying to find funding, trying to follow a story even when I don’t know what the end result is going to be.”

-Grace Lee, Filmmaker 

The next work the two discussed was Lee’s 2017 interactive web documentary, “K-Town ‘92,” about the 1992 Los Angeles riots.

“That was an event that made a huge impact on me 26 years ago, not only because it was such an explosive moment in this country’s history,” Lee said, “but because, for the first time, Korean-Americans showed up in the media.”

The images, however, were not positive — news coverage of the riots mostly showed armed Korean-Americans standing on the roofs of their businesses to protect them from rioters, or mourning the loss of their businesses after they had been burned down, according to Lee.

“K-Town ‘92” puts that news footage next to archival footage and interviews, from both 1992 and 2017. After watching an introductory segment, users can navigate a repository of clips from all of those perspectives. Lee’s aim, she said, was to give viewers a pick-your-own-narrative experience.

“One of the big questions of ‘K-Town ‘92’ is, ‘Who gets to tell the story of Los Angeles, 1992?’ ” Lee said. “I really felt as somebody living in Los Angeles for the last 20 years, as somebody rooted in the Korean-American community, that these films were going to continue to recycle the same kinds of archival images that I found weren’t telling the whole story.”

In response, Lee set out to create a representation of the riots that put the multiple narratives on an even plane, “flattening” the narrative. By taking the voice of the filmmaker out of the equation, she said, viewers can experience the events according to their own interests.

Before “K-Town ‘92,” Lee had experience in a different experimental genre — the mockumentary. Her 2012 film “Janeane From Des Moines” incorporates real footage from the 2012 presidential campaign trail, but the main character Janeane — a conservative housewife seeking answers from Republican politicians ahead of the Iowa caucuses — is played by actor Jane Wilson.

Hornaday asked Lee about pushback the film received — some felt that it was not upfront enough about the fact that many of the scenes were scripted, and the main character was an actor.

Lee pointed out that the film was never intended to be a documentary, and when it premiered at the Toronto Film Festival, it was not in the documentary category. Lee also emphasized that campaign events are not entirely unscripted, either, calling them “political theater.”

“(The film) is really a question about who is performing,” Lee said. “Is Jane Wilson performing as Janeane, who has really embodied the kind of needs and distresses that she’s going through in the story? Or are Mitt Romney and Michelle Bachman performing to some extent when they talk to voters?”

The final clip shown at the lecture came from Lee’s yet-unreleased project covering the current surge of women of color running for political office. The clip showed Lucy McBath, a candidate for Georgia’s 6th Congressional District, arriving at a campaign event to a large, welcoming crowd.

McBath was originally running for a seat in the Georgia House of Representatives, but after the Stoneman Douglas High School shooting earlier this year, she decided to run for Congress. 

Lee’s production team is all women of color — a conscious choice, she said.

“One of the things I’ve observed is that when you have a close cultural connection to this community, you’re going get different results,” she said, “rather than just parachuting in and trying to tell a story that people have already told — the kinds of stories that news crews come in and tell.”

In 2016, Lee’s work earned her an invitation to be the keynote speaker at the International Documentary Association’s Getting Real Conference. The main themes of the conference, which she spoke about in her address, were art, diversity and sustainability.

In part of that address, which Hornaday read to the audience in the Amp, Lee spoke about how the three themes were inseparable to her. She said they also prompted difficult questions about what the documentary community looked like, who got to be a part of it, and which stories mattered — all themes that she explores in her own work, often through the perspective of Asian-Americans.

“I had to make a decision, like, I don’t know if I should talk about Asian-Americans because this is the broader documentary community,” she said. “But then I realized, if I don’t talk about it, we’ll never talk about it. If I’m given this platform, I have to talk about it.”