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When guest conductor Jorge Mester mounted the stage of the Amphitheater for Saturday’s season-opening concert, he immediately turned away from the orchestra to conduct the audience in a sing-along of “The Star Spangled Banner.” Smiling broadly and snapping his stick, Mester radiated purposeful delight.

When Paul Farmer spoke to a crowded Amphitheater audience earlier this week about global health efforts in Haiti and Rwanda, one audience member was right there in Rwanda with him. When Melissa Driver Beard, executive director and CEO of Engineering World Health, came to Chautauqua’s “Global Health and Development as Foreign Policy” week, she had two goals in mind.

Johanna Mendelson Forman began her lecture on Thursday with a chilling scenario. “If you can imagine a whole city … that is filled with tents, and you’re sleeping alone, and maybe you don’t even have a full tent around you; you don’t even have four walls, but you have blankets or quilts, sometimes blue plastic sheeting that’s given out by humanitarian agencies. There’s no electricity and no lights, so it’s dark,” she said. “And suddenly you hear a rustling, and then you hear the sound of the knife cutting through the sheeting. And before you can scream, a man, or a group of men — often they come in gangs — crashes through the opening. They grab you. They push you down. They rape you. And often, all of this is done in front of your children.”

Guest Review I’m sorry, but this show is just not the way it is supposed to be. It’s off-kilter, sometimes upside-down and usually topsy-turvy. Give this 54th version of Chautauqua’s juried Exhibition of Contemporary Art a nudge and it would tumble over the line, across that careful border that too often marks what is right for art and what is supposedly not.