Call this interview “Festival 101,” and think of it as the Chicago Humanities Festival event that’s not on the schedule.
In the organization’s nondescript offices on North Dearborn Street, CHF Executive Director Phillip Bahar and Program Director Alison Cuddy took time out last week from putting the finishing touches on this, the 25th anniversary of the festival. Among those touches are “finalizing people’s itineraries” and “making sure letters of agreement are signed,” Cuddy said. This is an edited transcript.
Q: Do you get legendary contract riders, like with rock bands?
Bahar: It’s not like with the rock bands, where you get, you know, two bottles of vodka …
Cuddy: No. But, you know, you have a big star like Darlene Love (from “Twenty Feet From Stardom”) coming, and there’s going to be — nothing outrageous, but it’s definitely someone you want to treat well.
Q: Let’s talk about the new “hub” system right away. Give our readers a quick sense of what that means.
Bahar: Every weekend of the festival there are four or five venues, all within a five- or 10-minute walking distance. So you’re parked once. You can go to one program. You can go to six programs. You can have lunch in between. Whereas before we really spread out much more across the whole city, so you might go from the North Side to the South Side to the West Side, all in one day, and you had to be more than committed to make that happen.
Cuddy: I call it the “Amazing Race” of the Humanities Festival. And now it’s going to be like the “Amazing Stroll” of the humanities.
Q: So, 25 years down, 25 more, or beyond, to go. What’s the direction? What’s the aim?
Cuddy: You can see some of the direction this year. We’re trying to change up the sorts of programs we do. This year the theme is “Journeys,” which is about where we’ve been as an organization, where we’re going. But we’ve also embedded some actual journeys in the festival, so you can get on a bus with Tim Samuelson and tour the history of blues in Chicago. So trying to do programs that are a little smaller in scope, are more intimate, that allow you to do a real deep dive into an issue or group or experience.
Q: It strikes me that there’s so much more competition in this space since you started. Chicago Ideas Week runs almost adjacent to you guys. The Tribune is doing a fair amount of events now. Even things like The Moth storytelling nights. How do you respond to this competition?
Bahar: I would say the competition shows that people really want this kind of program. At a time when everything’s instant on the Internet, and you can get a video of anyone at any time, people still want to get together in a room with their friends and other people who are inspired by things that they care about. I think it’s a format that people are only growing to like more.
Q: I was trying to come up with a term for the genre, if there is one. “Post-collegiate knowledge accumulation”? “Non-graded graduate school”?
Bahar: Oh, boy! No, none of those things. You know, I’d say they’re programs for people who are just curious, and they continue to be curious throughout their lives. And they want to hear from the very best people in their field, whether they’re authors, artists, politicians, journalists.
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Cuddy: To me, it’s kind of high-level water-cooler conversations, right? If you come here, you may be listening to a MacArthur fellow or a Nobel Prize winner or, you know, an emerging writer. You’re able to have these conversations, but on this level it just elevates it in a certain way.
Q: So instead of talking about The New Yorker article, you’ve got the author of it, or the subject.
Cuddy: Right, or someone who’s intervening in a set of issues. Or, like, Roxane Gay, I’m so excited because she’s this emerging critical voice. Just the way people are talking about gender, gender equality, sexuality, reproductive issues, feminism has just really changed over the last couple of years.
Q: Does the festival need to keep being organized around a theme?
Bahar: You know, we’ve had that conversation a lot. Historically, the curatorial team has really liked a theme because, otherwise, year after year, what really makes it a distinctive festival? Sometimes the constraint is what gives you the creativity. But, yeah, there are possibilities that we move in a different way. In the old days we had themes that were kind of binary. We’re talking about that again.
Q: You’re pointing to a poster (from a past festival) that says, “Crime and Punishment.” But you’re kind of out of themes, aren’t you? At this point, aren’t you just finding new ways to state the old themes?
Cuddy: Are you kidding?
Bahar: At the end of the day, it’s all, you know, sex and death, right? (Laughter.) There’s the next one: “Sex and Death.” You know, it’s the human condition, and the human condition is constantly evolving.
Q: I have to tell you, when I saw this year’s theme (“Journeys”), I thought, “Oh, they just wanted a nice, wide-open one.” That covers a lot of territory.
Cuddy: (Tongue-in-cheek) We just wanted people to think of classic rock to give a whole new feel to the festival. It’s a big risk.
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