romantic rebirth - Muskoka Chautauqua

Chautauqua
romantic rebirth
Article by Allan Cook
Photograph: Heather Douglas
T
Gayle Dempsey and Gary Froude have a shared passion for the arts. Together they
are bringing the famous Chautauqua back to Muskoka.
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May 2013 www.muskokamagazine.com
he woman at the health food store told
Gayle Dempsey to look for the man with
the boots.
“He has the same sparkle in his eyes that you do,”
she’d said of the tall man who had been coming into
the store occasionally since late that fall.
Gary Froude had left his Costa Rican rainforest
tree house to come to Muskoka to help an old business associate produce a Friendship Festival of music
and artisans in Port Carling for the week between
Christmas and New Year’s, 1995. He arrived to bare
ground, and awoke the next morning with three feet
of snow, so the authentic native Canadian sealskin
boots that had caught the eye of the lady at the
health food store came in handy.
Of course, he wasn’t wearing them that New Year’s
Eve day when Dempsey came to the festival. Ultimately, it didn’t matter: she found out he was one of
the organizers and went to express her regret that
they hadn’t received the local support that she
thought they should.
She made an impression on Froude, who hoped to
spend that evening’s festivities in her company as
well. It wasn’t to be – at least not that day.
“You stood me up!” he claims, the sparkle still in
his eyes 17 years later.
“No, I had other plans already,” Dempsey counters, and they both laugh.
Together they have changed Muskoka’s cultural
landscape: managing the Muskoka Lakes Music Festival; creating the Kaleidoscope children’s art education program; helping lead the drive to build the
new Port Carling Memorial Community Centre;
working with such organizations as Rotary, Muskoka Tourism, and the Arts Council of Muskoka; and
resurrecting the Muskoka Chautauqua, an arts-based
community that represents a dream they have shared
since that New Year’s Eve day in 1995.
“I knew immediately,” Froude says, remembering
the first weeks after they met. “I said ‘I have this
whole film, this vision of what’s happening, and
you’re in it.’”
After a career in promoting, producing and managing live entertainment with performers as diverse
as the Rolling Stones to Nigerian Afrobeat pioneer
Fela Kuti, Froude had begun to envision how the
arts, education and community could be fused in a
way that transformed everyone involved.
Dempsey, a fourth-generation Muskokan and
executive director of the Muskoka Lakes Association
who was developing her talents as an artist, had been
dreaming the same thing.
“We just started talking about this vision, and just
couldn’t believe that we shared it,” she says.
The pair soon became inseparable, united by their
growing love for each other and their shared vision.
Photograph: Courtesy Gayle Dempsey/Gary Froude
Frank Mahovlich (centre) joins a group of bass players following a concert at Gravenhurst United Church.
here on Lake Rosseau.”
The Chautauqua movement began in upstate
New York in 1874 and by the 1880s had grown into
a network of institutes and organizations around the
United States and Canada dedicated to personal and
cultural development through the arts, education
and spirituality.
In 1921, Reverend Charles Applegath founded
the Canadian Literary Chautauqua, which became
famously known as the Muskoka Chautauqua and
enjoyed a reputation as one of the finest Chautauquas in Canada. Famous poets and writers held
readings and wrote while staying at the Epworth Inn
on Tobin Island, while the theatre program produced plays and reenactments of significant
The Muskoka
Chautauqua
had a reputation
as one of the finest
in Canada
Photograph: Courtesy Gayle Dempsey/Gary Froude
Within that first year, Atis Bankas, violinist with the
Toronto Symphony Orchestra, asked them to manage the fledgling Muskoka Lakes Music Festival. It
would prove to be the foundation upon which they
could finally begin building their dream.
“His thing was world peace and understanding
through music, so that’s why we connected with
him,” Dempsey says. “We had already had . . . this
bigger vision and we somehow knew that it would
be a gateway to manifesting (it).”
The couple began to seek out examples of other
arts communities they could model their goals after.
At the suggestion of a mutual friend, architect and
past-president of the Royal Canadian Academy of
the Arts Ernest Annau, they travelled to Findhorn,
Scotland to attend a conference on creating sustainable cultural communities.
Dempsey was invited to join the Bracebridge
Rotary Club, and the two later became founding
members of the Bracebridge/Muskoka Lakes Rotary
Club. The organization’s ideals of service above self
and international co-operation and community
development fit perfectly with their own, travelling
to Jamaica and the Bahamas on Rotary projects and
hosting delegations in Muskoka.
“When we travel we can go to a Rotary meeting all
over the world and know we’re . . . with people with
the same values,” Froude says.
Their search for the right model to help build
their dream of an international arts centre in Muskoka took them on a road-trip tour of communities
such as Tanglewood in Massachusetts and the Cranbrook Academy of Art and Interlochen, both in
Michigan. At the suggestion of Ernest Annau, they
visited the Chautauqua Institution in New York.
“As soon as we saw Chautauqua, New York we
said ‘oh my God, this is so it for Muskoka,’”
Dempsey recalls. “It just has that whole feel of
Muskoka. It wasn’t until five years later that we
found that we’d actually had a Chautauqua right
Before Chautauqua, Gayle Dempsey and Gary Froude were
instrumental in founding the Muskoka Lakes Music Festival.
The Platin International Choir from Germany put on an impromptu concert focused
on peace, love and understanding on the evening of Sept. 11, 2001.
www.muskokamagazine.com May 2013
73
moments in Canadian history.
Unfortunately, as with many of the original Chautauquas, the Muskoka assembly dissolved in the
wake of the Great Depression and in the face of the
changes wrought in society by the onset of the Second World War.
After their road trip, Dempsey and Froude, certain
of their path, began to introduce more layers and
programs through the Music Festival, notably the
Kaleidoscope Children’s Festival, which integrated
performances and hands-on arts workshops for children. It has since morphed into the Kaleidoscope
Arts In Education program, which unites professional artists with teachers and children; in 2008 the
program became an official partner with the prestigious national ArtSmarts organization.
The world’s growing need for new approaches to
community was thrown into stark focus on September 11, 2001, following the terrorist attack.
Dempsey and Froude were hosting an international choir from Germany that had arrived at their
home only days, and a Rotary group study exchange
from South Korea that arrived on Sept 10.
After a day of watching the horrors unfold on television, the choir held an impromptu concert in the
living room, changing their repertoire for the occasion to songs of peace, love and understanding. The
act spoke through the language barrier to the visiting
Koreans who changed into their formal national
dress clothes, and performed songs of their own. To
conclude the evening’s concert, a member of Toronto’s Mendelssohn Choir sang The Lord’s Prayer.
“As the rest of the world was talking about terrorism and fear, here we were surrounded by people
from all different countries who were singing about
peace and love and hope,” Dempsey says. “So we felt
extremely blessed to have had that experience, espe74
May 2013 www.muskokamagazine.com
cially considering the experience the rest of the world
was having.”
To Dempsey and Froude, the evening stands as a
vivid example of the incredible power the arts have
to unite people and change how they view the world.
When Dempsey first started exploring the visual
arts in the 1990s, she knew she needed to share the
joy and revelations painting was bringing to her. “I
went ‘wow, somehow I have to reorganize my life
because I have to get more arts into my life. I need
to build my life around the arts,” she says. “I was just
so blown away about the power of the arts that I was
just enthusiastic to share it with others.”
Dempsey operates Muskoka Place Gallery from
their home on Foreman Road, which also houses the
headquarters of the Muskoka Lakes Music Festival,
the Kaleidoscope Arts in Education program, as well
as the reborn Muskoka Chautauqua.
Dempsey built what she describes as a “learning
community of painters,” open to anyone with a similar desire to explore and develop their own creativity in the visual arts. “When I see what people create,
it just overwhelms me with emotion,” she says.
Although Froude claims not to be creative himself,
Dempsey says his ability to bring the right people
together in the place at the right time and follow his
intuition despite any surrounding chaos, is the heart
of the creative process. “Creative energy is what is
going to make or break this world,” Froude says.
While he applies his gifts to organizational challenges and events, Froude admires Dempsey’s ability
to live in her creative bubble and dream out loud.
“And she stays there. To me that’s one of my
favourite things . . . she stays so in her heart and positive,” he says. “Sometimes my influence on her isn’t
the best because I sometimes sense some of the cynic
in her and it bothers me when I see that, I say ‘don’t
Photograph: Heather Douglas
Photograph: Heather Douglas
Gary Froude is proud to own an antique child’s portable study Chautauqua desk.
The late 1800s desk includes as much reference material as a small encyclopedia.
go there, that’s me; you stay in the positive. That
other stuff is not you.’”
Born in Saint John, New Brunswick, and raised in
the Tillsonburg area and Toronto, Froude credits
Dempsey with showing him the meaning of community. He “ran away” from his former life in the
music industry twice, once when he moved to West
Africa in 1986, and again after he found himself
immersed in it there, helping bring West African
music to North America. After a stint back in Canada designing architectural landscapes for the motion
picture industry, Froude left it all behind to live in
Costa Rica. There, he became involved in ecological
initiatives, including a project that convinced locals
to trade their cattle for iguanas to prevent the clearing of rainforest for pastures, and an initiative that
helped establish an uninterrupted migratory green
belt from Mexico to Panama.
“When I left that to come to Muskoka – I guess I
grew up here,” he says explaining community is
paramount to everything they do.
Having investigated and explored other arts communities around the world, Dempsey and Froude
joined the International Chautauqua Network in
2009 and began the work of resurrecting the longdormant Muskoka chapter.
After nearly 80 years idle, the Muskoka Chautauqua was officially relaunched on June 5, 2010.
With a mission to offer arts programs that celebrate
creativity, the human spirit and Muskoka’s unique
natural environment and heritage, the Muskoka
Chautauqua works to enrich life for individuals as
well as Muskoka’s communities. Programs have
included readings by prize-winning authors; international think-tanks; theatrical and musical performances; annual reading lists; Aboriginal arts; wildlife
viewing and arts events; alternative adult education;
topical lectures; symposiums and youth programs.
Dempsey and Froude have been keynote speakers
at the original Chautauqua Institute in upstate New
York, and travelled to Florida at the end of January
as delegates to the Florida Chautauqua Assembly.
There, they shared the stage with former U.S. First
Lady Rosalynn Carter, who is working to revive the
Chautauqua movement in her state of Georgia.
“Her delegation just amazed me,” Froude says of
the opportunity to sit and simply share ideas with
Carter’s group, which included former advisors and
Gayle Dempsey is an artist who is very
involved in supporting Muskoka’s arts.
Photograph: Courtesy Gayle Dempsey/Gary Froude
In 1996, Barb Leek, Gayle Dempsey and
Gary Froude had Muskoka Centre plans.
staffers from their time in office. “They were in the
White House but they were so humble and unpretentious. It’s an important time now, because we’re
starting to break through into the new consciousness
of caring, fixing some of the things that are wrong,
and believing in the values of community and creativity.”
One of his prized possessions is an antique
Chautauqua portable study-desk; among its many
clever features is a scroll of reference material that
covers everything from basic math, maps and rules
of grammar to engineering, architecture, telegraph codes, business forms and art techniques.
It’s an entire encyclopaedia covering kindergarten
to post-secondary topics from the late 1800s.
“We’re still educating for the industrial age,
though,” Froude says of today’s schools, “and education has to move on into the creative age.”
It’s all part of creating a community of dreamers
who not only imagine, but can bring their ideas to
life. “I think if we could just support the youth,
especially those who dare to be different, who
really are figuring who they are, the gifts they
have, and the power they have – we would really
see a difference in this world,” Dempsey says.
The couple may have accomplished much since
first discovering their shared vision, but they’re
not resting on their laurels just yet. “We’re still
doing the work; we’re not gratified yet because
we’re not finished yet,” Froude explains.
Creating richer, fuller lives for Muskokans
through the arts – and for the world beyond – is a
task large enough that Dempsey isn’t sure they’ll
ever be finished. “There’s such a long way to go,”
she says. “The vision is so big and will outlive us;
it doesn’t seem like (we’ve done) much so far.”
For a moment they reflect on where they’d been
living when they first started dreaming their
shared dream: Froude in a Costa Rican treehouse
and Dempsey above a coach house at the mouth
of the Muskoka River. “They were both lofty,
beautiful places,” she says with a dreamer’s sparkle
still in her eyes. “You know how it is when you’re
living in lofty places; you can’t help but have lofty
dream.
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