Welcome to our Chautauqua!
A Chautauqua is a particular type of unofficial learning institution. In the late 19th and early 20th century there was a community education movement that started at Chautauqua Lake, New York. As the movement gained popularity, “pop-up” sites were also called Chautauquas. Chautauquas took different forms, from brick and mortar institutions to roving tents but always featured entertaining lectures. Although the Chautauqua movement has long since died, traces of it still remain and we would like to revive the spirit of Chautauqua using a contemporary platform, the internet!
For those of you who know us from our Basement Cinema, we are excited to present the next phase. This time around we would like to transcend beyond entertainment, our cinema will be just one dimension of our Chautauqua. We will have monthly screenings that correspond to our current topic, and hopefully with popularity we will add more screenings (both feature length and shorts).
Our website will be the main platform of our forum and participation is highly recommended! Each month we’ll have a different topic that everyone can contribute to. The success of Reykjavík Chautauqua relies heavily on the participation and comments of others and the diversity of perspectives, otherwise it would just be us ranting on a blog… Our goal isn’t political or necessarily intellectual, we just want to have fun while learning and exploring some things that we find interesting, and we welcome you to join us.
Who are we
Our names are Chantal Uto and Rúnar Berg, we live in Reykjavík and like to have fun. We have the most fun when we are learning and doing something new. This is the kind of experience that we are trying to share at our new web space. We really like pizza, icecream and coffee, but not necessarily at the same time.
How did we make this so pretty
We use good amount of free and open source tools. Most noticeably the beautiful font faces we use are Vollkorn for the heading and Crimson Text for the paragraphs. Our app is powered by Express that runs on Node.js. We are happy to show you our code as well.