Welcome to Light in Winter 2008 and another wonderful weekend of arts and science in Ithaca, NY. If you read any of last year’s blog entries, you may remember me — my name is Adrienne and I am an undergraduate student at Princeton University. But more importantly I’m a lifelong Ithacan and I almost always make the trip home to see Light in Winter.

The weekend began last night at the State Theater, with a program called “First Person: Stories from the End of the World.” The show combined dynamic spoken word by NPR’s Neal Conan and Lily Knight, beautiful music by the Ensemble Galilei, and stunning pictures from National Geographic projected on a large screen.

Conan and Knight read first-person narratives from a variety of world explorers, including Matthew Henson (an African-American explorer who overcame prejudice to reach the North Pole), Charles Darwin, Robert Ballard, George Mallory (who died on his third attempt to scale Mount Everest), Jacques Cousteau, and Ibn Battuta (a 14th-century Arab world traveler), among many others. These narratives were accompanied by beautiful nature photos and music from the Ensemble Galilei. The ensemble combined baroque instrumentation with Scottish and Irish traditional music which was occasionally tinged with Middle Eastern and Balkan themes and which provided the perfect stirring backdrop to the narratives.

The first-person stories of exploration ranged from the hilarious (Jacques Cousteau’s description of his intoxicating experience with “the rapture of the deep,” rendered in a fake French accent by Lily Knight) to the truly tragic (a description of a sailor’s accidental death at sea by ship’s captain Allen Villiers). But what brought all the stories together was the light they shed on the pure emotion of exploration. From elation to mysticism to sadness, the stories showed what drives explorers to go further than others. They also revealed that explorers are ordinary people — Charles Darwin was violently seasick on his voyage with the HMS Beagle, and explorers in the far north suffered terribly from the cold and violent weather. Hearing narratives that were written in the first person brought home how human and how much like us these famous explorers were — but how extraordinary they were as well.

I’m now sitting in the atrium of the Statler Auditorium, getting ready to go into the first Saturday morning event — “Digital Deception.” More reporting to come!