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Annual Celebration
Future dates to be announced.
The Light in Winter Festival is brains and beauty: an annual festival that uses the city and campuses of Ithaca as a backdrop for three days of science, music and art.
Founder and Artistic Director Barbara Mink, a painter and teacher of Management Communication at Cornell’s Johnson Graduate School of Management, first began exploring the idea of "edu-tourism" during her years as Chair of the Tompkins County Legislature. The notion was to consider the area’s rich educational and cultural resources as compelling as the waterfalls and parks, and to build relationships in the community to promote tourism with a twist. Conceived in 2001, with the first festival held in 2004, Light in Winter has made good on its promise.
In 2010 the festival had attendance of over 9,000, mainly from New York State but also Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Boston. There are more than 20 events, many free, most ticketed. The target demographic is adult, but there are also many family-friendly events.
Light in Winter is unique in its focus on collaborations –putting scientists and artists together to foster ideas and innovation, making new connections right in front of the audience's eyes, giving us a rare "a-ha!" moment that seldom occurs past childhood. The complex mating dances of spiders and insects are compared to the rhythmic shuffling of flamenco dancers; chaos theory is echoed in electronic music inspired by the bounding of subatomic particles. Light in Winter is now the premier festival in the country that intentionally blurs the boundaries between science and the performing arts in this way.
Some of the main events from 2010:
Innovative Juggler Greg Kennedy presented a panoply of juggling techniques, with the help of amazing aerialists, inventively engineered juggling contraptions and dazzling special effects. For a lecture demonstration Kennedy showed how each performance was done based on the principles of motion, light, energy, and gravity.
Part physics presentation, part dance performance, Redshift Productions' Dance of Scales took the Light in Winter audience to the nano, micro-, and millimeter scales before bringing it all back to the human dimension. An experience in physics and dance like never before, featuring a physicist, a company of dancers and a live doumbek hand drummer.
Cal Tech physicist Ken Libbrecht illustrated his unique process for capturing and photographing complex snowflakes in nature, then showed how those complex structures can be grown in the lab, even showing the growing in process! The results are stunning images, themselves works of art.
Do we approach wild animals with fear or understanding? Ron and Andrea Riddle shared their experiences of saving a timber wolf from being euthanized by creating an "interspecies pack" with the animal. Jody Enck from Cornell's Department of Natural Resources shared results of his research in human reactions to the idea of restoring wolves to the Adirondacks, and how the Riddle's reaction to Chance provides another understanding of our relationships to wild animals.
Cornell enology professor Gavin Sacks explored the history of how chocolate became the bittersweet sensation that we know and love today while Tammy Travis, chef and chocolatier at Sarah's Patisserie, demonstrated how chocolate is tempered and made into delicious delectables, that were then handed out to audience members.
Light in Winter is produced by Founder and Artistic Director Barbara Mink, Executive Director Marie Sirakos and the Light in Winter Board. Founding collaborators include Cornell University, Ithaca College, the Tompkins County Convention and Visitors Bureau, and the Discovery Trail, which includes the Sciencenter, Museum of the Earth, Tompkins County Public Library, Johnson Art Museum, Cornell Lab of Ornithology, and the History Center. Media partners include the Ithaca Journal, Ithaca Times, Tompkins Weekly, Cayuga Radio Group, and Time Warner Cable.