A Little Illumination

Day two of the Light in Winter festival is drawing to a close...and I think I just may have decided that I'll be skipping out on the final evening performance of the day. A girl can only take so much illumination, and I've already been to three performances today! So far, I'd have to say that day one of the festival was my favorite. I started with the Ying Quartet performance of music written mostly by Chinese Americans. The program explored the meeting of Eastern music with Western instruments and musical styles. The music was truly innovative, one piece was entirely plucked instead of performed with bows. Both pleasing musically and educationally.

The evening's performance of Voices from the Edge of the World was really magical. I find pieces that combine music, narration, and images very powerful. Neil Conan and the whole cast were great. I especially liked the piece from Jacques Costeau which was performed with drunken watery sounds made by the percussionist on this exceedingly odd looking instrument. I have no idea what it was, but the sound effects and the reading were just perfect.

After the show, it was on to the after party which I attended as a dutiful board member even though I'm not all that comfortable at parties where I am the youngest person present, usually by far! But, it wasn't too painful :-) The party was held in the penthouse of the old Dewitt Mall building. It was hard to imagine that the building used to be a school. Truly a lovely apartment. Being the person who generally finds it difficult to mingle, I was proud of myself that I didn't spend too much time by myself looking out windows. I met Neil Conan, spoke with a few of the musicians, and chatted with some of the other board members, so I felt it was an evening well done.

Saturday started off early with a yoga dance workshop which was fun, then a presentation loosely based around the "identities" of super heroes. This one didn't really seem to me to follow the theme or the title of the talk too much, but it was a lot of fun, especially the last presenter who talked about the biology of b-movie monsters. He even made a plug for Museum of the Earth when he talked a little about the evolution of dinosaurs through time in the movies. Actually, its been really amusing to see how much of what we talk about at the Museum made its way into the presentations. On Fri, one of the pieces narrated was Darwin's letters (if you want more, come to Darwin's Birthday Party at the Museum in Feb), and today, we had the dino posture stuff (come to the Museum and check out our temporary exhibit for more), and then in the last panel, one guy who works with robots talked about letting robots learn and evolve through natural selection. Funny how themes follow you around!