For many in the North, the winter solstice is a day to be celebrated, as it means the return of the sun and the lengthening of the days thereafter.

This year, the annual Longest Night show takes place tonight and Saturday, beginning at 8 p.m. at the Yukon Arts Centre.

For longtime Yukoner Al Pope, Longest Night is a great time to speak to people.

'It's a really good opportunity to get exposure to a lot of people at once,' he said in an interview earlier this week

'When a writer does a reading, quite often you're reading to 10 people or three or four, so when you get a 500-seat house to play to, that's pretty exciting.'

Pope is a novelist and columnist who first came to the territory in 1976.

'I was going to go get a job in the mines, make lots of money, go back and be rich,' he said. 'I never did work in a mine.'

For the show, Pope will read several short pieces from a novel he's working on, set during the construction of the Alaska Highway in the early 1940s.

'They both concern the black soldiers that came here to work on the highway, about a third of the soldiers,' he said. 'They had a very different life from everybody else that worked on the highway.

'They were discriminated against incredibly. It was a very hard life for them.'

The idea for the book came to him three or four years ago, while driving down the highway.

'I was travelling through Liard Hot Springs and across the road from the hot springs there's a historical site sign and it mentions that they used to have a ladies' day at the hot springs,' he said.

'I got to wonder who were these women, and during the construction of the highway, you always only hear about the men that came, so then I got interested in realizing that there are untold tales from that construction.'

From there, Pope discovered other forgotten stories.

'I ran into the stories of the black soldiers and realized that my understanding of their experience here had been very sketchy before,' he added.

This appearance marks Pope's third time participating in Longest Night.

'In fact, the piece I did last time became the opening passage of my first novel,' he said.

That piece was called The Drummer, a story of a hippie drummer in the 1970s, which he contributed in 2000. His first Longest Night was in the late 1990s.

Two special contributors have come from Vancouver to take part this year: theatre professional Tanya Marquardt and experimental folk musician Jesse Zubot.

Marquardt is a playwright, director and performer, and has already come to the Yukon twice.

Last spring, she directed and acted in the Nakai Theatre production Carnival. Then, in the fall, she came to direct Dark of the Moon, a Guild Hall production.

For Longest Night, she will perform two works: a dance piece and a monologue, both very experimental in nature.

The dance, entitled This Cage Is A Rickety Bridge, is a a collaborative piece with Jesse Zubot of experimental modern dance, partially improved.

'Once we started working together it was great; it just clicked right away,' she said. 'Mostly it's because we're both interested in improvisation and experimenting with that form.

'It's been a really good learning experience.'

Georgina's Piece, the monologue, was originally set in a bathroom and meant to be a one-person show for a one-person audience.

'It's about a girl who wants to tell secrets to strangers,' said Marquardt.

'It's all these collections of stories from her life. It's not really linear, it doesn't have a story necessarily.'

Having been in the territory for a week, Marquardt said, she has found the difference in light to be rather startling.

'I wanted to see what the longest night in the Yukon is like; a personal desire,' she said. 'It's not so bad because there's so much sunlight (during the day).

'In Vancouver, it's just a blanket of rain it comes in October and doesn't leave until May, so actually this feels like I'm getting a good amount of light.'

Founded in 1995 by Daniel Janke in conjunction with the Yukon International Storytelling Festival, Longest Night is now being performed for the 13th time. The helms of artistic director and music director are held by Dave Haddock, with Brian Fiddler as the director.

Other highlights of the show include dances choreographed by Deborah Turner-Davis, blues musician Brandon Isaak, animations from Yukon filmmaker Fabienne Tessier and l'effet boule de neige, a newly formed ensemble of performers from the franco-yukonnaise community.

The Longest Night ensemble band consists of Andrea McColeman, Colleen McCarthy, Ben Barrett-Forrest, Graeme Peters, Kim Barlow, Jordy Walker and Haddock, and original compositions will provide the musical backdrop.

Haddock will also perform various works to help tie it all together.

Though not actually part of the show, an art installation by Nicole Bauberger will open at 7:00 this evening in the Yukon Art Centre's community gallery. There will be a reception with refreshments.

Entitled December's Deepening Darkness, the art project involves the creation of 100 small paintings, at the rate of 10 a day, for the 10 days leading up to Longest Night.

'It's an interactive studio residency kind of thing,' Bauberger said as she painted in the space on Tuesday. All of the paintings are done with melted beeswax and are of dresses.

'I'm inspired by being in Whitehorse these particular 10 days leading up to winter solstice and the way the light dwindles,' she said.

This isn't the first time Bauberger has painted 100 dresses in 10 days. Last March, she first tried it at Studio 204.

'One of the things I discovered in doing that was that by about dress 40, you're out of ideas; you've used them all,' she said. 'So anything that walked into the studio was fair game to be made into a dress and I got excited by it as a way to responding to a particular time and space.'

In that way, she found it similar to painting landscapes.

'As I sit in the back of my truck and I'm painting not just that mountain, but what that mountain looks like right now in terms of the weather and so on,' she explained.

Last August, she again painted 100 dresses in 10 days while in Dawson City.

Bauberger has been a permanent resident of the territory for four years.

'Like many people, I came on a whim, partly drawn up because of the storytelling festival,' she said. 'Mostly it's the horizon here and what I can see to paint.'

It's a great place to be an artist, she stressed.

'People are very supportive and I think Yukoners are generally proud of the artists they have up here.'

Bauberger's work will be on display in the gallery until Jan. 6.