Art is science made clear.
– Jean Cocteau
Physics is discovering that everything is a form of organized vibration. String theory posits that both matter and energy are composed of vibrating strings. Creation is literally a symphony.
The Birth of Color: A Marriage of Darkness and Light is a Frequency Opera, a multi-media oratorio where a story of The Creation is told using frequency as both the content and the form.
The story, told as a simple fable, is a love story of the sudden emergence of the homogenous universe splitting into time and space, light and dark. As they separate, they long for each other. When eventually they reunite, the intensity of their crashing together creates the harmonics, the colors, the strata of creation.
The Frequency Operas are conceived, researched and directed by multi-disciplinary artist Honora Foah. The music for The Birth of Color by Lucio Ivaldi, has been written with correspondences to the frequencies of color. This is not a new idea but because we can measure and understand scientifically more about the frequencies, there is a new level of physical accuracy to use as a starting point. That the world is made of vibration was already known to the authors of the Vedas more than 10,000 years ago. In this evening length piece, the depth of ancient wisdom, which was based in the human body, is joined to the beauty of scientific exploration and understanding.
It is now also coming to light that Goethe’s ideas about color are a description of the neurological and biological means of perceiving color.
The majority of the music is sung by an unaccompanied chorus who surround the audience in an outer circle and sing into them as the lights project around and above, creating an immersion in the vibratory field. The sound is also being shaped through an emerging sound placement technology that can sculpt the space with the music itself, placing the audience into different relationships and experiences of scale. Woven throughout is the poetry of the lyrics, written by Pulitzer Prize nominee David Brendan Hopes, opening up an additional current of unfolding images.
As the first piece in the performance cycle R E C O M B I N A N T D N A, The Birth of Color initiates a series of love stories, which combine science and mythos, taking on different views of Siva and Sati, Persephone and Pluto, Elizabeth and Viktor Frankenstein and the two trees of Paradise.
The lasers, light work and projections are by a team of Italian, Hungarian, Colombian, British and American artists, scientists, designers and technical wizards.