Refined Colors

01 Production concept:

Refined Colors is a sequence of dances performed in settings defined by light.

Using the latest digital LED lighting equipment, the Project furthermore explores new possibilities in mobility for staging dance.

Dance is eminently more flexible than other performing arts, making it possible to stage works from only three components: body, space and light. In this Project, these elements will be kept to a bare minimum for easy transport and simple set up, while yet maintaining a high degree of precise computer control and functional adaptability.

Also incorporated into the dance movements is the concept of "contact improvisation," a technique/style from the West as yet barely known on the contemporary Asian dance scene.

Refined Colors is an experimental dance performance with a new perspective. While involving a small team of dancers and technicians (5 persons at most) carrying only a minimum of equipment they can transport themselves, the Project hopes to have great impact, showing how today's digital technology can be used as an accessible personal creative tool readily adaptable to local creative needs.

02 Technical concept:

LED lighting equipment manufactured by Color Kinetics Ltd. can create an amazing range of color variations (16.7 million colors) from only three primary colors "R(ed), G(reen), B(lue)" as simply as for any digitally-controlled computer display. Yet for such an impressive palette, LED lighting units consume surprisingly little electricity, require no complex wiring and generate almost no heat. All of which makes it possible to create a theatre environment with much more impressive color effects that ever before using only a minimum of equipment: a laptop computer (as control unit), a moderate power supply and the LED unit.

The Project is designed to work in any walled gallery space or museum interior, though it can also be set up outdoors, temporary shelter or private home. All that's needed is three white walls or sheets and sufficient room for a dancer to move around. Although fade-to-black conditions are preferred, the entire lighting package can run on standard household electricity.

03 Artistic concept:

The Rays are not colored

The human eyes have an organ called “cone”. There are three kinds of cones: Red cone, green cone and blue cone. They detect light of a wavelength at around 700nm (red), 546nm (green) and 436nm (blue), respectively.

For example, the color we recognize as yellow is a beam of 570nm. Instead, let’s look at a surface which reflects an orange-ish yellow whose wavelength is 590nm. When the beam enters a man’s eye, it stimulates the red and green cones at a certain ratio, and the brain receives that information and see's yellow. Using this mechanism in reverse, if you shoot red and green beams at the same ratio into the eye, one will see the same yellow as well. We cannot tell the yellow which is in fact a mixture of red and green from the yellow of the beam of 590nm.

A human eye interprets beams of different wavelengths into ratios of red, green and blue stimuli which are then reorganized as different colors. In other words, “colors” are made up in our brains based on the stimuli of red, green and blue, or RGB. There is, however, no knowing what kinds of colors are generated inside the brains of each person through such mechanism.

“Color,” which covers everything of this world, is already so ambiguous, then, how much of the world are we meant to ever understand from those fleeting glimpses on a journey, no matter how keen we may be of seeing the world? Nevertheless, that’s how the shape of the “world” in each person is born, and is then developed through experience and knowledge one gains day by day. There is no other way to know the world.

Yes. The “world” is formed within you, by yourself, through your journeys.

Reference: “Guide to Color Psychology” Tadashi Oyama, Chuko Shinsho.

Co-production
Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media [YCAM]

YCAM that opened in November 2003 is a complex having three studios of different sizes, production and study room, and city library. As a new base for cultural information dispatch through media technologies, it promotes creative activities crossing over the genres of image, sound, and bodily expression. YCAM InterLab (a media laboratory well-equipped with different information processing devices) and technical staff, who always stay alert, support the production and exploration in artistic expressions of invited artists. Also, educational activity such as workshop and collaboration with artists is one of the major programs.