The Birth of Color, A Marriage of Darkness and Light is a frequency opera based on ancient and new scientific ideas and images about the Creation of the universe. The author of the piece, multi-disciplinary artist, Honora Foah is both a mythologist and a science enthusiast with an inspired interest in how we imagine the world and therefore how we act.

The Birth of Color is an hour-long performance piece for male and female chorus, singing bowls and percussion, with light and projection. Lucio Ivaldi is the composer, poet David Brendan Hopes is the lyricist. The projection designer is Nicola Vidali and Honora Foah is the author and director.

The story is narrated simply, almost as a basic myth, combining elements of physics, the ancient Indian Vedas, dark matter and dark energy, the evolution of the basic forces and Goethe’s color theory. The Creation is told as a love story, where the original oneness engenders longing and appreciation as it begins to split into all of the parts of the manifest world. The work is a reminder of the sheer beauty and wonder of creation and how the more we understand, the more mysterious and beautiful it becomes.

 

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 music 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 hour-long 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 Recombinant DNA, 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.

Conceived and directed by multi-media artist Honora Foah, the music for The Birth of Color was written by Lucio Ivaldi.

The lasers, light work and projections are by a team of Italian, Hungarian and American designers and technical wizards with images from many different artists and NASA.

God made everything out of nothing, but the nothingness shows through.  – Paul Valery