Chroma is an investigation into the nature of colour, tone and light, a non-story of how we learn to see and create the world we see. A collaborative effort of the entire creative team, all performers and participants contributed ideas from the sciences of physics and harmonics to their most personal associations and remembrances.

Simon Fisher Turner’s music came first, then the title, which harks back to Chroma: A Book of Colour (1994), the last work by English artist-filmmaker Derek Jarman with whom Simon collaborated on numerous projects. As in the book, the performance intersperses poetry, anecdotes and quotes from such luminaries as Aristotle, Leonardo, Newton, Geothe and Wittgenstein with meditations on the loss of sight—not necessarily limited to Jarman’s own AIDS-related blindness and subsequent death. The staging casts time’s arrow in reverse, starting from a wish to free the self from death (“Unclose your eyes”) and regressing over the course of one day—one lifetime—to birth (“Feedback”). We hope the production may serve as an “eyepiece” and “mirror play” for viewers to reflect (and refract) upon their own chromatic sense of the world.

Director :

Shiro Takatani

Performers :

Misako Yabuuchi, Yuko Hirai, Olivier Balzarini, Alfred Birnbaum

Music :

Simon Fisher Turner, Takuya Minami, Marihiko Hara

CG/Computer programming :

Ken Furudate

Stage manager :

Nobuaki Oshika

Video technician :

Shimpei Yamada

Stage technician :

So Ozaki

Conceptual collaboration :

Hiromasa Tomari, Alfred Birnbaum

Voices (in order of appearance) :

Paolino Accolla (Aristotle, Leonardo), Mark Robinson (Newton), Markus Thinnes (Goethe),
Alfred Birnbaum (Wittgenstein, Jarman), U-zhaan (text: Misako Yabuuchi)

Graphic design:

Takuya Minami

Company manager :

Yoko Takatani (dumb type office Ltd.)

Production :

dumb type office Ltd.

Coproduction :

Biwako Hall Foundation

Support :

The Saison Foundation

Cooperation :

Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media [YCAM], Seian University of Art and Design

https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=222&v=0BQ0ejUoaYo