Can You Sing a Rainbow?

Well, can you? The short answer is: yes – if your brain happens to be wired in a particular way. Though difficult to accurately measure, an alleged 4% of the population experience synaesthesia: involuntary cross-sensory perception, like hearing colour or tasting shapes.

And while performance is an excellent domain for posing questions, the question posed by Patch Theatre’s new opera-for-kids Can You Hear Colour? isn’t really the titular one. Instead it asks: if you can hear colour and I can’t, how can I try and understand that? Why should I?

“It’s using a unique way of perceiving the world – in that when [the Girl] sees colour, she hears music – as a metaphor for difference,” explains Naomi Edwards, Patch’s artistic director since 2015, “and how that’s a precious gift and a wonderful thing. I wanted to make a show about empathy, and particularly what it is for children. How can we amplify that and value it, and give an artistic experience around it?”

In today's divided world, empathy sometimes feels like a lost skill.

“I don’t think children need to be taught empathy,” she asserts. “We need to unlearn the things that stop them being empathetic. They don’t see the divisions that we see, they don’t see the categories of people that we see. What happens when they start going to school and encountering people outside of their family unit? What do they learn that unteaches them their natural instinct to be cohesive socially?”

Can You Hear Colour? might utilise synaesthesia as a proxy for alternative points of view, but the neurological phenomenon wasn’t the show’s original inspiration.

“I was packing up my house and watching this TED talk of a guy called Neil Harbisson, who is a cyborg.”

She clarifies: “He has colour blindness – which means he only sees in black and white – and had an antenna put into his skull. This antenna changes light frequency into sound frequency, so he hears a different pitch for each colour – he hears colour. I was just so arrested by it, I could not imagine what that must be like, and bang – that’s the show.”

The plot of the show is accessibly simplistic, the key ideas boiled down to the interactions of three characters: “[The Girl, Michaela Burger] meets the Bird [Bethany Hill], who introduces and expands her idea of music. Then she meets the Colour Catcher [Alan John, also the show’s composer] – who has taken all colour out of the world – and she uses her gift to remind him of the beauty of colour and the beauty of music.”

But Edwards recognises the preconceptions some might have of this particular type of performance.

“I think a lot of people hear ‘opera’ and think they’re not going to enjoy it, because it’s really formal, or stuffy, or old and dusty! But the show is quite contemporary in that sense, and because [the Girl is] discovering her ability to hear music very simply and gradually, it slowly builds up into quite a complex gorgeous score.”

This way of building complexity from smaller identifiable parts conjures Sergei Prokofiev’s beloved Peter and the Wolf, something Edwards will know well from directing the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra’s production in 2017.

“I was working on Can You Hear Colour? at the same time,” she recalls. “I asked [Alan John] to write the finale of the show first, and then we’ve woven backwards all of the themes and ideas and lyrics. By the time we get there there’s this rich and sweeping orchestral sound, and we feel like we’ve heard it all our lives because it’s been slowly planted and built, in the same way that Peter and the Wolf does.”

Making work for children is challenging. Their age makes them perhaps the most ruthless critics of all (“There is nothing more vibrant than an audience of 4-8 year olds – there is no audience more critical, no audience more engaged”), forcing theatremakers to adapt in order to survive.

But, commenting on the health of children’s theatre Down Under, she says that while “the work that’s being created is sensational, and the artists that are working in the field are the best in the country,” our weakness is that “other countries are better at valuing it than we are in Australia.

“There’s lots of talk about opera dying and not being relevant and it’s like, well, let’s find a new audience. Let’s open up the artform to what it can be and reinvent it and be informed by it, but take it forward at the same time.”

Can You Hear Colour? is therefore pitched as an unthreatening yet inspiring show for both kids and their parents, in order to hopefully restore the magic of taking a trip to the stage.

“The whole ritual of going to theatre is so valuable for families,” she expands. “It is that shared time of two people sitting in the dark, looking in one direction, and experiencing the same thing – but probably not experiencing the same thing, and what that conversation is.”

How important it is, then, that a work devised to be accessible to a critical age group should be about not only tolerating but celebrating differing perspectives and alternative experiences. If this message lands home, Can You Hear Colour? might just be the catalyst to propel children’s theatre to the ranks of ‘serious’ performance – and maybe even help the next generation be a little bit more empathetic in the process.