No one knows exactly what the Prague performance of Monochrome Circus will be like, not even the dancers themselves. This budding Kyoto dance company's current production, Refined Colors, is never the same show twice, as each performance is made to reflect the place it's being performed in. The sounds used in the show are drawn from recordings made in the city hosting the performance, and the lighting, produced by a new technology called LED, is changed to match the way the city makes the dancers feel.

Refined Colors is the first in a three-part Japanese performing arts festival at Archa Theatre this fall. Revolutionary in terms of its use of lighting and sound, it's also designed to showcase the next generation of Japanese dancers. Archa Director Ondrej Hrab describes Monochrome Circus as "young and fresh, something which has recently sprung from the art community in Kyoto."

The production is a joint project of Monochrome Circus and the Japanese art group Dumb Type, directed and choreographed by Monochrome Circus founder Kosei Sakamoto, and co-directed by Dumb Type member Takayuki Fujimoto, who is also in charge of the lighting. Performers include Sakamoto and fellow dancers Yuko Mori, Hirokazu Morikawa and Yuka Saeki. The Monochrome troupe has toured extensively through Asia and Europe. This will be its premiere performance in Prague.

Refined Colors is staged in a large white box that serves as a blank canvas for the three essential elements of the show: light, sound and movement. The dancers have a fluid style, choreographed but drawn from their improvisational training, which unfolds amidst an often-soothing digital thunderstorm of changing light and mixed sound. The result is a multimedia cascade of sensations in an ever-changing environment.

The lighting is one of the show's most dominant elements, made possible by LED technology, which produces an astonishing array of colors — over 1.6 million different shades. This flexibility of color allows the troupe to draw inspiration from wherever it's performing. "We take colors directly from pictures of the town for lighting," Sakamoto says via e-mail.

According to Archa public relations spokesman Jirí Sulzenko, the new lighting technology also has an unseen benefit. "LED is ecologically interesting because it requires just one light source to produce all these colors and effects," he says. "So it conserves a lot of energy."

The technology is so new that its uses are still limited. "Nobody uses these LED lights at all yet," Sulzenko says. "Regular theater can't use it because it's not focused enough to serve the purposes of drama. However, this makes it great for dance, and for lighting white-box stages."

The sound element of the performance also relies on a bold experiment in technology. Site-specific for each performance, the soundtrack is a computer-manipulated mosaic of impressions the dancers get from the cities in which they perform. "They go out with recording equipment and record sounds of the place," explains Sulzenko. "When they were performing all over Asia, they were recording markets and harbors and using the sounds in the performance that night."

Focusing on reproducing the sensations of different moments in life, the dancers work with the light and sound to create a stunning command of atmosphere.

The style of dance in Refined Colors represents a new movement in Japanese dance, notably distinct from Butoh, but still grounded in the traditional forms. "There is a very strong art and dance tradition in Japan — strong, but local," Sulzenko says. Young groups like Monochrome Circus, he adds, "represent a way to bring traditions to the international stage."

But innovation is the keynote of the troupe's work, according to Sakamoto. "I felt that the system surrounding theater was [too] conservative, so I founded Monochrome Circus in order to discover a new attitude towards building theater performance," he says.