COLOR DANCE

A novel idea for a book about color: Three small dancers wave diaphanous scarves to demonstrate how colors combine. There are many subtleties here: where the fabric is doubled, color is intensified, producing many shades of red or such variants as chartreuse and aquamarine. A boy joins the girls to add white, gray, and black scarves in turn; the book concludes with a color wheel and the comment that ""Color Dance is a fantasy"": the scenes are easier to paint on paper than perform on stage. It's not even so easy on paper: for instance, the printer's red shown is pinker than the popular idea of true red; the violet is more like blue; and the yellow doubles on itself to make orange. Laboring over such nuances is inevitable in discussing color; Jonas' book may provoke more discussion than she intended.