WHY THE THEATRE SEATS ARE RED IN COLOUR-EXPLIANATION

WHY THREATRE SEATS ARE RED IN COLOUR?

Have you ever wondered why theatre seats are always covered in some shade of red? It’s because red is the first colour that is lost to our sight in low-light conditions.

If the memory of my scuba training still serves me, it is the first colour that disappears as we go underwater.

Anything red virtually disappears once the house lights go down, hence the choice to once again putting maroon coloured seats in your theatre.

Well, that and the fact that we are doing all that we can to maintain the historic accuracy of the opera house.

I’m greatly astonished every time I walk into your theatre these days.

I’m also greatly admonished every time I walk into the theatre or at least I was greatly admonished until I finally started to wear steel-toed boots.

As I mentioned to you last week, within 24 hours the seats were all removed, the carpets were ripped up and a space was revealed that none of us had seen in 20 years since the original restoration took place.

The old seats have been carted off to storage and eagerly await a new home.

STORY OF RED THEATRE SEATS ?

For centuries, Italy has been the center of opera performances. Being so, as operas started to expand into the rest of the Europe, the opera houses were designed to look like the Italian operas which were, primarily, red and gold:

Of course, they were opera houses that weren’t always red and gold. For example in France, the main colour palette used was gold and blue:

At the end though, because opera was associated with Italy, the red and gold colours caught on throughout Europe and the majority of the opera houses were using this colour palette. Later on, when theatres and cinemas started to replace opera houses as a main form of entertainment, this trend remained.

But, as it turns out, there is another reason why the red trend prevailed up until today and it has to do with science: red is the first colour that we lose in low-light conditions. With a wavelength of 650 nm, once the house lights go down, the red colour will be the first to disappear from our sight:

It’s hard to imagine a more typical American food than popcorn. We guess everyone likes popcorn. There are already various flavors on the market – salted, raw, butter or caramel. But who can we call the discoverers and the first fans of popcorn? You may be surprised to learn that the first traces of popcorn were discovered by archaeologists in a thousand-year-old Peruvian tombs. The Iroquois Indians made popcorn in clay pots filled with heated sand. At that time, they broke corn out to make popcorn soup.

So popcorn is not just a modern invention of young people. The popcorn tradition as we know it today began during World War II, when sweets were not as readily available as they are today. This forced cinema owners to move to another, much cheaper alternative – popcorn. Gradually, however, people became so accustomed to chewing this roasted corn while watching the film – they can’t even imagine any movie performances without it.