Paint party has a little this and splat

HOW TO GO

What: Life in Color, the World's Greatest Paint Party

When: 9 p.m. Saturday

Where: U.S. Bank Arena, 100 Broadway St., Cincinnati

Cost: $46

More info: (513) 421-4111 or www.usbankarena.com

HERE, AND THERE, FOR YOU

You may live a county or two north of Cincinnati, but it’s close enough that you might go there to play. Your Thursday Life section emphasizes local special events, including things to do in Cincinnati.

If you want to dance, you go to a club. If you want to see contortionists and acrobats, you go to the circus. If you want random goop splattered onto you, you go see bands like GWAR or maybe find a midnight screening of ” The Rocky Horror Picture Show.”

But only Life in Color combines all four elements of music, art, dance and, most of all, paint, into one massive, multimedia performance. It goes without saying that revelers attending the Cincinnati performance this weekend are strongly encouraged to wear white.

Life in Color was formerly known as Dayglow and is also known as the “World’s Largest Paint Party.”

“We go for more of a Cirque du Soleil feel, just with paint and house music added,” said Freddy Hernandez, marketing and social media manager for Life in Color. “There’s a story behind everything. Last year, the story was that a paint meteor hit the earth, and this year is the continuation of that (the show is subtitled “Rebirth”). A girl wakes up in this new world. She goes around trying to find other people, but instead she finds this new world of colors.”

Under a state-of-the-art light show and visual effects, the various performers, accompanied by thumping electronic dance music, wear eye-searing costumes, everything from butterflies to robots to unicorns on stilts to a guy who enters a transparent sphere and is rolled onto the audience (perhaps the most benign form of stage-diving ever witnessed). Anyone who attends can expect to come home looking like a paint can exploded on them, but there is usually fair warning before the paint guns are unleashed. Sunglasses are also strongly recommended to protect the eyes.

Life in Color was started by four college students in Tallahassee, Fla., in 2006. From those initial performances on college campuses, the show has been growing ever since.

“We used to be in nightclubs, but now we’re in big arenas,” Hernandez said.

As Life in Color tours all over the country, different DJs are selected according to the city the show is currently visiting.

“We do market research to decide with DJ will bring more people to which venue,” Hernandez said. “Some places like house music, other places like different types. It just varies.”

The DJ-in-residence for the Cincinnati show will be 3Lau, a 21-year-old Las Vegas native whose EDM mashups have received over five million views on YouTube. He now regularly sells out clubs when he’s not joining larger festivals.

“It’s a different experience,” Hernandez said. “At some point, we introduced paint cannons instead of just people lobbing paint at each other. With the paint mixed with the music, people really feed off the energy of it. There’s a lot of people who try to copy us now.”