Wildly successful since its creation in New York in 1987, the Blue Man Group is performance art that is audience interactive, so interactive in fact that people in the first few rows at the Charles Playhouse wear raincoats during the show. Three men painted blue are backed by a rock band as they make music on plastic tubes, splash paint, and cover themselves and the audience in pounds of Twinkies and Captain Crunch. The creative triumvirate behind Blue Man asserts that the work is as much art as spectacle, noting that themes of ritual, the limits of technology, and information overload underlie the show. In our April 1998 program, Greater Boston Arts interviewed Chris Wink, Matt Goldman, and Phil Stanton, the creators of the Blue Man Group.

Below are excerpts from transcripts of these interviews in which the three men speak about the "mask" of a Blue Man; Blue Man's relationship to the art world; Blue Man's take on technology and the future; Blue Man and the audience; and franchising the production.

On Blue Man's "mask"

Matt Goldman: The character was developed to be a shedding of our cultural masks, not an adding. That's what's so interesting about putting on the blue make-up and taking your hair style out of it, and your ears, which are very defining to your looks, and putting on the blue make-up. That's not an additive process, that's actually a removal of this mask that we've chosen to walk around in the streets and interact with the world.

Phil Stanton: We kind of used almost a Freudian model -- we're not Freudian thinkers in any way -- but we pulled from it this idea of the superego, the ego and the id, and we've taken it to be, like the superego is hero, the ego is the ordinary, the person in his ordinary life, with the kinds of cultural masks and the idiosyncrasies that we learn in our lifetime, and the id is the clown, or like an animal.

So we think of Blue Man as the top and the bottom, the superego and the id, or the hero and the clown, smashed together without the seventy-odd years that we live, with all of the habits that we develop, the pathologies or the neurosis, stuff like that. So we think of him as smashing these kind of extremes together.

Chris Wink: All of our work starts with this idea that from the day we are aware that there's a culture larger than ourselves, we begin that process of acculturation, which is really the process of building a mask for ourselves, which is really the end of authenticity, really, it's the beginning of manipulating one's self, being one's own god, creating the impression that other people have of you.

And I guess our belief is that art, among other things, can offer a glimpse back, a peek underneath the mask, or remind people of that area under the mask. Ironically or paradoxically, we wear a mask but it's really a way of liberating ourselves from our cultural mask. I mean, the question is are we putting a mask over when we put on the blue character? Or are we really peeling this off?

On Blue Man's relationship to the art world

Chris Wink: Our relationship with art is an interesting one in the show, because we make fun of certain aspects of it. Because of this belief of authenticity, we take on a little bit of -- a little satire approach towards Artspeak, in that piece where the words are going across. This is where art itself, the art world, has become a place of further alienation, of further posturing, of manipulating of the truth, versus a revealing of the real thing, where people don't understand what the other one is saying, and people are building a kind of wall of academic credibility, a mask of academic or Duchamp-sort-of-based intellectual credibility.

So there's two kinds of points of view in our show. Again, we're making fun of the parts of the art world that are really part of the problem, not the solution, and then we're celebrating parts that we think are inspiring. So we had this sort of abstract expressionist kind of connection. The best example being the paint on the drums. If a robot does it, and the paint goes up, it's spectacle. But if I begin having a feeling, and then this notion and the paint would come out of that as an extension of it -- and I feel like I'm in the tradition of modern dance, or Pollack -- they we've created art.

And that's the edge we live on: that the performers really will determine whether we've done something with authenticity on a given night. I think that we really depend on the performers to make the show "art."

On technology and the future

Chris Wink: There's an extraordinary thing that's happened in this century. Even as we become technologically advanced, or perhaps because of it, there's this counter-piece of work that's happened collectively, which is toward a search of the authentic human essence, and it's a fascinating sort of duality there.

So in our show we have a little bit of that world trying to be expressed, this century's dilemma of -- the story of John Henry: humankind vs. the machine. Not necessarily versus but just, responses to; and, like anything, technology -- or pop culture -- can serve to further our distancing, our insularity, our mask, or it can be used towards other purposes -- and it's up to us.

So it seems silly for us to take on some kind of Luddite position via anti-technology. It's more a question of what your purpose is. And again, that's what art can remind us of, what our purpose should be, and striving for this authenticity and sort of undermining, or undercutting, like good tricksters do, the civility, the rigidness.

On Blue Man's relationship to the audience

Matt Goldman: The Blue Man is looking to connect. There's this whole group of people here, and there's the Blue Man over there, and they come from very different places, but they've met here, sort of, where is it? It's kind of this neutral meeting ground. And they're looking to connect and they're not sure if it can happen, and they're trying, and they're testing, and they're -- and so is the audience. And then hopefully by the end, if everything works out, then you have this kind of magical experience.

One of the things that I think makes this work unique is the fact that it actually does matter who is in the audience on a given night; it actually does matter that you're here, and your two friends are here, and all the other people, because your responses and the responses that the Blue Man has to you and vice-versa is actually going to influence the way the evening goes.

I would have these relationships, a person over there, a person over there, a person up there, we'd be making a lot of eye contact, there would be kind of this specialness -- and then the whole audience put together has a certain personality. Sometimes it has a certain personality, sometimes there are factions, there's the loud group over here, and the really intense scrutinizing group over here, but it's all part of this back and forth, it's almost like there is a breathing element to it, where you're breathing in sort of what they're giving you, you're processing it and then you're breathing out, and they're getting what they're getting back, and it's sort of this back and forth.

Chris Wink: We've had big debates about Duchamp, and the question was, did Duchamp ruin everything? Because, you know, he's very inspiring, very intelligent, very interesting, but he certainly was the excuse for a lot of really bad performance art. A lot of really indulgent, really intellectual, really cut-off -- I mean, it was so against anything looking nice, it was so against anything from the neck down.

Art -- especially performance art -- has found a way to make the audience not matter. I've got my books and my philosophies and whatever, and I'm going to do my thing and you'll just sort of get what you get. Well, we've reached a point where people are not understanding what's going on -- it's too much of an abyss. It's great to have this individuality, and this thing of not having it be so easy to figure things out, and not having work that panders to an audience -- that's all good, but at a certain point we've lost the element of ritual.

I think we use the word ritual from time to time to kind of keep us out of the theater mode, where you're just sort of performing in front of them. We're not constantly trying to find ways to use the audience. It's not really so much like that. It's just that the audience is really there, there's no fourth wall, and in a few key moments we find it necessary to involve selected participants from the audience.

Phil Stanton: What I think is most fascinating is that from my background -- I grew up in this kind of church service that was really a lot closer to what people mean when they say tribal. There was a place where people went to three times a week, and really what it was about was trying to get to an ecstatic experience.

Now, they felt that it was totally about the religion and about the morality and about the trappings of the belief system, but the fact is that it's one of the few remaining places where people can go and have this very human thing, which is just to have an ecstatic experience for no good reason. Have a joyous kind of place where you can have a joyous kind of... what do I want to say?... expression.

Now, we have 300 different people every night. But there's something about the show that's trying to get at that kind of experience, where your inhibitions are hopefully shattered and you can just feel like you can have an ecstatic experience at the end, in a group.

So that's one reason this developed, it's kind of a call to not forget what makes us all human, and that's part of it, these group experiences.

On Franchising

Matt Goldman: We have concerns about franchise and dilution. If you don't have those concerns then it will go that way, because that is the natural drift, that's the natural way the current takes it.

We're in three cities now, and we don't have any plans on adding a fourth city. There have been very specific reasons, all the way through. We were here in New York and we took over the show after three years. It reverted back to our ownership. So there was a sort of getting through those three years, to a certain extent.

But [New York] is a tiny little theater, it's 299 seats, and we have the whole project in our minds, growing. And so we decided to open Boston, to have a second sort of playground to play in, an opportunity to take all our latest ideas and get them onto the stage.

And so Boston was hugely about new material: let's get the new material, let's get the new toys, let's get -- all that. Let's have something that represents what our latest creative thinking is for the Blue Man Group. And then what was nice about that is when we opened in Boston and did all that, then we were able to come back to New York and, to whatever extent the space allowed us to, we were able to backtrack and get New York all updated.

So that was what New York was about. And then, Chicago. Chicago lived on several different levels but one of them was a quality of life for the organization, and the other was taking Chris', Matt's and Phil's vision and fantasy of what the project was meant to be, and fold more of that into all three shows.

So we took this opportunity to be in the biggest of all three theaters, in Chicago, and it wasn't about adding a lot of new material, like we had in Boston, it was about folding more vision and fantasy of what the project was always meant to be and to address the quality of life issues for everyone in the organization, that couldn't be addressed with only having the two shows.

And so now we're at three, and three has just been a number that's worked for us. It's a magical number. A stool on two legs is the most vulnerable to fall down, but a stool on three legs is the most stable.

We're a completely artist-owned and run organization. We have no producers. We have no agents. We have no managers. We don't have any of that. We started as the three of us, spending our own money, losing our own money, in the East Village, and then did a little traveling, and then we got into that whole producer, investor, blah-blah-blah, thing. We spent good part of the last three or four years jettisoning from that, from that system where people put money into you expecting a return. Because that just doesn't work well for us.

We're in a system where you have to pay your bills, and your rent, and all that kind of stuff, and so we're realistic in that aspect of the whole thing. But we're also not in the game to profit maximize. That's what people who put money into it want to do.

Chris Wink: I feel very proud of how hard we worked at not being a franchise. I mean, we could have shipped tons of road shows by now, as other shows have. We've gone a very different path. We've moved very slowly, comparatively speaking, and we've kept it an ensemble, we've kept the workshop, we've kept interspersing ourselves in the shows. That's the biggest danger -- to become a franchise and perhaps just bang out the show.

That would be the worst thing that could happen for us. So that's why we've worked so hard to become the producers, so that we can make decisions. So one of our greatest accomplishments artistically is that we've take over the business of it. We do our own marketing. I mean, we had a really good time with the ads this past opening in Chicago. We made fake advertisements and had the Blue Men infiltrate them, and this kind of thing would never have happened if we weren't in charge of it.

I feel like the work has been strengthened by adding, by letting it go and including more people. But we have to be very meticulous, in our role of director, not in, so much, controlling people and their choices, but in making sure that what we're trying to express is being expressed. The original intent of what this show is trying to express needs to be maintained.

We have become the tenders of the fire. Not the fire, the curators.