Friday, June 08, 2007

 

The Blue Man Group Experience


Last night I attended a performance of The Blue Man Group (www.bluemangroup.com), at the Astor Place Theater in NYC. What a visual treat! The performance, titled Tubes, has no plot. In fact there isn’t even any dialogue. It was an event as much as a play—maybe more so. Thankfully the producers, now raking in the bucks I suppose, have retained a faintly anarchic, dingy “rave-like” quality that makes the evening seem subversive. The characters are the blue guys of course. Audience members are also brought onto the stage to interact with the players.

Making the “Contract With The Audience”
http://www.blueman.com/multimedia/video/index.php
The performance begins with drumming (in fact, to be cast in this show now franchised around the world you must first be a top-notch drummer). But the evening at the theater begins long beforehand. I entered the (rather small) theater and was directed to my seat on the mezzanine (an area above the “orchestra” seating on the main floor…you could call it the balcony). There was music playing over the sound system. It was somewhere between tribal rock and techno…think Rusted Root with electronic strings added, and ribbed plastic tubes throughout the space. There was a palpable sense of expectancy as we waited for the show to begin. The walls were dressed out in ribbed plastic tubes of various dimeters from an inch to six inches. The stage contained more tubes, drums, screens and constructions that raised a sense of expectancy. Walls and floors all painted black, and with a bit of urban grunge…a patina of use—wear—dirt, throughout.

The pre-show was designed to get the audience into an inter-active mode…breaking us away from a typically passive attitude prevalent in today’s theater-going culture. A scrolling message board of red LED lights reminded us to use the restrooms before the show began as there would be no intermission, and then proceeded to ask the audience to do things such as welcome some fellow audience members (by name they were asked to stand…probably gleaned from credit card sales records I’m guessing.). Each command was initiated with a “ready go” command, followed by a list of words we audience members chanted, spoke or yelled. The contract with the audience was set—we were an ACTIVE audience.

The sign indicated that the show would start, the music was raised a notch, and the three Blue Men showed up in their black garb and alienating makeup that turns them into bald, cobalt blue men with no ears. This is a form of mask-wearing and because they never speak, I “read” their faces as I might an actor wearing a full face mask. Without words—literature in scripted plays--to pay attention to, my attention is ever-increasingly drawn to the gestures and movements. But I digress.

Enter—The Aliens…Who’s the Alien?
Lights glowed from under two drums upstage (away from the audience, near the back wall of the theater, but really not very far from the audience). The center drummer began to play a rhythm, and the other two poured in turn yellow and blue paint onto the heads of the two drums. It was as if they were curious about what might happen…as if they were doing this for the first time—an essential ingredient for most theatrical performance. They were paradoxical, at once very human in their inquisitive way of beginning, and very primal and even alien in their appearance. The paint erupted in bottom-lit showers of color like fireworks, and the audience erupted in approving applause and cheers.

The Blue Men moved downstage toward the audience and looked around the space…it was as if they were discovering the space for the first time too—their bright eyes peering around the space, looking at the audience as if we were perhaps as foreign to them and they were to us. They spent the performance exploring the entire space, even coming into the audience and selecting people to come onstage for some scenes.

Structure of the Show And How It Affected Me
To call them scenes, though, is a bit off the mark. After the show, digesting what had just happened, I thought of the entire show as a spectacular evening of lazzi not unlike what Commedia del Arte players might have performed if moved forward in time from the streets of Renaissance Italy to New York City now. These lazzi, bits of spectacular tricks and “bits” improvised between the players, were the stock elements of a Commedia performance as the masked characters of that era displayed their acting and athletic virtuosity in the context of an over-arching scenario.

The difference is in the scenario…or in the case of the Blue Man Group, the absence of scenario. There was no story. Just a tribal activity we audience members watched and became involved in. In some sort of way it seemed an artistic-anthropological experiment. It was a complete evening of spectacle built along a theme of alienation…or bridging the alienation of modern living. What it means to be an alien…to encounter someone very much like us and very much different at the same time, seems to me a theme worth pursuing today. The world is still largely a tribal place. Perhaps the greatest conflict of our time is that between Western European democratic ideals, and tribal ideals of the developing world. The performance got me thinking about that anyway. Not a bad outcome to a bourgious theatrical setting of New York City’s theater district, and an audience that can afford $78 tickets—ouch! The show disrupted the status quo. Yay for the arts. Again.

Wouldn’t You Like to Be A Fly On the Wall?
I tried to imagine how the creators of this event could have broadened their minds to imagine this stuff. Where did the idea of concealing and transforming actors into blue guys come about? When did the notion of tossing jello into the audience become a “good idea?” How did the ensemble develop scenes such as inviting an audience member onstage to eat a twinkie…you’d have to experience it to see how compelling these actors can be to watch, improvising reactions to the cues given by the audience member. How long did it take to create, tune and learn to play the array of PVC pipes formed into an urban “organ?”

I think that will be the subject of my next blog…creative process.

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