INTERVIEW: Blue Man Group, Audio (Virgin)
- Chris Hill
{This is part 2 of the interview. Part 1 appeared in the February 15 issue - #200 - of Consumable Online.}
CO: Seems you begun the Blue Man Group as a piece of art criticism. Since you've been doing this for more than a decade, what sort of new things have you been bringing into the show?
BMG: That's a good question. A lot of our material comes from whatever kind of gigs that we're doing at the time. The art stuff happened, I think, when we were doing some of these galleries and new museums down in Soho in New York, and we had some fun knowing that the people in the audience would get a sophisticated art reference. We also had fun biting the hand that was feeding us by kind of making fun of them, but knowing that they were sort of masochistic and would actually like being made fun of.
CO: That sounds like New York.
BMG: Yeah, exactly. (laughter) So then we moved on, opened up at the Astor Place Theatre and "Tubes" solidified, but we started doing a couple of outside gigs. And one of the ones we did was the Interactive Media Festival, in the mid-90's. I guess they were calling it "Interactive" - it was a little bit before the web had really taken off. But there were a couple of things like that: the Utne Reader had a kind of big salon vision fest, and the Interactive Media Festival, and another computer related event. So, for those we did a couple of pieces that dealt with technology...the equivalent of what we were doing in the art world. We were making fun of them a little bit, but we were also taking advantage of the fact that we could make certain jokes that we knew that they would get. It's a love/hate thing.
Our show is a send-up of conceptual art and a celebration of it at the same time. We make sure we keep ourselves honest. We're making fun of performance art, but we're also doing it. And similarly, we were making fun of some of the claims of technology, but we were also using it to cool ends at the same time.
The common thing, I think, with them, was to dance around the question of "Where's the room for humanity in it?" "Where's the room for human emotion?" And "Where's the room for the human body when things are becoming increasingly more technical and technological?"
And then, I think after that, we did a couple of rock and roll gigs. We did the New Music Seminar. So we did a little bit of Blue Men's Take on the Rock World, 'cause that's easy to make fun of. You want to kind of get in there, and have some fun, but also...you want to rock! The making of Audio was the culmination of that experiment. You know, why aren't people being more creative with their instruments? Why is every band playing guitar, bass, drums in the background. You have two guitars, a couple people are spinning records, a couple people here and there playing cheesy synthesizers, but basically, what happened to the innovation with the instruments?
So we took that "not being satisfied" energy into the rock world. We didn't want to create an album that was esoteric and typical performance-y, or microtonal music, or whatever. We wanted to make a ROCK album. We don't have vocals, that's just the way it is, but we wanted to make songs with the electric guitar, with some familiar sounds, but mixing in some of these other tambres. And for some people, I'm sure it's not weird ENOUGH...
But for us, those same people probably didn't like the Sex Pistols when they came out. For us, it's an energy and a blend of naivete and exuberance AND intelligence that we go for, and so that's been a very satisfying process. But then, to really feel like I've answered your question, as soon as the album was done, we felt "Wow! That was cool, we really did our rock thing." We're going to keep doing that. But now that we've gotten that out of our system, let's take a moment and go back into the vaudeville empty room, and see if we can entertain people with nothing more than the relationship between these three characters.
And so we've kind of gone back to some of our acting roots in the last few months, getting ready for this show, because we wanted to make sure that as great as the music's gonna be, we wanted the character work to be as big, or more important than the props. We didn't want to have it be an evening of spectacle. Not that rock music is only spectacle, but we wanted to make sure that we had done our homework, where we're in front of an audience, and it's the three of us, that relationship, and nothing else. Just our wits and our improv and maybe a few props. We wanted to get back to that dimension.
CO: So as far as acting, is there any progression in the characters when they're doing their stage show? Or are they just pretty much reacting to the environment and playing the instruments?
BMG: I think there is a progression. I think the Blue Man enters the environment not entirely sure of the surrounding, and it doesn't go straight to "now I play you a song". The Blue Man is thinking on his feet, the character is figuring out what to do, what would be appropriate, how to wrestle this audience from an intellectual state to a visceral state. In a very basic sense, the Blue Men're trying to figure out how to get the audience to be ready to rock.
And they're NOT, they're not sure how. They have no idea at the beginning, if it's even going to work. They're not sure what the other characters, other Blue Men, are going to do. So that's where the character comes in. There's little bits of mishaps and so on, but by the end, they're pretty much in step with each other, and they've taken the audience, perhaps, to a new level.
CO: All right. Hey, I've checked out your site, and it's brilliant. [ http://www.blueman.com/ ]
BMG: Oh, great. Thank you so much.
CO: I think I particularly like the Forrest Gump/Blue Man Group in the art world...
BMG: Oh, yeah, yeah. I wonder if anyone's read that. Or if they've even gotten it. We haven't gotten any feedback about that.
CO: Seriously!?
BMG: No one talks to us about that. You know, it wasn't easy to write that. It took us a little time. I don't think anyone's read it! We have a piece in the show that we call "Klein", and...oh, you haven't seen the show, right?
CO: No, but I'd like to.
BMG: Well, Yves Klein made two kinds of paintings, basically. He made the blue monochrome. He made sponge reliefs, blue, but it was always that same color, which we've tried to match. He also would paint people's bodies, or rub paints...have them roll in paint, and then he'd press them against canvasses. We have a send-up/tribute to one of those paintings in our show.
It's a lot of fun, it's a real lot of fun. And we never imagined that it was going to have the kind of reaction that it did. Yves Klein's widow - because Yves died at a very young age, his heart just literally exploded - his widow came to our show. We spoke to her in the lobby afterwards, and she said that Yves was there. He was in the theatre with us and he was very pleased.
CO: That's pretty powerful.
BMG: Isn't that amazing? It was cool.
At that point, after a second warning to get to the stage, the BMG had to cut the interview short, taking their energy and enthusiasm back to their Vegas show installation. I was left with a high that lasted for days, and a desire to see for myself the visual production which inspired Audio.
