by RAF KATIGBAK

It's New York in the mid-'80s and the situation is bleak. MTV has all but castrated rock 'n' roll and popular cinema's idea of a creative challenge is thinking up zany new adventures for the Police Academy squad. But while young, upwardly mobile professionals are busy conspicuously consuming everything in sight, three friends (Matt Goldman, Phil Stanton and Chris Wink) are searching for something more.

By painting themselves blue, zipping their lips and hitting the streets of Manhattan, this trio of cultural pranksters were out to cause a serious ruckus, guerrilla art-theatre style. After a few impromptu street skits, the blue-beaned triumvirate added some homemade percussion instruments, art skits and junk food and put together a smart, funny and irreverent performance-art show (dubbed "tribal vaudeville" by one critic) that turned the ingredients of music, science, art critique and pop culture into a food fight of epic proportions. With their unique blend of live drumming, physical comedy, audience participation and a piece involving the creation of abstract art with mouth-caught marshmallows, their half-hour opening slots soon blossomed into an eight-shows-a-week, off-Broadway smash hit.

Fast forward to the present. The ranks of performing Blue Men have increased 10-fold as the Blue Man Group have gone from obscurity to empire. Appearances on The Drew Carey Show, The Simpsons and The Tonight Show have cemented their place in pop-culture history. What started as a lark has grown into Blue Man Group Productions, a multi-million-dollar, artist-run theatre company boasting shows in five North American cities (the next one slated to open in Berlin in May), a Grammy nomination for best pop instrumental album, a new, more rock inspired album featuring guests Dan the Automator, Dave Matthews, Esthero and Tracy Bonham, a six-bus and eight-tractor-trailer travelling rock show that features state of the art lighting and special effects and a 16-piece backing band. The Mirror caught up with one of the "founding fathers" of Blue Man, Matt Goldman, to talk yams, Twinkies and rock 'n' roll.

Mirror: You guys got your start in the New York performance art scene in the '80s. When I hear the words "performance art," I imagine hairy bohemian types pulling strange things out of places they shouldn't. Then I start feeling queasy.

Matt Goldman: Well, there were definitely the yams-up-the-ass Karen Finley type artists, but on the whole, it was just monologues. There was a lot of talking, which you had to have read the right 10 books to understand, or you had to be in this group or that group. But we realized that you don't have to be so angry or serious to get stuff across and that's also why we shut up. The choice for the Blue Man not to speak was kind of a rebellion to what was going on at the time.

M: So who is the Blue Man?

MG: The Blue Man is just an impartial observer. He's that innocent, curious part in all of us. That's what you get to experience when you watch the Blue Man, seeing ourselves and our culture through fresh eyes. The Blue Man turns Cap'n Crunch into a percussion instrument, because he watched TV for a minute and saw that the only property that people discussed about Cap'n Crunch is that it stays crunchy in milk. It doesn't talk about the taste, it doesn't talk about the nutritional value, it doesn't talk about it being satisfying after you've eaten it -

M: Or the fact that if you eat it raw, it tears the shit out of the roof of your mouth.

MG: Right, so for Blue Man, it's like, oh, then it's a percussion instrument!

Bowing down before the Blue Man

M: You guys used to do a piece with Twinkies and marshmallows too - what is up with the artery-clogging death wish?

MG: Twinkies were chosen very specifically because they have, like, a 200-year half-life. It's crazy how totally engineered they are. Then we were fascinated with Jell-O and gel toothpaste. It's so beautiful the way they reflect the light and how you can stare through it and everything turns upside down. People could only have come up with gel toothpaste because of the beauty, because there's no functional advantage to it. The Blue Man can totally get behind that.

M: You talk about the Blue Man like he's a real guy.

MG: He really is! We realized it so early on. When we started, we did a couple of shows, and someone who'd been to just two of 'em came up to us and said, "You know, I didn't really like this thing because I don't think the Blue Man would really do that." It was like, holy shit! First of all, they were right, and second, here's someone who doesn't know nothing about us telling us that the Blue Man wouldn't do something. Then we realized that we had found something that we were serving.

M: So you serve the Blue Man? Sounds like some kind of Smurf-ish cult to me. When did you, uh, I mean, when did the Blue Man decide to go from a sit-down musical performance to full-fledged rock show?

MG: The Blue Man saw certain rock things being repeated over and over and over again. We have rock movement number one, the head bob; rock movement number two, the one-armed fist pump; all the way up to rock movement number 54, bringing out the guest vocalist. The Blue Man sees different versions of the same exact thing and he thinks, this must be some kind of instruction manual to being a rock star.

Are you ready to rock?

M: Okay, so for the rock tour, the Blue Man is backed up by a band, an insane laser show and a huge wall of sound. It seems the Blue Man is still missing one major ingredient - the ego.

MG: The rock show is a crazy dichotomy. It's a tired, old, rehashed, egocentric kind of thing yet it's still one of the freshest, most interesting and fun places. We think it doesn't have to be about ego, we look at it as the rock ritual. If you put your arms up and 10,000 people put their arms up, that's just an exciting moment. Now you don't have to have a name like the Edge to get people to do that. People want to be a part of ritual and the rock show is the one of the best fuckin' places for an amazing ritual to happen

M: Of course it helps that you guys got Marc Brickman as a production designer. I mean, this guy's lit everything from Pink Floyd to the Olympics!

MG: Of course, since we were pre-teenage rock star wannabes, we've had really strong opinions of what we want to see on a rock stage. It's so funny, we got some reviewers criticizing the show, going, "Whoa, the lighting and special effects were totally outrageous and over the top!" And we were like, exactly! We always put on the stage what we would want to see. That's just been our guiding principle all along the way. You're talking to someone who loves the idea of a Kiss show. I mean, no one's trying to be tasteful about four zillion BTUs of pyrotechnics!

At the Bell Centre Theatre on Thursday, July 10, 8pm, $29.50, $39.50, $59.50

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