The Participatory Aesthetic

Recently I trekked down to the Briar Street Theater, home of the Blue Man Group. The aesthetic performance begins before the show; when you're ushered in to the lobby, large plastic tubes snake across almost every surface, with dim lights, spoken words, and the bustle of people. The lobby is also adorned with famous or relatively known paintings that have tubes coming through them. If you put your ear to the tube, you can hear different songs or sayings. And, even the bathrooms play a custom-made, BMG-recorded song, called simply, "Bathroom": "bathroom, bathroom, bathroom, etc. Overall, this lobby display sets the tone for a fun, party-like atmosphere that the BMG will deliver later in the show.

When the doors open, and the audience enters, they are greeted with marquee boards flashing various things. Part of the performance of BMG is audience interaction; some staged, some spontaneous. One saying that flashed across the marquee was "Jennifer has a headache..." and asked the audience to say a series of things along with the marquee. Several times, we broke out in laughter, because it was funny. But having seen the show before, I know it's part of the interpolation that goes on throughout the performance. While I'm not sure many audience members would put it this way, the experience of going to a BMG performance is definitely a form of interpolation -- coupled with a participatory group aesthetic.

The overall aesthetic of the BMG performance was, in a word, kitschy. BMG performers wear all black casual outfits (pants and long-sleeved shirts, I think) and have -- you got it -- smurf blue, bald heads. The stage is set up on two levels, though you can't really tell where the levels are until they light up, and most of the stage design is sparse. BMG performers do things like drum on those white pipes and trash barrels, sometimes with real drumsticks, and sometimes with other accoutrements. They catch around 30 marshmallows in their mouths, and make paintball art by catching a paintball in their mouth and spitting it on a spinning canvas. There is also a highly amusing, creative "sketch" where an audience member joins the three performers on stage for a bit with Twinkies. Hilarity -- and delightful immaturity -- ensues. Bright lights and paint are used in almost all aspects of the performance, providing for a truly unique visual experience. And, I forgot to mention -- the BMG performers never speak. The only sounds they make on their own are crunching, when they all chew on Cap'n Crunch cereal at different rates.

For me, however, the most striking parts of the performance came near the end. The first is a simple bit commenting on the status and nature of art. Three images are shown: A "real" fish, a blue and white painting of a fish, and the word "Fish" on a marquee. A voice-over speaks to us, telling us that modern technology has made it easier for the artists, for they can now just write "fish" on a marquee and "sell it for millions of dollars" -- we'd be none the wiser. In fact, we buy into it without even thinking it's bizarre. Kind of like the rest of the performance, if you ask me. This part works well with the infamous "toilet paper" part: HUGE rolls of toilet paper, rigged at the back of the theater, are released, and the audience's job is to get the toilet paper off the roll to the front of the stage. Strobe lights and loud music accompany this feat, which takes a solid 5 or 10 minutes.

The performance basically exploits our love of the everyday spectacle, and capitalizes on -- no pun intended -- our participatory instincts. While some members of the audience might resist, they're basically egged on out of necessity or something else altogether, and by the end almost everyone complies. A genius attempt at showing us how we become subjects? Or just a fun, entertaining, schizophrenic aesthetic smorgasbord? You decide.