Engagement Editor Audrey Hogan reflects on the end of the Blue Man Group at Briar Street Theatre and what it means to be truly curious.
Engagement Editor Audrey Hogan reflects on the end of the Blue Man Group at Briar Street Theatre and what it means to be truly curious.
Cadmium blue bled to funeral black Jan. 5 as the Blue Man Group took to the Briar Street Theatre stage for the final time.
The group will be leaving the theater and the Chicago area after a nearly thirty-year tenure, according to the Chicago Sun-TImes, swapping one troupe for another in a new theater in Miami.
I went to see the Blue Man Group almost two years ago on a snowy Thursday in February. I was initially skeptical of the whole endeavor. The drums, the cereal, the blue paint — it all seemed more than a little gimmicky.
I thought perhaps the Blue Men would be more at home awash in fluorescents on the Vegas Strip rather than tucked away off North Clark Street in the grim Chicago winter, or more comfortable returning to their roots and wandering the streets of New York, asking tourists if they’d like to take a picture in Times Square.
I was very, very wrong.
Throughout the show’s vignettes — made up of paint-splattered audience members and silent laments over the minor irritants of our technological world — a curious narrative began to take form. Or rather, a narrative about curiosity.
The Blue Men, with their heads cocked to the side like cats, investigate every item or process they come across with a certain inquisitive spirit. They’re meant to be neophytes in the church of living, pointing to the unrecognized absurdity of life’s mundanities so the audience might recognize its profound silliness.
The world was open to me, I realized through the din, if only I rushed out to meet it. If I could get blue, and embrace the world not as a rigid, predestined landscape but as something open to constant exploration and discovery, I might live a far more hopeful life.
Curiosity, not hardened reproach, ought to drive life. But there seems to be a dearth of curiosity in the modern world.
A few have pointed to a rise in a kind of anti-intellectualism, one denouncing anything deemed “woke,” “leftist” — or any other token phrase of the right-wing that’s come to represent experiences unfamiliar to white politicians.
The banning of Advanced Placement African American Studies in Florida and other states and the outlawing of education emphasizing the discursive nature of gender, sex and sexuality, among other instances, are all part of this petrifying wave of anti-intellectual activity.
At the peer-to-peer — blue-man-to-blue-man — level, however, the moment we find ourselves in might be more accurately described as non-intellectual.
It’s not so much that knowledge is being shouted down, but that it’s being silently and swiftly supplanted. Students are turning to Chat GPT and other AI language models to complete their assignments, choosing to forgo any struggle with new concepts. It’s much easier to settle for the automatically generated answer presented at the top of any Google search than to investigate anything for yourself.
These technologies, alongside the cultures of un-curiosity they bring with them, are leaving us willing to take what we’re given as it remains unchallenged in our minds.
The processes that spark and drive curiosity — asking questions, committing to understanding, pushing through unforeseen challenges — have begun to stagnate in the face of new threats like AI. To be spoon-fed information by some machine built to grind up and spit out something like an answer is giving up.
Our non-curious reactions are just as dangerous, only more subtle, as the ultimate goal of anti-intellectual policies. These trends stifle and prevent the sharing and embrace of life’s countless experiences. When our ideas about the world aren’t left open to interpretation and productive contestation, but to restrictive and repressive definitions, the voices of the marginalized are pushed to the side and demonized.
In the face of this growing tide, we have to embrace curiosity and care for that which is unknown — we have to get blue. Reacting to the world with childish naivety and unabashed curiosity for the nooks and crannies of knowledge is key to recovering the importance of learning for learning’s own sake.
Audrey Hogan is a third-year student from Morgan Hill, California studying Communications and Political Science. This is her third-year as a writer and second-year on staff as Engagement Editor. She's written about the perils of academic pedigree, table tennis and Peter Gabriel, too. In her free time, she likes to read and walk.
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