The Lesson: The entire foundation of the Blue Man Group’s production was built on creativity, fun, surprise, exploration, and curiosity. Despite how these bombastic elements aren’t typically associated with a school curriculum, one of the group’s co-founders has created an entire academic institution that helps youngsters achieve their “aha!” moments through creativity and fun.

Notable Excerpt: “When we started Blue Man Group in 1988, we had never done an off-Broadway show before. We’d actually done almost no theater. But we knew what we were passionate about, and it was a whole series of things that we had never seen onstage before, things like art and pop culture and technology and sociology and anthropology and percussion and comedy and following your bliss. We established a rule that nothing made it onstage if we had seen it before, and we wanted to inspire creativity and connectedness in ourselves and our audiences; we wanted to do a little bit of social good, and we wanted to have fun doing it. And in the office, we wanted to create an environment where people treated each other just a little bit better, just a little bit more respect and consideration than in the outside world. And we continued to iterate and collaborate and find solutions to create things that hadn’t been seen. Over time, I’ve come to identify the optimal conditions for these types of creative and innovative environments are clear intent, purpose and passion: this is working on something bigger than ourselves. Personal integrity: it’s doing what we say we’re going to do. It’s being our authentic self in all interactions.

The Guest: Matt Goldman co-founded the Blue Man Group in 1988— and now, nearly 30 years later, Goldman is working to apply lessons from the Blue Man Group to education. He created the NYC-based Blue School, a school that values creativity as much as it does academics so he can help to create safe environments where new ideas are free to be formed.

(LISTEN to the inspiring talk below or read the transcript)

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