One morning, not long before the opening, Goldman, Wink, and their wives stopped by the center, which occupies two airy floors in a row house on Lafayette Street. The director, Jane Racoosin, and three teachers were showing a visitor around the unfinished classroom, stepping over a stray disco ball and explaining that a large, apparently blank hanging canvas is an outer-space mural rendered in ultraviolet paint. Nearby, members of the Blue Man costume crew, on loan from Blue Man Productions, in Red Hook, New York, were riveting sheets of green vinyl to the foam-covered walls of what would become the “soft room.”
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“Imagine a school that people wouldn’t have to recover from,” Wink said. The couples have devised their own guiding philosophy, drawing heavily from what is known as the Reggio Emilia approach to education, developed in Italy after the Second World War, which emphasizes empowering children by encouraging their creativity.

“Some schools feel like they’ve got to rein the kids in,” Wink said, banging on a drum the size of a hot tub. “We kind of let them have moments of unbridled exuberance.”

Racoosin, the director, broke in, sounding a note of institutional responsibility. “It’s all back and forth between the children and the teachers,” she said. “But it won’t be a free-for-all.”

Every day at the center will end with a ritual called Glow Time, during which the shades are lowered, the regular lights are turned off, and black lights are turned on, illuminating the parts of the room (including work created by the students) that have been painted with special UV paint. The collection of Blue Man-inspired educational gewgaws on hand is a far cry from flash cards and Play-Doh. There’s a hypnotic Bubble Machine, with kid-controlled colored lights; a futuristic Water Machine, with a mini-whirlpool; and a trippy installation, left over from the B.M.G.’s 2003 tour, of giant computer-animated dragonflies that can be made to light up, flap their wings, and fly. The Tree House, whose slide deposits kids in the Texture Pit, looks like fun. So does the OMi-Beam machine, a computerized rig made up of eight ceiling-mounted halogen lamps, loudspeakers, and a video monitor (there is only one other OMi-Beam machine in the country, at Madame Tussaud’s). Colored beams create pools of light on the floor, and by waving a reflective wand through the beams kids can produce any number of sounds, from musical instruments to the calls of barnyard animals and samples of pop hits from the nineteen-eighties (one is Fatboy Slim’s “Rockafeller Skank”).

Once the school gets accredited, Goldman and Wink plan to extend it, one year at a time, through at least the fifth grade. And they hope to maintain what they call “Blue Man’s essence.” During a trial run of the center for a group of two- and three-year-olds last year, Goldman and Wink experimented with incorporating actual bits of Blue Man Group business into the curriculum. They decided against teaching their pupils how to catch paintballs in their mouths (“Maybe in second grade,” Goldman said), but they did adapt their spin-art routine, which involves a Blue Man spitting paint onto a canvas rotated by his fellow Blue Men, as an exercise in coöperation. “By the end of the experience,” Wink said, “they got to a tribal place.”