Glenn Goldberg
Our first national gathering outside OKC 2024
Shane Ogren
Blue Glass Intentionally facilitates opportunities for people to connect in a manner that they feel moved towards breakthroughs that offer them new freedoms and awareness.
The Blue Glass Collective’s mission is to be a powerhouse think tank, production company, artist community focused on climate intervention. With the experience of genuine community as the foundation, our intention is to gather leaders of various fields together to build large-scale, live, public works that educate and inspire our world toward meaningful redirection of current declining trends. The chart below provides a snapshot of the reality we are facing:
At its heart, Blue Glass is an experiment in collective imagination and authentic community. Through immersive experiences that integrate art, music, film, theater, philosophy, science, spirituality, and dialogue, we seek to create environments in which meaningful human transformation becomes possible.
On July 13 1985, while performing at the Live Aid benefit concert for the 1983-85 Ethiopian famine, Bob Dylan made comments about family farmers within the United States in danger of losing their farms through mortgage debt, saying to the worldwide audience exceeding one billion people, "I hope that they can just take a little bit of [the money], one or two million, maybe ... and use it to pay the mortgages on some of the farms."
Bob Dylan’s comments inspired fellow musicians Willie Nelson, John Mellencamp and Neil Young to organize the Farm Aid benefit concert to raise money for and help family farmers in the United States. The first concert was held on September 22, 1985 at the Memorial Stadium in Champaign, Illinois before a crowd of 80,000 people. Performers included Bob Dylan, Billy Joel, B.B. King, Loretta Lynn, Roy Orbison, and Tom Petty, among others, and raised over $9 million for U.S. family farmers.
Community building: the experience of interconnectedness About the same time that Farm Aid was forming, a psychiatrist turned author, Dr. M. Scott Peck, was touring the world giving lectures on the connection between psychology and spirituality as an outgrowth of the publication of his first book, the Road Less Traveled. One common denominator stood out to him as he spoke with audiences throughout the U.S. and beyond: a profound longing for a sense of community that was missing throughout our world. Through experimentation, Dr. Peck developed a simple, experiential model that results in a group of individuals becoming “a community” by design rather than by accident or disaster. In 1984, Dr. Peck co-founded the Foundation for Community Encouragement to “live, learn and teach” the principles of community. For any group to achieve community in the truest sense, it must undertake a journey that involves four stages: “pseudocommunity,” where niceness reigns; “chaos,” when the emotional skeletons and underlying conflicts crawl out of the closet; “emptiness,” a time of quiet, transition and letting go of barriers; and finally, true community, marked both by deep honesty, deep caring—and heightened group effectiveness.
Although there are many existent and well-developed modes of thought and work throughout the world, Blue Glass seeks to create a large-scale accelerator toward transmission of breakthrough experience through our live shows. We believe that through the fusion of Peck’s community building structures along with a cosmological approach to live performances, we can reach a critical mass of humans in a compressed timeline.
The ensemble likewise becomes more than a cast. Its members embody archetypal dimensions of human experience—the Lover, Warrior, Magician, King or Queen, Mystic, Fool, Child, Elder, and others whose presence lives within each of us. Through story, music, imagery, movement, and authentic presence, these archetypal energies begin to resonate within the audience, inviting recognition, reflection, and participation.
At the same time, Blue Glass incorporates intentional practices of community formation inspired by Peck's work on authentic community. The goal is not merely to gather an audience, but to cultivate genuine connection. Through carefully designed encounters, participants move beyond passive observation into shared experiences of trust, vulnerability, imagination, creativity, and collaboration.
As the evening unfolds, the distinctions between performance and participation begin to soften. Story becomes experience. Observation becomes presence. The boundary between audience and ensemble becomes increasingly permeable.
Narrative gives way to music.
Music gives way to silence.
Silence gives way to communion.
Communion gives way to breakthrough.
Blue Glass has been fortunate to receive meaningful support from thus far, 4 patrons. Dan Mayo, Mark Haskell, Gentner Drummond and Andy Mickel. We are developing relationships with additional contributors in the Twin Cities. It’s been through our supporters’ generous contributions that we’ve gotten to our present place, and we look forward to going further. Through Gentner Drummond, we have a PBC corporate structure that was filed in Oklahoma and will be moving it to Minnesota through the Secretary of State of Minnesota.
"There can be no vulnerability without risk;
there can be no community without vulnerability;
there can be no peace, and ultimately no life,
without community."
– M. Scott Peck
