Butoh dance, attack art and the band Devo have all had a role in influencing Blue Man Group — which is bringing a two-month run of avant-garde theater to Japan.

The fact that Blue Man Group are from New York City, which has a long tradition of innovative and challenging performance art, is no surprise. The fact that Blue Man Group have become an international phenomena is.

The idea that a trio of blue-faced, bald, alien-looking percussionists could find mainstream success is rather hard to imagine — especially given their taste for playing bizarre homemade instruments and creating paintings that involve spewing pigment-soaked marshmallows out of their mouths onto canvas. But true it is; in NYC, their show "Blue Man: Tubes" has run about as long as any Broadway hit, going strong since 1991. They've opened in London, Toronto, Amsterdam and Berlin; they've done clever commercials for computer technology maker Intel; they did the soundtrack for the animated movie "Robots"; and they've been cited in "The Simpsons" on four different occasions. Hell, their daily show at the Luxor casino in Las Vegas has even had a seven-year run.