Blown away by bubble art

EDINBURGH, Scotland – It was supposed to be a quiet Monday at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, a time for performers and spectators to catch up on sleep after a busy opening weekend. But in McEwan Hall last week, the atmosphere was riotous.

For about an hour, some 400 adults and children were gasping, screaming and laughing as Louis Pearl, the Amazing Bubble Man, encased girls and boys in huge soapy globules, made bubbles levitate and wobble, filled many of the fragile spheres with smoke, and karate-chopped others in half.

For the show’s finale, Pearl, 68, grabbed a long plastic stick with a ring on one end, dipped it into a vat of soapy formula and waved it above his head so that thousands of bubbles drifted over the audience. Children throughout the theater leaped out of their seats to pop them.

Such spectacles are at the heart of bubble art, a performance genre that, for over a decade, has been a growing presence at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, the annual arts festival more renowned as a birthplace of hit comedy shows, plays and musicals.

This year, four bubbleologists, as they like to be called, have shows on the Fringe, which runs through Aug. 25. Alongside Pearl’s, in which he also cracks jokes while performing tricks, a performer called Ray Bubbles has a show for disabled children and an “Ultimate Bubble Show”; an act called the Highland Joker has the simply titled “Bubble Show”; and Maxwell the Bubbleologist has a “Flying Bubble Show,” largely performed midair.

After his gig last Monday, Pearl posed for photos with fans and sold bubble-making kits outside the venue. “Bubbles are like dreams,” he said later in an interview: “When you blow one, you go out of normal reality and this magical thing captures your attention until – boom! – it pops.”

Pearl’s audience members were less verbose in interviews about the show’s appeal. Leon Fort, 12, who during Pearl’s performance had gone onstage to pop a huge bubble by kissing it, said that bubbles “are cool,” even if they “taste quite weird.” Lily Barton, 3, just smiled shyly, then hid behind the legs of her father, Harry.

Born in San Francisco, Pearl said his bubble fixation began in the 1970s at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire when a roommate showed him a bubble pipe and they tried out some tricks like filling the bubbles with marijuana smoke.

While working odd jobs after college, Pearl sold toy bubble pipes on the streets of San Francisco, and sometimes sold pot, too. His life changed in 1983 when he saw Tom Noddy, a bubble artist who once appeared on “The Tonight Show,” perform at the Exploratorium, a San Francisco science museum. Noddy’s tricks included creating a cube-shaped bubble, making smoke spin tornado-like inside a bubble, and blowing piled-up bubbles to form the shape of a goblet.

Pearl said he spent “hours and hours” replicating Noddy’s tricks and developing his own. During that time, Pearl recalled, he also had to work out the ideal mixture for bubble blowing. (His current recipe, he said onstage, calls for dish soap, water – and personal lubricant to make the bubbles stretchy.)

At this year’s Fringe, Pearl is performing versions of some of Noddy’s best stunts. “In the bubble community, if you present tricks in a new way, it’s cool,” Pearl said. “If you steal, it’s not.” Pearl said he had once looked offstage during a routine in Edinburgh to see a rival bubbleologist taking notes from the front row.

When Pearl first took his “Amazing Bubble Man” act to the Fringe, in 2007, he played a 100-seat venue. Now, he’s in an over-1,000-capacity hall, although he said a full house could be disastrous, in part because the heat generated by larger crowds creates air currents that make it harder to control the bubbles. During the Monday show, Pearl explained that to his young crowd and joked, “If you’d all leave, it’ll be a great show.”

Yet Pearl is up against an even bigger challenge this year. For the first time, the most hyped bubble act at the festival isn’t his, but “The Flying Bubble Show,” in which Maxwell the Bubbleologist blows hundreds of the iridescent orbs while flying on a harness around a circus tent.

The spectacle’s performer, Graham Maxwell, 32, said in an interview that he had been putting on traditional bubble shows around the world for about a decade when, in 2024, he had “a vision:” He pictured himself suspended midair while using tai chi movements to make bubbles levitate, bulge and spin. That inspired him to train in a circus tent in Goa, India, where he learned how to use a wired harness.

Last week, Maxwell performed his flying show to an audience of about 500. Whereas the mood in the hall for Pearl’s performance was raucous, for Maxwell’s it was awestruck.

As graceful classical music played, Maxwell – wearing a top hat and billowing velvet shirt – swooped overhead as the audience sat around a circular stage. Trailing behind him were elongated bubbles that he created by blowing through his soapy fingers or using ropes he had dipped in bubble-making fluid. During the hour-long show, he juggled bubbles midair, tried to create “the biggest bubble ever” and performed his bubble-levitating trick.

“Bubbles, it’s such a lovely word,” he said at one point. “You can’t ever say it without smiling.” He then encouraged the audience to shout “Bubbles!” back at him – which they did, grinning wildly.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.