Blown away by bubble art

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.

- Alex Marshall

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 thousands of bubbles drifted over the audience. Children throughout the theatre leapt 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.