BLOWN AWAY BY BUBBLE ART

THE EDINBURGH FESTIVAL FRINGE HAS BECOME A POPULAR SHOWCASE FOR BUBBLEOLOGISTS WITH WHIMSICAL AND GRAVITY-DEFYING PERFORMANCES

- STORY: ALEX MARSHALL / NYT

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 theatre 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."