Blown away by bubble art at Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2025

Straits Times

13-08-2025

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Graham Maxwell performing during the Flying Bubble Show at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in Edinburgh on Aug 5.
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.
In 2025, four bubbleologists, as they like to be called, have shows at 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, 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.'
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Louis Pearl, the Amazing Bubble Man, creates thousands of bubbles that drift over the audience at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in Edinburgh on Aug 5.
PHOTO: ROBERT ORMEROD/NYTIMES
Born in San Francisco, he 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 wit h s moke.
While working odd jobs after college, Pearl sold toy bubble pipes on the streets of San Francisco . His life changed in 1983, when he saw Tom Noddy, a bubble artist who once appeared on American talk show 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 2025'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.'
Louis Pearl encases Leon Fort, 12, in huge soapy globules during a show at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.
PHOTO: ROBERT ORMEROD/NYTIMES
When Pearl first took his Amazing Bubble Man act to the Fringe in 2007, he played a 100-seat venue. Now, he is 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.
Yet, he is up against an even bigger challenge in 2025. For the first time, the most-hyped bubble act at the festival is not 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 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 taiji movements to make bubbles levitate, bulge and spin. That inspired him to train in a circus tent in Goa, India, where he learnt how to use a wired harness.
Graham Maxwell creates elongated bubbles while swooping over the crowd during the Flying Bubble Show.
PHOTO: ROBERT ORMEROD/NYTIMES
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.' NYTIMES