Bubbling over

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This article was published 09/06/2011 (5474 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson and Led Zeppelin’s Robert Plant may be appearing in Winnipeg this month, but did either of those 60-something legends ever create a smoke-filled, cube-shaped soap bubble inside a cluster of six other bubbles?

How about a volcano bubble that spews smoke, a spinning tornado bubble, or two bubbles that smash against one another until they merge into a single “love bubble?”

Tom Noddy is the original Bubble Guy, the inventor of “bubble magic” done with a simple jar of soap-bubble mixture. The “new vaudeville” entertainer, who started as a street performer in the hippie era, has appeared on The Tonight Show and Late Night with David Letterman and travelled the world with his awe-inspiring bubble feats.

“I’ve been playing with bubbles every day for most of 40 years,” says the genial Bubble Guy, 62, from his home in Santa Cruz, Calif.

One word sums up the all-ages appeal of his bubble shows, he says: wonder. “There’s a sound that people always make, kind of an ‘ooh’ mixed with a laugh. It’s surprise and wonder.”

Noddy, who is teaming with a guitarist and two anarchic clowns in a show called Order & Chaos, is one of the headliners at the 29th annual Winnipeg International Children’s Festival, on today through Sunday at The Forks.

The four-day celebration of family fun, which has officially shortened its name to Kidsfest, is presenting 17 English, francophone and aboriginal acts in four large tents, for one all-inclusive ticket price.

There are musical acts, circus stunts, variety shows, magic, dance and storytelling at the rain-or-shine event. The festival is also using Manitoba Theatre for Young People’s indoor space for puppetry performances of the much-loved The Very Hungry Caterpillar and two other Eric Carle stories.

Noddy, who was a big hit in two previous visits to Kidsfest, is performing in Tent A.

In his early 20s, the New Jersey-bred Noddy was a hitch-hiking hippie who dropped out of college and became obsessed with mastering yo-yo tricks. He moved on to bubbles after he realized he could bounce a delicate soap-film sphere off his body — like a hacky sack — if he wore certain fabrics.

He got the idea of blowing cigarette smoke into bubbles from a friend (he has quit smoking and now uses a can of theatrical fog).

As his act developed, he learned that bubbles, and the ways they connect in efficient geometric structures, have fascinated scientists for centuries. “The people who are most interested in bubbles are four-year-olds, physicists and mathematicians,” he says.

The brainy Noddy became an expert in bubble science and has performed educational shows at science centres for nearly 30 years.

Here’s some more of our effervescent chat with the Bubble Guy.

FP: In 1983, a call from The Tonight Show changed your life. At that time, you’d already been working with bubbles for a decade. I understand you were starting to organize indoor shows of street performers.

TN: Yes, The Tonight Show had heard that there was this new kind of act — a bubble show — somewhere in Santa Cruz. But I didn’t have a phone and I was living in my van. That’s Incredible found me first. Forty million people watched That’s Incredible in prime time, but I never got a gig out of that. I did The Tonight Show, and the phone didn’t stop ringing. They wanted to put me on TV in Belgium, Germany, France, Japan, England, Spain, Australia, Norway…

FP: You’re the godfather of bubble performers. Did you ever meet anyone who was doing bubble tricks before you?

TN: After doing it for nine years, I found a guy living on a farm in Indiana. He was in his 80s — Eiffel G. Plasterer. He did shows for his church group. He kept bubbles in jars in his basement. He had all these different formulas. He kept talking about wet bubbles, dry bubbles, fast bubbles and slow bubbles. I had always used the dime-store bubble mix!

But in 50 years of performing, he had never done my tricks, like blowing bubbles inside of a bubble….

If you talk to jugglers and magicians, they credit (the inventors) of their tricks. Some bubble acts credit me or Eiffel, and some don’t.

FP: One of your signature tricks is creating a cube-shaped bubble inside a cluster of six other bubbles. Is there some Holy Grail of bubble tricks that you’ve been trying to perfect?

TN: You know, they study bubbles at the highest levels of mathematics. There’s a thing called the Kelvin cell. (Proposed by Lord Kelvin in 1887, it’s a 14-sided space-filling polyhedron with six square faces and eight hexagonal faces.)

I got obsessed with the Kelvin cell. I spent night and day, and eventually I found (how to make it from soap bubbles). At the International Congress of Mathematics in 1998 in Berlin, I showed it to 900 mathematicians. In more than 100 years (since Kelvin imagined it), nobody had ever seen one or tried to make one. I made 14 bubbles positioned exactly the right way, and then with a straw inside, I made a bubble that was being pressed by those 14, into that shape.

My goal is to make the Weaire-Phelan structure (a complex structure, representing an idealized foam of equal-sized bubbles, developed through computer simulations in 1993). Kelvin has been dethroned. During the Beijing Olympics when they built the Water Cube (aquatics centre), it was based on the Weaire-Phelan structure. With bubbles, I have to build it within the time limit — as long as it takes for the first bubble to break.

FP: For your shows at Winnipeg’s Kidsfest, you’re teaming with some old friends: vaudeville clown Hacki Ginda from Germany — whom you’ve known since the 1970s — his adult son Moeppi, and guitarist John Olufs from Seattle. You’re calling the show Order & Chaos. What’s it going to be like?

TN: I’m trying to present a science-educational bubble show — the thing I do at science shows. Hacki and his son will help me, in the way that clowns help people. It’s madness. Some parts (of the clowns’ antics) I’ve seen before, but there’s also improvising. Hacki is the personification of chaos. I am all about order. It really will be a struggle.

alison.mayes@freepress.mb.ca

The 29th annual Kidsfest runs today through Sunday, rain or shine, at a fenced site at The Forks.

Performers include Ontario music duo Splash’N Boots, local legend Fred Penner and his Cats’ Meow Band, Quebec folk band Mauvais Sort, Cree hoop dancer Dallas Arcand, Inuit storyteller Michael Kusugak, Calgary’s High Strung Aerial Dance and local singer/drummer Mr. Mark.

There’s also Bronkar Lee, a Californian who combines body percussion, drumming and beatboxing with juggling, and Mermaid Theatre’s acclaimed blacklight puppet show The Very Hungry Caterpillar and Other Eric Carle Favourites

Winnipeg’s fest offers more hands-on activities than any other Canadian children’s festival. Kids can make many different crafts, play with clay, try a classic toy with the Etch-A-Sketch Guy, join in an archeological dig, go critter-dipping or visit the Artists & Audiences — Bridging the Gap venue to try skills such as trapeze, drumming and hoop dancing.

All shows and activities are included in the ticket price. Children under two attend for free. Kids under 12 only need to pay once for the entire festival, provided they keep their wristbands on (wristbands can be exchanged for fresh ones daily).

Advance tickets are $12 ($40 for a family pack of four), available through Sunday at Winnipeg Safeway and Assiniboine Credit Union locations. Tickets at the gate are $14 ($48 for a family pack of four).

The free Kidstock concert, which ends with fireworks, is Saturday from 5 p.m. to 10 p.m. on the Scotiabank Stage. Kidstock performers include Mauvais Sort, Jake Chenier and Rocki Rolletti & the Junior Noodle Wave Band.

For more information, visit www.kidsfest.ca, call 958-4730 or pick up a printed program onsite.