Guinness world record holder Fan Yang presents his amazing bubble show during the Gazillion Bubble Show to a packed Jorgensen Center for the Performing Arts on Sunday afternoon. (Amar Batra/The Daily Campus)
As the sun began to set on a pleasant Sunday afternoon, parents, grandparents and children of all ages poured into the Jorgenson Center for the Performing Arts to see a performance unlike any at Jorgensen before: Guinness World Record holder and bubble art performer Deni Yang, son of legendary bubble art performer Fan Yang.
The stage was set with large plastic willow trees, a few reservoirs full of bubble soap, fog machines and several light installations pointing to a bowl on a stand in the center of the stage. As the show commenced, loud house music and prompts on dual projectors encouraged the audience to make some noise.
Yang took the stage with great energy and immediately began to fill the stage with bubbles by performing elaborate bubble tricks using just his hands, a few wands and a bowl of bubble soap. Yang blew multiple bubbles inside much larger suspended bubbles, inflated and deflated huge bubbles using just his hands, all with masterful precision and movement.
Yang then welcomed the crowd and began to recall his story of how he became a bubble artist. “Every day, I get to make people happy with my bubbles and today I would like to make you happy too,” Yang said to the audience.
The show also consisted of many tricks that involved volunteers from the audience. Yang took two kids at a time, putting them inside increasingly larger bubbles. THe largest bubble ultimately contained six children inside.
One of the highlights of the show was a scene from Deni’s personal life. Deni was not able to visit his niece in Hawaii due to all his traveling. He took a little girl from the audience and recalled the scene of his niece not being able to see snow, living in Hawaii. Deni then used the magic of his bubbles to recreate the sensation of falling snow by filling the entire theatre with flying bubbles with the house lights off only to reveal them to delight the entire crowd.
All the kids that were brave enough to go on stage were given bubble-blowing prizes from Yang for their help with the show.
Yang then proceeded with the core of his show, which included a cart of bubble blowing tools that appeared to be of custom design. The cart contained plenty of bubble fluid, various reservoirs of soap, clear pipes of different lengths and diameters, bubble wands, and a machine that filed the pipes with fog machine smoke when a pipe was inserted into it. This allowed Yang to blow smoke-filled bubbles, even inside other bubbles, without inhaling any vapor.
Yang blew smoke bubbles inside larger bubbles and then manipulated the air within them to produce what looked like planetary orbit, volcanoes, spinning wheels and even, some how, square bubbles.
“The bubbles were crazy!” Samantha Keller, an eight-year-old girl in attendance, said.
A huge laser light show finale finished off the show as the room was filled with smog, bubbles and a dazzling array of lights from the laser system, imitating the surface of the ocean and the bubbles beneath it at first to climaxing into a visually stunning, three dimensional experience.
“The finale was incredible, I have never seen any thing like it in my whole life. I think everyone had lots of fun,” Chris Summers, an attending parent, said.
To see where The Gazillion Bubbles Show will be headed next and other tour information you can go to www.gazillionbubbleshow.com.
Dan Wood is a staff writer for The Daily Campus. He can be reached via email at daniel.wood@uconn.edu.