Published in Crossfire, Issue 13, 2003
A cloaked man smears blue liquid all over his hands, makes an ‘o’ shape with his fingers, and blows. The rows of people before him are silent as a bubble emerges, glistening and swirling with colour. The man lets the bubble rest in his left hand, while with his right hand he sucks smoke into his mouth from a pipe. He takes a straw and ever so gently blows the smoke into the bubble. With a tiny breath he sets the bubble free of his hands. Everyone stares as the bubble containing its nebulous ball of smoke slowly floats to the ceiling, then suddenly bursts. The audience exhales. The man begins work on a new bubble.
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For several years now, Conan O’Brien has been enchanting audiences worldwide as his alter-ego, Conan the Bubbleman. Whether he is projecting psychedelic, swirling bubble colours onto the dancing hordes at a rave, or keeping a sell-out audience on the edge of its seat at his stage show, ‘Ephemera’, Conan’s ability to manipulating his unique and unpredictable medium is mesmerizing. A trained physicist and seasoned traveler, the self-proclaimed ‘alchemist of liquid and light’ is most comfortable working in the spaces where art and science merge into magic.
We are sitting in Brunswick’s Kaleidoscope Café. Part of the wall behind Conan’s slight frame is covered with a mandala-like circle of colour fragments. The rest is a sea of canvases and drawings. None of the chairs in the café seem to match, creating a kind of gentle chaos. It seems a fitting venue in which to interview a bubble artist, however Conan would be more impressed if the café’s name was literal.
‘I was a bit disappointed when I first came in here and there weren’t any actual kaleidoscopes,’ he says. ‘I might ask if they want me to make them one.’
Conan sits with his feet on the seat next to him, twirling his red beret between his thumb and forefinger. As he talks he tugs on his wiry orange beard, or puts his finger to his mouth to think. He speaks in a quiet and considered manner; his carefully chosen words and ‘hand wavy science’ are as engaging as his stage performances. It’s been a long journey for the twenty eight year old artist, whose best subjects in school were maths and science. ‘When I was a kid I was good at science so I just went in that direction. I never thought of myself as being very good at art – the only thing I ever failed at school was drama. But I guess I’ve always been fascinated by the little, interesting things there are in the world, like looking at close-ups of insects through microscopes.’
Learning to juggle gave Conan his first taste of performance. ‘Strangely enough it was maths that led me to juggling. I went to a maths conference in Year Twelve and while I was there this mathematician from New Zealand taught me how to juggle. Caught that bug – I was totally hooked on juggling. I ended up spending a lot more time juggling than doing maths while I was there.’
After Year Twelve Conan embarked on a Bachelor of Science degree at the Australian National University in Canberra. During his honours year working with infrared lasers, Conan realized that he lacked the drive necessary for a career in research physics. ‘The honours year was hideously hard work. I found myself doing experiments in a windowless laboratory with all these machines around making continual low-level noise. Nothing that you’d really notice, but it’s there all day, it still frustrates you. I had to wear these goggles all the time to protect my eyes from the lasers I was working with, and they were uncomfortable, and I was working with invisible lasers that I couldn’t even see. It was an interesting project that I was working on but I guess I didn’t enjoy the whole experience. I decided that research wasn’t what I wanted to do with my life.’
In 1999, after completing his degree, Conan swapped his protective goggles for a backpack and set off for Europe. While the solo trek through foreign lands to discover one’s place in the world is a time-honoured tradition, even Conan is surprised at the strange trajectory his life had taken since.
While visiting juggling conventions in Europe Conan became inspired Spanish bubble performer Pep Bou, and the young traveler got to thinking about performing tricks of his own. ‘Seeing as how I was on the other side of the world and I wanted to travel and earn money at the same time, busking on the street was an obvious way of paying my way around Europe,’ he says. Conan began juggling and experimenting with bubble tricks on the streets of Montreux and Avignon, exploring new ideas and building upon his repertoire in each city.
As Conan started to hone his skills at arts festivals around Europe, the sheer bizarreness of some of the acts he saw further cemented his interest in circus art. He says the Festival International de Theatre de Rue in Aurillac in France left a significant impression.
‘This small, medieval town gets totally overwhelmed with performers and audiences. There are shows on basically every street corner in the middle part of town, all day and most of the night. Everywhere you look there’s crazy, unexpected things happening. Like you’d just be having a coffee somewhere and these people would go past on motorscooters with these big, foam cars built around them and huge, foam puppet-heads over the top. So it looked like this totally unlikely, huge-headed puppet driving around in a little car.’
At the Montreux Jazz Festival, performing against the breathtaking backdrop of Lake Geneva, Conan was inspired to start using music in his shows. In his current show ‘Ephemera’ the sounds of the cello and clarinet mingle and play with the bubbles as they bounce, float and burst: ‘I like instruments that make smooth, liquidy sorts of sounds.’ Last year at the Melbourne Fringe Festival Conan worked with a multitude of musicians, including the talented Mal Webb doing a capella sound effects.
‘He’s one of those people who can play any instrument and do amazing things with his voice,’ says Conan. ‘The ideal musical accompaniment for me is a combination of someone I’ve worked with before and someone I haven’t, or people that I’ve worked with in different places, but haven’t actually played together. There’s unexpected and unexplored territory.’
The unexpected plays an all-important role in Conan’s work. The unpredictable nature of bubbles means that shows can only be loosely structured, with lots of improvisation. ‘It’s never the same show,’ says Conan, ‘it’s always different. Things don’t go how I expect them to, and sometimes they produce this amazing, wonderful thing that I’ve never seen before. I’m always surprised.’
Constant experimentation also helps to keep the shows evolving. Conan gets a kick out of inventing contraptions such as his bubble projector, a modified overhead projector that works by reflecting light off, rather than through, a bubble. ‘That’s one of the fun things about working for yourself as a performer, sometimes you have to design and make something that nobody’s ever thought of before. There’s always new ideas to try out, new props to work on, which is important to keep myself fresh and interested as well as to keep the show changing.’
Conan’s bag of tricks includes bubbles filled with smoke, a giant bubble mirror and electrified bubbles. While he says that some tricks are fairly common, he’s keeping mum about certain techniques. When asked about using static electricity Conan begins to explain, then stops to think. ‘I have to think about giving this one away,’ he says, his finger to his mouth again. ‘I don’t know if anybody’s doing that; I might have to keep it a secret. Something I haven’t figured out yet is when I should be secretive.
‘I was reading last night in the Encyclopedia of Ball Juggling, that there’s a big difference between magicians and jugglers because magicians try to conceal their skills and jugglers flaunt theirs. I don’t know where I fit into that whole thing because sometimes I conceal what I’m doing and sometimes I don’t.’
Slightly uncomfortable with the idea of secrecy, Conan is very openly curious. In the near future he plans to study the role of alchemy in history, and further develop his stage character. ‘The character I use for most of my shows is an alchemist. More and more I’m developing that character to be different from myself. I wish he didn’t have the same name as me so I could make a bit more of a distinction,’ he laughs.
His current fascinations are with the lesser-known fields that alchemists once concerned themselves with, such as astronomy and geometry. He plans to work some new ideas into his shows based on scientific areas. ‘I’m very interested in the aesthetics of geometry,’ he says. Smiling, he adds, ‘I’m yet to see how interested my audience will be in that connection.’
A stage show about tetrahedrons and rhombuses? Surely it would take a genius to make that work? Perhaps, but in the hands of Conan the Bubbleman, it would probably be the most suspenseful, edge-of-your-seat geometry the world has ever seen.
www.conanthebubbleman.com