“Wake up, Sleepyheads!” the children proclaimed in unison at the start of the performance of Bubble Time Friday in the Dvorak Concert Hall in the Doudna Fine Arts Center.

Performer Casey Carle said this was a truly unique reaction to the opening of the show he performs with Doug Rougeux, the other half of Bubble Time.

“We were a little concerned at the top, just a little bit, when the kids were screaming for us to wake up. We’ve never experienced that before, and we couldn’t even hear our own musical cues,” Carle said.

He said the reactions from the children surprised them, but they just stuck to the script and the rest was like riding a bicycle.

“At that moment it was like this isn’t going to be the show we planned, but we stuck to our guns and (in the end) we did the show we planned,” Carle said.

Carle said the present act developed from years of performing as “bubble artist,” dating back to the ’80s, when he said there were only about six bubble art performers in the world.

Carle said the Bubble Time act is a unique bubble show because they incorporate conflict, slap-stick comedy and music to produce a “circus.”

Marshall Lassak, an audience member, said his family’s favorite part was being able to see large bubbles.

Lassak brought his children Haylee and Tanner to the performance.

The bigger bubbles were made with the use of body-mounted fans and plastic rings to help Carle and Rougeux create human-sized bubbles.

Carle said seeing the reactions from the grandparents’ faces was his favorite.

“I was looking out there and grandparents were acting like kids,” Carle said.

He said all the audiences are suppose to look like this one because this show has been targeted to all ages.

Carle said they try and incorporate a lot of objects to blow bubbles with in their show and have to sometimes modify these items.

“That’s one of the things about bubble performance, there isn’t stuff out there you can necessarily just go out there and get,” Carle said. “And if there is you usually have to adapt it to be better than what it needed to be to sell it on a toy market.”

They both said trips to the store are not what they used to be.

“There have been many moments in my life when I wander through a store and I try to flip the switch in my brain,” Rougeux said. “What would happen if that went into the soap?”

Carle said he now looks a things differently when he is in stores.

“When you look at those expanding spheres, those were a science toy,” he said. “No one in the world had used for bubbling prior to our work… It was one of those things that I saw and instantly knew its potential was there.”

Carle also said they have to consider the wind movement around the stage for their performances.

There was more breeze downstage than he would have liked, but he said it turned out to cause him no problems in the end.

“With a 100 degrees during the day, we thought the air conditioning would need to be cranked up and would be pushing our bubbles all over the place,” Rougeux said.

He said the Doudna Fine Arts Center staff used variable speed air conditioning to solve this problem.

Dwight Vaught, director of the Doudna Fine Arts Center, said there is a committee that suggested there be a fun family show for the summer, so he mentioned this act because he has worked with Bubble Time’s agent when booking other acts.

Rougeux said it takes around 90 minutes to clean up after a show.

“This place has been great providing us with workers, but we do ask for a crew wherever we go,” Rougeux said. “We never know what we are going to get, but when we came here we got excellent help from Dwight and Mike and everybody in the whole crew here.”

Marcus Smith can be reached at 581-2812 or masmith6@eiu.edu.