Come and watch a man blow himself up onstage.
He's Fred Garbo, of the Fred Garbo Inflatable Theatre Company, and he made that joke up himself.
"I don't use it on airplanes," he said, from his home in Maine. Garbo comes to Ogden a week from tonight for a performance at Peery's Egyptian Theater.
"I also tell people they can come and enjoy inflation," said Garbo, who discovered his art form as he prepared to parachute for some recreational skydiving.
"I noticed the nylon parachute was strong and colorful, and I had been traveling (as a juggler) with a plywood set piece that the airlines used to damage every time I traveled to a show. My first idea was to make that same set piece, inflatable, out of parachute material. It could fit in a suitcase, and I could stop paying extra to arrive without a working set."
But that was just the beginning. Garbo discovered he could have a suit made for himself that would inflate, leaving only his head, hands and feet exposed. Then he realized he could create blocks and other 3-D shapes, inflatable, that could be manipulated by an unseen person inside.
"If I hide myself doing a cartwheel, the audience gets lost in the fact that they can't tell how I am performing it," Garbo said. "It's quite mystifying, and it works on young and old."
And on people of any nation. Since there's no language spoken, there's no language barrier, and Garbo has traveled the globe with all his sets and props stuffed in a few trunks. He also travels with his stage partner, Chilean ballerina Daielma Santos.
"People always ask me if we are a couple, so I ask them 'A couple of what?' "Garbo said.
They are a couple only onstage, he clarified.
People also ask if Garbo can see out when he's encased in one of his cubes or other shapes. The answer is, he can see a few inches to spot the spike marks -- pieces of tape he puts on the stage to help him with choreography. But he has one move that requires him to tumble across stage, blind, to a sign with his name on it.
So he decided to make it an audio cue. He puts the sign against a speaker.
"I've had stagehands move my speaker, which causes some problems," he said. "I always have to explain to them why I need it right against the speakers."
Some of the pieces within the performance are designed to be beautiful, and others are designed "just for yuks," he said.
"It's a visual delight that works for audiences 10 to 110," he said. "People assume it's a children's show, but I played purely to adults for years. It's something unique and colorful, and quite beautiful."
There's one thing he will not explain: How each piece inflates.
"They all work differently, but I don't talk about it," Garbo said. "There have got to be some secrets, or it isn't 'magic.' "
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