Even when Michael Marlin was a youngster, he had an inventive spirit. One night he taped lit candles to balloons and sent them up to the sky to watch them burst in the night.
Marlin became a well-known juggler, touring the world, working with magicians including David Copperfield, and at shows in Las Vegas, even with a live orchestra playing classical music.
“It was great,” said Marlin.
But then, because he felt something was missing, he left his career, built a tree house in Hawaii where there was no electricity, and began to create a spectacular light show in the dark, called “Luma Art in Darkness,” which has been touring for 20 years.
The production comes to College of Lake County on Wednesday, and uses darkness as the canvas and light as the brush to create a show combining dance, magic, puppetry and gymnastics. The San Francisco Globe called the show “truly magical.” It has been seen in 15 countries and features an award-winning rhythmic gymnast from Canada, and this year, an all-female cast.
Marlin, who still lives in Hawaii, said one night after leaving the juggling world, he had an epiphany. He was watching Halley’s Comet through a telescope and then noticed the Milky Way and everything ” aglow” in the sky.
“And I thought, We’re all drawn to light. Even when we die, we go to the light. We all play with flashlights under the covers at some point. We’re excited the first time we get a sparkler in our hands. When we look into a fire, our brain slips into an alpha state. Light is mesmerizing in that regard.”
He also thought of how a deer freezes in headlights, plants turn their leaves to face the sun and humans gaze in wonder at the aurora borealis.
“And though I didn’t have the faintest clue what I was going to do and how to do it, it was a calling, to produce a show playing with all kind of light in the darkness,” he said.
He began creating mini shows.
“I used things like embers to create pinpoints of light that look like stars. It was incredibly crude. I was using flashlights. But I kept at it, then it became a duet, a trio,” and finally “Luma Art in Darkness,” a production that he said is a “combination of holiday lights, candles on a cake, fireworks, carnival rides, fireflies, screen savers, shooting stars.
“And the thing that really makes this work,” he said is, “you’re not sitting in front of computer monitor watching it — you’re in the dark, seeing all different sources of light. There are people on stage creating a three-dimensional experience. We’re using a myriad of light sources, LEDs, incandescent, fluorescent, along with a variety of physical disciplines — dance, acrobatics, puppetry,” and blending in the “chaos theory and the phenomenon of physics.”
“Now because I’m so compelled to tell the story about light, we’re adding a story to the show, a story of a parent who is trying to put their child to sleep. Every time she turns off the light, the child starts to cry,” he said.
When the child finally dozes off, he dreams of looking for the light in the dark. “The light leads him to the city lights and he loses his connection with the stars on his way home.”
Marlin said people often tell him the show has changed them in some way, or that they remember it years after they saw it and are drawn to come see it again.
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In between productions, Marlin’s inventive spirit remains alive, he said. In fact, he has just invented and patented a toy called Slingerzz. It’s a coil lasso that gives the player the ability to retrieve objects at a distance and do lots of tricks, Marlin said.
He’ll bring this new toy to sell after the light show, hoping to wow the children in all of us, just as he said “Luma Art in Darkness” creates a special memory for children and adults.
Sheryl DeVore is a freelance writer.
Luma Art In Darkness
When: 7:30 p.m. Wednesday
Where: Mainstage Theatre, 19351 Washington St., Grayslake
Tickets: $14-$37
Information: 847-543-2300; www.jlc.clcillinois.edu