A master of all things impossible

An odd little man in an old-fashioned frock coat shuffles onstage at the Skirball Cultural Center.

Rowdy grade-schoolers on a field trip have been waiting for the show to start, heady with this break in their routine. The man laboriously makes his way to a small table and lights two candles while emitting small hisses, grunts and whispers that strangely mirror the noise of the audience.

The kids fall silent, intrigued. Tomas Kubinek, clown extraordinaire from Canada, turns to face them. His shoes are too big, his trousers too short. He has a sharp nose, a broad forehead and flyaway hair braided in back and sticking out in peaks over his head and ears. Somehow, one of his hands has disappeared up his capacious sleeve.

Recovering it, he swirls his hair on top of his head and an egg pops out of his mouth. Then another, and another.

Before he is done with this weekday morning performance, Kubinek will have switched his arm for his leg, imitated a gramophone, donned a multi-legged “continuous footwalking machine” for a whirligig “Dance for Six Shoes” and balanced a glass of wine on his head while somersaulting. Without spilling a drop. While playing the ukulele and whistling “It’s a Sin to Tell a Lie.”

Kubinek will perform again in “The Return of Professor Kubinek: Certified Lunatic and Master of the Impossible,” at Caltech’s Beckman Auditorium in Pasadena on Saturday. With a nod to adults in the audience and some changes in content, this family show will skew a little older than his grade-school program.

“This is kind of my traveling little island,” Kubinek, 39, said of his internationally touring solo show. “I keep building huts on it and changing the landscape.”

Over a soup-and-salad lunch following his Skirball appearance last month, Kubinek, slim and fine-boned, with a mild blue-eyed gaze, remarked on the difference between a mixed-age audience and one made up of kids only.

“Young audiences, they have a very big energy,” he said. “You have to meet it, or they will lead.” Not that he ever dumbs down his show for kids, he added, even though his influences -- “New Vaudeville” clowning, old-time music hall, silent movies, circus acrobatics and cabaret -- and his offbeat references to physics, atomic particles, Joseph Campbell and Pavlov are far from childish.

“That would be boring for me and it wouldn’t respect their humanity and spark. Children get way more than we think and they’re very curious, so even words or concepts they don’t understand still kind of wash over them.”

Born in Prague and raised in Canada, where his family sought refuge after the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, the soft-spoken Kubinek fell in love with the circus and performing when he was 5, although there were no theater artists in his family.

“There’s a pretty strong tradition of Czech puppetry, mime and clowning. I think I’ve carried it genetically or something.”

By age 11, Kubinek, already an experienced magician and clown, had his first paying gig. Graduating from high school at age 16, he dropped out of college at 17 to perform full-time.

Since then, Kubinek has received many international awards, including the Moers Comedy Prize from Germany’s International Comedy Arts Festival and the Samuel Beckett Theatre Award at Ireland’s Dublin Theatre Festival.

His theater of the absurd, based on optical illusions, perception-bending and physical humor, often incorporates gadgets of his own design.

If a venue can support his flying apparatus, he soars across the stage wearing canvas wings based on early experiments in aviation; his contraption with spokes and shoes, with which he walks and waltzes across the stage, was inspired by animation effects.

“I’m really into finding stuff that is visually like a surreal suspension of gravity, movement, time, whatever,” Kubinek said.

As for his wine glass-balancing, somersault act, it’s an old bar stunt he learned in England. The ukulele-playing and whistling are Kubinek’s own embellishments.

“I realized I wasn’t using my hands or my mouth and I thought, ‘What can I add in here to make it even more complex?’ I can do it blindfolded too, though it’s a little overkill,” he added.

And, yes, that really is wine that he downs in the tricky, no-hands finale.

“So, I always try to get a good one with a nice label.”

As for his unearthly, wispy hair and its bizarre peaks, that’s just an accident of nature, Kubinek said. He discovered its gravity-defying properties when he was old enough to disregard parental strictures against long hair.

“I vowed that when I got older I would just let my hair grow. Then I found that it would kind of move around on its own. It’s kind of like yak hair,” he said wryly, “so it’s been a big attribute.”

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Tomas Kubinek

Where: Caltech, Beckman Auditorium, 332 S. Michigan Ave., Pasadena

When: 2 p.m. Saturday

Price: $7 to $12

Info: (626) 395-4652, (888) 222-5832; https://events.caltech.edu