BRATTLEBORO — Fifteen years ago, Brattleboro Museum and Art Center Director Danny Lichtenfeld was looking for a way to attract young people when he saw his first-grade son watch a YouTube video of dominoes snaking, spiraling and falling spectacularly to pieces.
“I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be cool to do that here,’” Lichtenfeld recalled over the weekend. “It seemed like a fun and creative thing to draw more kids and families.”
Lichtenfeld didn’t foresee the chain reaction that would turn that spark of inspiration into Sunday’s 15th annual Domino Toppling Extravaganza — celebrated by a standing-room-only crowd, social media influencers and millions of their followers as the longest-running such event in the world.
It all started in 2008, when Lichtenfeld hired the makers of his son’s video, then-twentysomething brothers Mike and Steve Perrucci of Pennsylvania, to create a mosaic of cascading dominoes on the museum’s ceramic tile floor.
The duo came back for several years before giving way to a new generation of creators: Shane O’Brien of New Jersey, who began in 2011; Nathan Heck of North Carolina and Chris Wright of Massachusetts, who entered in 2013; and fellow New Englander Lily Hevesh, who joined in 2014.
The latter four keep returning for their annual floor show. Heck, who began at age 12 and now is 21, remembers traveling in a blizzard before the event was moved from February to October.
“It didn’t matter that it was a 12-hour drive — I was going to make it no matter what,” the college student recalled. “Within the domino community, this is iconic.”
Wright, who started at 15 and now is 24, took time from his engineering job over the weekend to set up 2,500 dominoes in the shape of SpongeBob SquarePants, configured to switch on a bubble machine.
“It’s a great way to be able to test out new ideas,” Wright said as he worked around a real pineapple. “I jump at any excuse or reason to keep coming back.”
Hevesh, the sole young woman of the group, has turned her hobby into a career. The 24-year-old, who participated in her first Brattleboro show at 15, now has her own YouTube channel with nearly 4 million subscribers and 1.5 billion views.
Hevesh’s most recent museum post has been watched almost 14 million times.
Alas, followers won’t find Hevesh, Heck and Wright’s 2014 appearance on NBC’s Today show because of copyright issues. But they can see clips from “Collateral Beauty,” a 2016 Will Smith film for which Hevesh and friends created a series of eye-popping domino courses, as well as commissions for Jimmy Fallon and the Tonight Show, James Corden and the Late Late Show, and Saturday Night Live.
Hevesh has partnered with toy giant Spin Master to release her own line of dominoes. She’s also the subject of a Discovery+ documentary, “Lily Topples the World,” that chronicles how she was abandoned as a newborn in China, was adopted by a New Hampshire family and has ascended into what The Washington Post calls “the brightest star in the domino universe.”
Even with all that, Hevesh won’t drop the Brattleboro event from her busy schedule.
“This is unique because we get to do anything we want, and this is one of the riskiest because we’re making it up on the spot,” she said as she rebuilt a spiral that had spun out prematurely just hours before its debut. “We don’t have a lot of time to test everything. We just fill the floor.”
With O’Brien unable to attend this year, Hevesh and friends sought help from Brady Dolan, an 18-year-old University of Michigan student they met five years ago when creating a record-breaking 250,000-domino course in Detroit.
After a full weekend of setup, they stood back Sunday evening as spectators tiptoed around the perimeter to witness the work of three long days collapse in three short minutes.
Watch the event’s Facebook live stream and you’ll see 25,631 dominoes tumbling toward a “15” finale sculpture. After, the crowd helped pick everything up as the crew anticipated next year’s Sweet 16.
“I just want to show people how they can get into dominoes — the artistic perspective, the whole educational aspect …” Hevesh said. “There’s still a lot more that can be done.”
