By Jerry Tallmer
27 Oct 2004

Slava Polunin in Slava's Snowshow

Slava’s Snowshow is a magical theatrical evening that mixes hilarity, fantasy, spectacle and unexpected poignancy

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It’s snowing at the Union Square Theatre. The “snow” inundates the audience on the heels of a balloon barrage. It’s the climax of a clown troupe’s silent expression of the mysteries of life in terms of sails, sharks, smoke, underwater angels, a vast gauzy spider web, Slava Polunin’s vivid egg-yellow bathrobe and whatever else comes along at any particular performance.

“It’s full-time improvisation, and often we don’t know as we get to the theatre who will play which role. That’s the modus operandi,” said Polunin, the creator and ringmaster of Slava’s Snowshow, over the phone from his house — which is also a sort of clown laboratory — outside Paris.

He was speaking in Russian. A translator put it into English. And when she was passing along his summation of what he does as “a combination of metaphysics, tragedy and comedy,” he cut in with: “ . . . and poetry.”

It had all begun when a ten-year-old in the village of Novosil, 60 kilometers from Orel, was suddenly transfixed by coming across, on television, Charlie Chaplin in "The Kid," a 1921 silent masterpiece. “My mother came into the room and switched it off. I cried till morning.” At 17 he did some switching of his own — from engineering school to mime school. He connects his craft, or art, to everything from ancient Slavic skomorokhi — minstrels, jesters, dancers, songsters, animal trainers — to the avant-garde thrust of Artaud, Tina Bausch, Robert Wilson.

Then there’s Samuel Beckett. Slava’s Snowshow has a certain clear relationship to Waiting for Godot, beginning with the sad-eyed clown (i.e., Slava) who fiddles with a noose, loops it around his neck, then yanks clown No. 2 in from the wings on the same rope.

“Well,” said Slava, “I adore Beckett. However, I think he is mistaken. I love his world, but I do not subscribe to his philosophy. In fact, a lot of my shows are originally conceived as counter-Beckett. His philosophy is that of impasse; mine is joy and happiness — even if tragedy is also a crucial element.”

In the days just after 9/11, there was much love and agony expressed in Union Square, a pebble’s throw from the Union Square Theatre. Slava knows about that kind of agony. “I performed in Kiev at the moment of Chernobyl in 1986. All the theatres were abandoned, but I kept on playing.” He went to Moscow to perform immediately after Chechen rebels seized the Dubrovka Theatre in which 129 people would end up dead. And he played outside the Berlin Wall when the wall came down.

Hope is all, with or without words.