VETERAN clown Slava Polunin is the founder of Slava’s Fools Unlimited, president of the International Academy of Fools, Ambassador of Hans Christian Andersen in Russia and Official Envoy of the Dolphin Embassy. In other words, he is no fool, just like Shakespeare’s fools.
Since 1993, Slava’s SnowShow has won 20 awards while playing 225 cities across 80 countries, re-writing the rules for clowning. No longer are clowns the cloying blockage in the flow of a circus show, filling gaps between more exciting acts. No longer are they strangely frightening or weird.
Still sad faced, painted in the traditional Hobo style, Slava’s clowns are a fusion of Max Wall, Vladimir and Estragon in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting For Godot, the loons of silent cinema’s golden age, the surrealism of Magritte’s paintings and the inventive joy of Aardman Animations’ Wallace & Gromit. You might even find yourself thinking of The Teletubbies. Slava prefers the term “Expressive Idiotism”.
And yet, Slava’s SnowShow is an immersive, whimsical, multi-sensory show like no other, in a league of wonder of its own, charming and enchanting audiences from London to Moscow, Paris to New York, Hong Kong to Los Angeles, and now, at long last, York, where November’s skies heralded its debut visit with the season’s first snowfall on Wednesday morning.
Later, manufactured flakes dusted coats when walking up to the Cumberland street theatre in suitably freezing conditions. Once inside, the stage is bedecked in what appear to be oversized mattresses, arranged as if at Stonehenge, with the stuffing falling out, accompanied by the disorientating pre-show soundscape of jungle wildlife and steam trains. One “mattress” has a hole at the top, adding to the intrigue of what lies in store.
Grown, in Slava’s words, out of dreams, fairytales and magical ritual, images and gesture, play and imagination, Slava’s SnowShow attempts to “wed all the facets of life” while leaving the everyday at the door. To quote in full: this show constructs “a theatre of hopes and dreams, suffused with solitude and longing, premonitions and disillusions…a theatre on the edge between art and life, tragedy and comedy, absurdity and naivety, cruelty and tenderness”.
A figure with a clown’s face atop a fancy-dress chicken’s bright yellow costume (Artem Zhimo) enters carrying a rope, a rope that he will place around his neck. He looks troubled: the tears and the fears of a clown wrapped into one, but thoughts of suicide are cast aside quickly by his playfulness with that rope, although he is always on the edge highlighted in Slava’s quote above. Slava, by the way, originated this role and still plays it on occasion at 75.
Forever blowing bubbles: Slava’s SnowShow, on tour at Grand Opera House, York
Enter Slava’s son Vanya, the first of a multitude of matching clown figures in full-length fleece coats (protecting themselves against the weather in John Motson style). Their dark feet seem to stretch forever, likewise the flaps of their hats, with the wingspan of a plane, forcing them to duck and dive to avoid contact mid-air.
The company of “fools on the loose” is completed by Francesco Bifano, Chris Lynam, Nikolai Terentiev, Yuri Musatov, Aelita West and Bradford West. Together with Zhimo and Polunin Jnr , they move with choreographic precision, yet with room for improvisation too, and they have a wonderful sense of timing, going against comedy’s usual rules for chaos and calamity by slowing everything down for maximum comedic effect.
Zhimo duly excels in a scene where he conducts phone calls on oversized yellow and red telephones that match his attire, another where he repeatedly crashes to the floor from a slanting chair and table, and above all when wrapped in a farewell embrace with a trench-coat on a coat stand at a railway platform. Charlie Chaplin would have loved it..
In this theatre of the absurd, Slava’s Snow Show takes the form of a work of art wherein each scene paints a picture that comes alive, whether for a shark fin to protrude from a misty sea or for clowns and audience alike to become entangled in a huge spider’s web spun the stage across the Stalls in the magical climax to the first half.
Zhimo’s journey becomes ever more prominent in Act Two, whose finale is a blizzard conducted by Zhimo’s chicken figure as if he were The Tempest’s Prospero, leaving the audience knee deep in (paper) snow and wreathed in smiles; their joy heightened by the release of giant balloons to bounce around the auditorium.
It takes four leaf blowers to clear up the mess after each SnowShow, which would make a show in itself, but as the snowfalls continue this week, make sure you find warmth and joy inside the Grand Opera House before clown-time is over. Children and the inner child in adults alike will have a (snow) ball.
Slava’s SnowShow, Grand Opera House, York, tonight and tomorrow, 7.30pm; Saturday, 2.30pm and 7.30pm; Sunday, 2pm and 6pm. Box office: atgtickets.com/york. Age guidance: eight upwards.
