Cosmopolitan Clowning -- Slava Polunin's Show Draws Inspiration From Great Comic Artists Around The World
------------------------------- "Slava's Snowshow" It plays Tuesday through Feb. 14 at the Moore Theatre, Seattle, 8 p.m. Tuesday-Friday, 5 and 9 p.m. Saturday, 3 and 7 p.m. Sunday ($20-35; 206-292-ARTS). -------------------------------
In Russia, clowns are not quite kings. But the traditions of popular Russian circus and cabaret clowning are long and illustrious.
Those traditions, however, are not ones Slava Polunin points to as primary artistic influences. Polunin is the creator and chief performer in "Slava's Snowshow," a much-acclaimed evening of highly visual theatrical high jinks that won raves in London and Toronto, and makes its Northwest debut at the Moore Theatre next week.
Though its 48-year-old star was born in Russia (in the small southern village of Orel), and has gained immense popularity in his homeland through frequent TV and stage appearances, his chief inspirations veer far from the Moscow Circus.
The list is topped by silent film greats Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, French mime guru Marcel Marceau and absurdist Irish playwright Samuel Beckett, for starters.
"I have no relation to Russian circus whatsoever," Polunin said through a translator, by phone from London. "I probably took something from the Russian style, but I think my work is much more connected to the changing way of circus around the world. A new circus is coming into being, and I am part of it."
The shift was inevitable to Polunin, who's amassed a large
private archive of "clownabilia" - (including many silent comedy films), and organized such alternative clowning extravaganzas as the Peace Caravan (which crossed Europe in 1989).
"The older circus lost its soul, its poetry. So I took the old trappings off clowning, pared down my performance to make it more minimal, and mixed into it such things as contemporary culture, modern technology, philosophy, surrealism and the aesthetic of Beckett, Artaud and Kafka."
In case this all sounds too heady, "Slava's Snowshow" has been received as an accessibly joyful, inventive (yet low-budget) spectacle, not an arcane treatise.
Polunin's central persona in the four-actor piece is a white-faced, Pierrot-like character who sports furry red slippers and bears the name Yellow. Among his adventures are a seafaring journey on a bed, a meeting with an angel on stilts, a brush with suicide and love, and the sudden onslaught of a blizzard.
Yellow comes through as a kind of enlightened fool, in the great melancholic-comic tradition of Chaplin's Little Tramp, and Marceau's Bip.
His creator calls him "a very thoughtful person trying to understand the world around him, a small being struggling with what is wrong."
"Slava's Snowshow" recently won a prestigious Olivier Award for its London run. And it did well in Denver and Washington, D.C., gigs, as well as in Canada.
While in Seattle, Polunin (who currently lives in London) hopes to hone his evolving show for its upcoming New York debut.
The studious artist already has a lot of experience gauging American audiences, thanks to a two-year touring stint with Cirque du Soleil.
"Our ideas are very, very similar," he says of that innovative, Quebec-based circus outfit. "What I've done with clowning is very much like what Cirque does with circus."
Polunin says American patrons have a distinctive reaction to his style of illusionistic, poetic, largely non-verbal foolery. "The difference is in their concentration.
"Americans have been brought up on action films and don't pay much attention to details. But I'm finding a rhythm and language to communicate with them, on their own terms."
What he hopes we comprehend is the essential whimsical, tragicomic view of life that great clowns have expressed (in many ways) for ages.
"Like all my shows, this one is a tragicomedy," Polunin says. "Its Russian title is `Snezhnost' - a word that means tenderness with snow, the cold with the warmth."