The internationally acclaimed Snowshow by Slava Polunin has again visited Manchester recently. Unfortunately, as I noticed from the reviews, very little seems to be known about Slava, despite his world-wide fame and unquestionable talent. James Ellaby writing for Entertainment Manchester tries to get to the core of the performance, giving a notice to surrealist and circusesque features. Liz Connolly on The MEN’s Urban Life is more on the “adult” side of the fence, which sees its spectators recommending the show primarily for kids. The two huge problems we are to find here is that, first, Polunin is Russian by origin, but in matters of his art he is the citizen of the world. To describe the Snowshow as ‘Russian surrealism‘ (Ellaby), even partly, is to understate the whole artistic baggage of Polunin, and indeed, of surrealism. And to state that the kids were mesmerised and adults were not is, alas, to prove that ‘your childhood is in the dim and distant past and pragmatism has gripped your soul forever‘ (Connolly). I dare say that Polunin’s show is aimed primarily at adults: a clown is a child, and the child is the one who readily empathises with the clown. The task is to bring an adult to their childhood past, but instead of having the older people to empathise with the performance, the aim is, perhaps, to have them empathise with themselves.
Anyway, back in 2003 when I was engaged as a Russian-to-English translator for The Herald of Europe, the very first text I had to translate was a very long interview with Slava, following the 2001 Theatre Olympics in Moscow. By the time the first edition of The Herald of Europe saw the light of this world in 2004, the article was perhaps quite outdated and somewhat heavy-weight, so it was never published. Thanks to online publishing, though, you can now read it in full, either here, in a series of blog posts with illustrations and YouTube extracts.
And one note on the title of the show, which might just explain a few things. In Russian, it is called ‘сНежное шоу‘, playing on the similarity of the Russian words ‘снежный‘ (snezhny – snowy) and ‘нежный‘ (nezhny – tender). By capitalising the ‘N’, Polunin gives a little hint to the story: on the outer side, it is about snow; on the inside, it explores the tenderness. Unfortunately, this is the kind of a linguistic nuance that inevitably gets lost, and hence the spectators notice the visible snow, but only intuitively guess about the invisible tenderness.
As for myself, I have grown up on Polunin’s clown shows, and there were quite a few really famous ones that he produced. The one turn that he referenced in his interview was called Blue Canari. You can read the English text and watch the Polunin’s theatre group performance below.
Slava Polunin, Natalia Kazmina: A Monologue of the Clown, or A Pie of Ten Layers
Context
Having left for London from Leningrad, he was out of the Russian cultural context for nearly ten years. Once back, he smashed our straight rows and, delivering chaos to the sober landscape of the theatrical Olympus, he opened our eyes on ourselves. After his tender “sNow Show”, after his street theatre performances during the Theatrical Olympics it became clear – we had a lack of him. We had a lack of this man-clown and a festival-man. We laughed and were not afraid to see, how constrained and set apart, false and envious, mean and timid we were. We realized, how difficult it could be to open your heart to a spectator, or a reader, or a friend, or even to the one you love. Some have a fear that people will not understand them, others are afraid they will be mocked, and some just have nothing to say. Yet he fears nothing. He walks into the crowd and cuts it through, like a breakwater. And what is important, he does not dissolve in the crowd. “I have made an attempt to bring to Moscow everything that had driven me mad earlier”, – he said at the press conference. – “I wanted to shift your appreciation of the theatre to a different path. I wanted to broaden your horizon”. You bet he did! We saw that the clownery, these fantastic mimes, rope- and stilt-walkers, people in masks, the buffoons and street musicians are all a completely forgotten part of our culture. It is a lost joy that Polunin wants to revive. He feels dull when enjoying alone.
Translated from Russian by Julia Shuvalova.