Jumbo balloons, rolling bubbles, giant cookie piles and spider's webs are returning to the National Theater. Two years after Slava Polounine and his Litsedei Theater Company brought the inner child out of the adult audience in Taipei with Snow Show, the world famous clown is back, this time with 23 performances at three venues, over the next three weeks.
At the last Snow Show here, Slava started a snowball fight among the audience in the first show. As the word of his exciting interactive performance spread, tickets to later shows were quickly snatched up by a curious audience. The brilliant stage effects also played a part in its popularity. Phone calls asking for Snow Show to perform again inundated the organizer CKS Cultural Center (
Born in a small town in Russia in 1950, Slava resolved to be a clown in childhood. At 17, Slava joined a mime studio in Leningrad, determined to emulate great comedians such as Charlie Chaplin and Marcel Marceau. Slava founded Litsedei in 1979, performing on the streets and soon, with a growing reputation, in major theaters around the world. In 1993, Slava rearranged his brand of alternative clown performances into Snow Show, which became an immediate success.
Snow Show has since attracted over 1 million viewers in more than 50 locations. Excerpts from its repertoire have been part of the Cirque du Soleil's Algeria, where some of Slava's students have been performing.
In Russia, Slava has had his own TV program for the past two decades. As founder and president of the Academy of Fools, Slava organized the first Russian Mime-Parade Theater Festival in 1982, the first Russian Street Festival in 1987, and Crazy Women, the world's first international female clowns' festival in 1993.
At the same time, his Snow Show continues to be popular worldwide. It has won the Olivier award and Time Out Award for best entertainment in London, the Edinburgh Festival's critic award and the Stanislavski award in Moscow.
Slava has described his Snow Show as many different things. "It is a theater that works in an epic-intimate alloy of tragedy and comedy, of absurdity and naivety, of cruelty and gentleness," while it's also "a kind of wedding cavalcade, where I try to marry everyone to everyone."
Snow Show is composed of a string of tragicomic vignettes of solitude, yearning for love and the wish to become a child again. These short episodes are acted out with minimal action while Slava's humor -- which is far from slapstick and closer to Samuel Beckett -- makes the show popular with an adult audience. Slava is always able to highlight the heart-warming aspects of ordinary
situations as poetically melancholic, and that has been the show's greatest appeal to adults. His performances are known to transform audiences into children, who walk out of the theater beaming with smiles.
As Snow Show's surprising stage effects may scare children, the performance admits only audiences above the age of eight.
Slava's Snow Show will begin at the Tainan Municipal Cultural Center (台南市立藝術中心) at 2:30pm today. Performances are at 2:30pm and 7:30pm daily through Sunday. Taipei Performances are at 7:30pm from Sept. 17 through Sept. 21 at the National Theater (國家戲劇院), with matinee shows at 2:30pm on Sept. 17, Sept. 20 and Sept. 21. Taichung performances are at 7:30pm from Sept. 24 through Sept. 28, at Taichung Seaport Art Center (台中縣立港區藝術中心), with matinee shows at 2:30pm on Sept. 24, Sept. 27 and Sept. 28. Tickets range from NT$400 to NT$2000 for Tainan and Taipei shows and from NT$500 to NT$800 for Taichung. All tickets are available at Acer ticketing outlets (http://www.ticket.acer.com). For more information, call CKS Cultural Center at (02) 23431587.
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