"Slava's Snowshow" feels like a dream — and occasionally a nightmare. Its surreal scenarios play out one after another on a stage set with seemingly oversized, fluffy blankets that give the audience a sense of being tucked inside a child's bed. There's no real narrative — but as in dreams, there doesn't need to be. It's enough to simply sit back and enjoy the ride.
"Slava's Snowshow" is as tough to categorize as its creator, the 64-year-old Russian performance artist Vyacheslav Ivanovich "Slava" Polunin, who has achieved international fame in the realms of pantomime, clowning, large-scale spectacle, street theater and beyond.
At the age of 18, Polunin founded a theater company in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) that he named Litsedeyi (Russian for "mummers" or, literally, "people who make faces"), which produced several renowned works — including "Dreamers," "Eccentrics in the Attic" and "From the Life of Insects" — before he disbanded it in 1988.