Thursday, July 26, 2007

SLAVA POLUNIN: Early Slava






A young Slava, early in his career.

4 comments:

justlarry said...

Isn't the other clown in the last clip, Sergey Shashelev(sp?)?

Anonymous said...

The other clown is Leonis Leikin, who is in "O" now.

Adam

Anonymous said...

Also, Slava's name is listed as Viacheslav, which I've never seen before. And it's Leonid, not Leonis.

Adam

Anonymous said...

The middle clip is more of the Licedi (not sure of spelling) troupe, who were (and are) students of Slava's.
There has just been a performance by members of the troupe at the Hackney Empire theatre in London. Some critics liked it; some didn't. The timing suggests it's going to The Edinburgh Festival.

It was at Hackney Empire that I first saw Snow Show. And Slava came to see us at The Clowns' Gallery, which was then just behind the Empire. At that time, he spoke French more easily than he did English. Thus I had to translate for some of my Clowns International colleagues. Not that I'm at all fluent. (Let's face it, I'm over 50 years old, and I'm still working on English!)

A few years after that Snow Show was in London shortly before Soleil's Alegria production. The snowstorm is in both. Some critics accused Slava of "ripping off" the gag from Soleil. Clearly they didn't bother to read the production credits for Alegria. Slava created the comedy for that show.

John.