Slava Polunin

Vyacheslav Ivanovich Polunin, known professionally as Slava Polunin, is a Russian performance artist and clown born on 12 June 1950 in Novosil, Oryol Oblast, Russia. The creator of the stage spectacles Asisyai-revue, Slava's Snowshow, and Diabolo, as well as the founder of the Academy of Fools, Polunin brought his production Slava's Snowshow to Broadway, where it ran from 2008 to 2019.

Polunin's early artistic development was shaped by his school theatre work, where he imitated Charlie Chaplin. His application to the Leningrad Theater Institute was rejected on the grounds of poor pronunciation, and he spent several years at an engineering school before graduating from the Leningrad Institute for Soviet Culture, where he subsequently taught. In 1967 he joined the Mime Studio at Lensovet Palace of Culture, led by Edward Rozinsky, a student of the Leningrad State Institute of Theatre, Music, and Cinema. His first significant recognition came as a leading performer in Rozinsky's production 21 Novels about Funny and Serious.

In 1980, Polunin created his clown character Asisyai, which brought him national fame, and shortly afterward assembled a theater group called Licidei, a term derived from Old Russian meaning street actors. His television debut on the New Year's Eve program Goluboy Ogonyok in 1981 introduced the Asisyai-revue to a broad Soviet audience. The following year, he organized a mime parade in Leningrad involving more than 800 mime artists from across the Soviet Union, a remarkable event given the strict Communist oversight of artistic activity at the time. In 1985, during the World Festival of Youth and Students in Moscow, he led a pantomime master class attended by Western mimes. Two years later, he organized the USSR Festival of Street Theatres, in which more than 200 participants, including critics and children, lived on an uninhabited island in the Gulf of Finland and traveled by boat to Leningrad for performances.

By 1988, Licedei had produced five shows: Dreamers, Eccentrics on the Attic, From the Life of Insects, Asisyai-revue, and Catastrophe. To mark the theater group's twentieth anniversary, the members staged an elaborate theatrical funeral, complete with coffins bearing the names of the participants, a procession through the streets of Leningrad, and the burning of the coffins on the Neva River. The event marked the actual dissolution of the group, in keeping with Konstantin Stanislavski's assertion that any theater perishes after twenty years of existence.

In 1989, Polunin organized The Caravan of Peace, a six-month tour in which mimes from around the world performed in cities across Europe. He subsequently founded the Academy of Fools, a center dedicated to reviving carnival culture in Russia, financing the project with his own funds until the money was exhausted. In 1994, he announced his intention to produce commercially successful shows in the West in order to generate funds to resume the Academy's work. Among the productions that followed was Slava's Snowshow, which went on to be performed in more than 80 countries, and Diabolo, described as a comical meditation on life, death, and the beauty of the universe.

Polunin has received numerous awards, among them the Gold Angle in Scotland, the Gold Nose in Spain, the Triumph award in Russia, and the Laurence Olivier Award for Best Entertainment in 1998. His film work includes appearances in Only in Music Hall (1980), To Kill a Dragon (1988), Clown (2002), on which he also served as producer, Snow Show 3D (2012), and Hoffmaniada (2018), in which he provided a voice role in the Russian animated feature. Polunin has attributed the international reach of his performances to the nature of pantomime itself, noting that working without language allows audiences everywhere to understand the work.