Slava's Snowshow

SLAVA’S SNOWSHOW
UCLA Royce Hall, December 14, 2006, 8pm

Production photos courtesy UCLA Live.

This was perhaps one of the most random, bizarre and ridiculously exhilarating things that I have seen in awhile. The show was created by Slava, who at one time worked with Cirque du Soleil and had an act in their show, Alegria. Slava’s Snowshow is a 90 minute show filled with the kind of clown acts you’d see with a Cirque show: not quite the squishy red-nosed American clowns, but somewhat more absurdist performance art type things. Like how he hangs a coat on a coat hanger, then expertly manipulates it into behaving like a lover in an embrace – just by sticking his arm into one of the coat jackets. Or, in another piece, jumping onto a red, metal frame bed, spreading a white sheet on a pole, then surrealistically sailing across the stage on his make shift sailboat. The random parts come when, as in once instance, one of the seven clown performers emerges through the back wall of the stage – pushing the panels apart – rolling inside of a giant plastic ball.

The visual impact of the show is stunning. It is set against a dark blue background of silver cut-out stars, a moon, and floppy panels (they look like those egg-crate things you put on your bed, but painted blue and hung vertically) that move back and forth to the clowns’ whims. The acts find fun and kooky ways to play with the set.

Then, the clowns come into the audience. The send the audience to intermission – a moment just as randomly placed as everything else in the show – by sending a giant web of cotton webbing into the audience. You know how for Halloween you make spider webs by ripping apart cotton balls? This was one enormous bit of that stuff, it came out of the flies, then spread over the heads of the entire audience: the clowns made us pass it over our heads between audience members. It gets stuck in your hair, spread over the seats – all over the place. And then during the intermission, the clowns came into the audience: they clambered over people and seats, sprayed and dumped water bottles, stole purses and caused general mayhem.

And then the finale. Oh my, the finale. With the bombastic final movement to Karl Orff’s Carmina Burana playing in the background, the set lifted away to a blinding rack of lights, then fog and confetti dumped from the flies and suddenly the auditorium was assaulted with a blizzard of gargantuan proportions (see that photo above). It was totally exhilarating. And it was especially fascinating, sitting towards the back of the theatre as I was, to see this enormous cloud of smoke and confetti rolling up the length of the theatre towards me, then entirely consume me. Oh boy am I a sucker for spectacle.

We were sent off into the night with a giant bouncy ball party. Enormous earth balls bounced off the stage and from the side balconies, and the audience basically stayed around and played beach ball with them for a good 30 minutes afterwards. Adults became children. And the way the balls were just ever so slightly filled with air, the surreally floated and bounced their ways through the auditorium.

Random? Oh yes. Fun? Oh HELL yes.

From the camera phone: the madness at the finale in Royce Hall.