After a three-year absence, Slava's Snowshow returns to Paris and takes up residence at the Trianon in Pigalle during the Christmas holidays. This wordless show, performed by clowns who tell the story entirely through gesture and music, offers a poetry accessible to all ages and languages, transforming the entire theater into a playground.
An Italian-style theatre and a staging that envelops the audience
The Trianon, a theater opened in 1894 and rebuilt in 1902, provides its setting of red seats and carved wooden balconies for a show that never stays confined to the stage: children gather confetti from the floor to shower it on the rows below, while clowns regularly descend into the aisles. The performance plays on silences and pauses, and multiplies simple objects that become comical or moving, in a very Chaplin-esque style of slapstick.
The heart of the production lies in a gallery of characters, most notably a small yellow clown with big red feet, joined by other figures, including a green giant. The scenes alternate between bursts of laughter, shivers, and more melancholic moments, supported by meticulous sound design and soundtrack, with the aim of traversing a whole range of emotions rather than simply stringing together a series of gags.
Giant canvas, snowstorm and balloons: the show's "signature"
Created in 1993 in Saint Petersburg by the Russian artist and director Slava Polunin, a proponent of "expressive idiocy," the show has toured the world. It boasts over 12 million spectators, and the director explained in 2022 that the interpretation of the show varies according to age: pure play for children, emotional sharing for adults.
On stage and in the audience, the experience revolves around a few key images: a shower of paper snowflakes, a gigantic spiderweb that slides from the stage and eventually engulfs the audience, then a climactic snowstorm that literally engulfs the theater. To come back down to earth, the spectators are then invited to play with enormous multicolored balloons, a final plunge into childlike joy. Slava's Snowshow runs at the Trianon until January 11, 2026, before continuing in Lausanne at the Théâtre Beaulieu from January 14 to 18, with ticket prices ranging from 35 to 94 euros depending on the day and seating category.
