A Cyclist's Life in Tenerife (Canary Islands)

Вячеслав Иванович Полунин (Vyacheslav Ivanovich Polunin ) has been called «The World’s Greatest Clown». I went and saw him in Sydney in the year 2000. It was an enlightening, inspirational and wondrous experience.

Slava’s Snowshow: 

As to whether he would describe himself, as others have, as an “existential clown”, his reply is typically Zen. “I would agree with that as well. Every object can have a different meaning. A maple leaf is a symbol of Canada — yet for a street cleaner it is garbage, for a child it’s a toy, for a train conductor it could be a hazard. But it’s just a maple leaf. In my show I try to present the maple leaf in such a way that each person can see each thing in it.”

“The more you want to be an anarchist, the more you have to know. There must be balance,” Slava explains, teetering on an imaginary tightrope to illustrate his point. “The more you reach out with one hand, the more the other must reach, or you fall over. So the more I want to be free, the more I have to learn.”

Slava’s biography

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