For a couple of years in the mid-1990s, Polunin folded parts of Slava's Snowshow into Cirque du Soleil's Alegría; ''I was doing modern clown art, the same as Cirque,'' he says.

But for more than a decade, Slava's Snowshow (which won London's Olivier Award as Best Entertainment in 1998) has been touring the world as an independent production with an ever-changing cast. It isn't that Polunin's actor-clowns come and go. He deliberately likes to shake things up in order to keep his performers and the show fresh. So a performer might play the yellow clown one night (Polunin isn't always in the cast), the green clown the next.

One of the clowns accustomed to Polunin's change-it-up casting is his 21-year-old son Ivan. ''Vanya'' Polunin has performed with his father since the beginning of Slava's Snowshow, appearing in Alegría as a child, now playing mostly the green clown (though he has performed every role in the show). His mother, brother, brother's wife and little girl are also part of the show; that way, he says, ``nobody has to stay behind.''

The younger Polunin has learned Russian, English, French and is starting to study Japanese during his life in his father's specialized kind of theater. He studies sculpture and furniture design when he's at home in London but says that the times he isn't performing are difficult.

''It is in the blood,'' he says. ``Every kid dreams of running away and joining the circus.''

As for the show itself, parents are discouraged from bringing children younger than 8, because the action inside the theater -- paper ''snowstorms,'' giant balls that fly into the audience, clowns spritzing observers with water and draping fake spider webs over others -- can get pretty chaotic.

Polunin says that kids love his shows, but he feels productions need to be addressed to adults or children, adding, ``I picked adults for this one, because they are more deprived and this makes them happy.''

The yellow clown, a character Polunin calls ''both poetic and crazy,'' starts out in a rather grim place -- he seems to have a noose around his neck -- but he keeps getting distracted and diverted, much as we all do in life.

If everything works as planned, Polunin says, Slava's Snowshow achieves a degree of synergy between the artists and their audiences that most theater pieces never do.

''Each and every person sees different things,'' Polunin says. ``This is the biggest joy the audience gets. They have their own chance to create. In the beginning, the audience watches me. For the last half hour, I'm watching them.''

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