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These clowns, called Aga-Boom, are from The Great Moscow Circus and spent seven years performing in Cirque du Soleil's "Alegria" and "O." My grandson hasn't seen Cirque du Soleil yet, but he and I had seen the Russian master clown Guennadi Tregoub at the Circus Chimera. The Aga-Boom clowns communicate with their eyes and bodies in a blend of slapstick, physical comedy, mime and European avant-garde. You sense that theirs is a very old tradition. But nothing my grandson or I had seen before prepared us for Aga-Boom. And I suspect that the rest of the audience for the afternoon show was pleasantly surprised too. The three Aga-Boom clowns are silent and mime-like. Each one has his or her own personality and "schtick." Collectively their take on the world is decidedly surreal. And very, very funny. Advertisement Iryna Ivanytska is the lead clown, Boom. She is the first to come out on stage, wearing a wild pale wig, a baggy yellow and orange outfit, red half gloves and oversized red slippers. In a matter of seconds, she has us watching her every move and laughing at her pranks. One of these involved finding a one dollar bill and standing to admire it in front of the huge white paper curtain upstage. Suddenly a hand bursts through the paper, grabs the dollar and disappears, leaving a fist-sized hole in the curtain. Boom, disconcerted and perturbed, reaches her hand into the hole to fetch her money. We see the bulge of her hand moving against the back of the curtain as she reaches further and further. The bulge slides the length of her arm and still keeps moving. After travelling about 20 feet, Boom's half-gloved hand punches through the paper — without the dollar. She withdraws her hand, the bulge moves back, she pulls her arm out and goes to the other hole to try again. Each time she reaches into the paper, something weird happens. Sometimes when her hand emerges, it has been replaced by a huge dinosaur claw. The next clown we see is the white-faced, purple-haired Dash, portrayed by Philip Briggs. He spends a lot of time walking around and interacting with Aga and Boom. Boom is Dimitri Bogatirev, Ivanytska's husband and the creator and director of Aga-Boom. "It's not American clowning," The orange-suited, brown jacketed, top-knotted Bogatirev told the Press Enterprise in Riverside, Calif. "Instead, we play characters which people trust, and we present a comedy of paradoxes, such as portraying an airplane in a birdcage. The paradox is something adults will perceive, while the children will laugh at the silliness of such a thing. It's sophisticated humor with unusual twists which make you laugh. It's funny because it's unusual." The airplane in the birdcage is truly unusual. But when Bogatirev takes the plane out and sends it magically flying around his head it becomes theatrical poetry. When the troupe walks around with huge green garbage bags pulled over their heads and bodies, the effect is more absurdist than silly. The same mood is evoked when an audience member gets cajoled into cradling a mop head in his arms and feeding it with a baby bottle. True to Bogatirev's assertion, my grandson found these shenanigans very laughable. So did I, but I also found a strange kind of beauty in the ambiguity of it all. But for strangeness, you can't beat the contortionist Elena Nekrassova dressed all in black and wearing an expressionless white mask. She bends her body into shapes reminiscent of four-legged, spider-like creatures, moving the mask around her head and into her arms to places where we know human heads can't physically go. It's that paradox thing again. The Russian word for paper is "boomaga." Aga-Boom not only turns the word around, but it sends reams of paper up into the air and literally into the audience, filling the Craterian with flying wads and flakes of paper, air-filled plastic garbage bags and huge inflated balloons. The place erupts with excitement, laughter and not a little disbelief as the paper keeps coming from the stage, from above and from the rows in front and behind you. It's everywhere. A huge sheet of paper passes over our heads. Lights flash, the smoke machine kicks in and the wild music by Bogatirev's brother Vasily keeps blasting away. Finally, we wave good-bye as Aga-Boom leaves the stage. They'd be back for the next show in less than three hours, just as grampa and grandson would be finishing dinner with their tales of a crazy afternoon of paper and paradox in Medford. Would you like to respond to this story? If so Click Here to visit our forums. Advertisement Copyright © 1997-2007 Mail Tribune, Inc. All rights reserved. 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