The clowns are in town for this year’s Denver Fringe Festival

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“It’s very serious,” said Katie Bowman, about the art of clowning.

Bowman has been a comedian for more than a decade, she started with sketch comedy and made her way into standup. Over the past five years or so she’s been exploring the world of clowning, dabbling in different clown pedagogies and developing her clown character: Bumpsy, an outspoken, unapologetic, red-nosed lady who Bowman will debut at this year’s Denver Fringe Festival, June 3-7.

“Bumpsy isn’t afraid to tell someone they suck, she isn’t afraid to be like, ‘this is about me!’” Bowman said. “Of course, it’s easier said than done. In real life I’m trying to be the person who doesn’t say sorry all the time.”

There are many ways to clown.

The acerbic French master Philippe Gaulier was known to shatter egos as a means of reaching the inner idiot. Gaulier, who died in February, studied under Jacques Lecoq, a renowned mime whose techniques relied on movement and physicality. The techniques of Richard Pochinko focus more on tapping into one’s insecurities and impulses, while the father of modern clowning, Joseph Grimaldi, combined daredevil stunts with a melancholic tenor, introducing the world to the image of the sad clown.

Bowman learned from Denver clowns Alice Gillette, Kii Clark and Madly Regular, during three courses that Bowman graduated from in January. That curriculum was a little less “do something funny” — Gaulier was known to tell his students to do something funny then bang on a drum when they failed — and a little more “let’s get in touch with our feelings,” Bowman said.

“I don’t do red nosed, big shoes, squirting flowers,” Gillette, one of Bowman’s teachers, said. “With clown, there’s no fourth wall. So the hope is always that you’re performing joyfully and earnestly for the audience, in a way that they can see a little bit of your humanity. Then they can go, ‘oh, yeah, I’m human too.’ Clown is never for you, clown is for the people.”

Clown is for the people. Fringe is for the clowns.

Denver Fringe goes way beyond clowning. Now in its seventh year, the local festival is tied to a global network of independent artists — comedians, playwrights, acrobats and opera singers, who perform at Fringe festivals as a way to experiment, try on personas or market sketches that exist on the outskirts of normal theater programming.

The best-known fest is Edinburgh Fringe, a magnet that attracts millions of visitors trying to catch more than 3,000 acts in nearly every nook and cranny of the Scottish capital. Edinburgh Fringe can be a huge career boost — acts like Stomp, Flight of the Conchords, Fleabag and Baby Reindeer were Fringe acts before they were off Broadway or on Netflix. But for the vast majority of artists, Fringe festivals aren’t about a financial windfall. In fact, most go to Fringe festivals despite knowing they’ll end up in the red.

Denver Fringe is a little different in that respect. Ann Sabbah, founder of Denver Fringe, has worked closely with about a dozen venues to keep entry costs low, and gives 70% of ticket sales back to performers.

Fringe hopefuls pay a $25 application fee, and, if accepted, pay anywhere from $150-$500 depending on the venue to cover the cost of staffing, marketing and stage management.

Sabbah and the organizers try not to turn anyone away. When there are more viable applications than there are spots available at a venue, they use a lottery system. The resulting lineup is a diverse mix of first-time performers, well-rehearsed one-offs, industry vets trying out new material and experienced actors touring Fringe-specific shows.

“It is so difficult and expensive for individuals to take a risk, to try something new. Rent a theater. Market what they’re doing. Put themselves out there. It’s scary. It’s lonely. It’s cost prohibitive,” Sabbah said. “So what the Fringe does so beautifully is to make things accessible and inclusive. The end result of that, I hope, is that it helps to cultivate the arts in the city.”

Mr. Flop comes to town

Risk, experimentation, putting yourself out there — it’s the ethos of Fringe and a cornerstone of clown, and inherent to both is the possibility of failure.

In clown vernacular, losing the audience is called a flop. Part of clown training is learning to cope with these moments in real time. It’s such a common experience that the flop often gets personified, as in, Mr. Flop is paying a visit. Mr. Flop can sink a show, but he can also be just a blip, depending on how the clown responds.

“With clown, the audience is the most important part. The audience isn’t wrong, ever,” said Adriana Gonzales, a Seattle-based clown who will be performing as “La Piñata” at Denver Fringe.

Gonzales created her character, La Piñata, for a thesis project at the University of Washington, where she graduated with a master’s degree in acting in March. She’d written a solo show about a family who makes piñatas during an early semester, but couldn’t quite get it to work. The following year she revived the concept and put it through full clown treatment.

“I made a list of 20 stupid ideas and I started workshopping with my classmates,” Gonzales said. “And then I realized, like, I have to be the piñata.”

Her show is about joy, happiness and celebration — and also about sacrifice.

“You know what we do to piñatas, we beat them,” Gonzales said, laughing. “So that was really like the most challenging part, figuring out how we were going to break the piñata.”

The absurdity of her piñata character serves as a foil to the darker moments in her show, like the appearance of La Migra, or immigration authorities, for instance. Other performers, like Prith Khalsa, whose show is about a man in love with a banana, let the absurdity of the situation stand on its own. The foil in his show is the audience themself.

In comedy, especially improvisation, there is often the absurdity and then the voice of reason, Khalsa explained. The absurd actor is making zany choices, while the voice of reason acts as a liaison between the audience and the other performer. “Like, this guy’s weird, huh?” Khalsa said, imitating the voice of reason.

“Absurdist comedy is when you take away that voice of reason,” he said. “It works particularly well in clown, because the audience becomes the voice of reason in their own heads.” Somewhere between the strangeness of the scene and the subconscious reasoning is “the land of delight,” Khalsa said. “They don’t have someone actually in the room making the joke, so it’s something, somewhere deep in their body making the joke.”

It’s always for the audience

While some clown teachings rely on shock value, shaking the audience out of their day to day, most clowns in the Denver scene prefer a consenting audience. “There doesn’t have to be a splash zone at every show,” Gillette said.

Patrick Reed, who debuted his solo clown show at last year’s Denver Fringe, said he has learned how to engage with the audience before shows to “give people the sense they can advocate for themselves,” he said. He hangs out doing menial tasks as a clown. Walking around the lobby, rearranging chairs. “Let them see you, give them a moment to take you in,” he said. “Don’t surprise people and come at them, because then the wall goes up. The defenses are there. They immediately feel off-center and like, ‘what do you want from me?’”

So while clown can take a lot of internal rewiring — willingly embarrassing oneself in public is a skill to be learned — the catharsis of a clown show is meant to be shared. Again, Gillette: Clown is not for you, clown is for the people.

“We talk a lot about status. High status and low status. The clown should, for the most part, be lower status than the audience,” Gillette said. “There are so many people that come to our shows feeling low status in their lives, whether it’s from policy or just overall daily strife. And so, if a clown can make someone feel for an hour like they’ve got the power in that room, that is so cool.”