12 AUGUST 6-12, 2026 westword.com WESTWORD | MUSIC | CAFE | CULTURE | NIGHT+DAY | NEWS | LETTERS | CONTENTS | Gillette and Idiot Theatre. In “Gulp!,” clown Prith Khalsa plays a man who falls deeply in love with a banana. He has to balance his love life with his job as a literal race car. As the audience cackles, Khalsa chugs half a gallon of brownish liquid labeled “Gas” and half runs, half leaps at breakneck speeds around the stage while making motor noises. Somehow these furious bursts of energy only serve to make the tender moments when he comes home to massage his banana- wife’s feet all the sweeter. Because being earnest also means vulnerability, clowns must learn to accept the pain and embar- rassment of failing, without the cushioning of detachment. Clark, the silent, avant-garde clown, re- calls another exercise at Pig Iron, a Phila- delphia-based theatre and school. “They forced us to fl op over and over and over again, because when you’re fl opping, it feels like the end of the world: my ears are hot, my nose is hot, my vision goes blurry,” Clark recalls. “But after so many times, I know the feeling; I know what’s going on. Just breathe.” Clown School The explosion of clowns has also led to an infrastructure gap. Far more people want to learn how to do clown than there are teach- ers. Self-professed “baby clowns” who have only been practicing the art form for a year or two are teaching classes to fi ll the need. Every clown we spoke to for this article ei- ther teaches or has taught clowning classes. The result is a rapidly growing Den- ver clown community whose members are constantly traveling to other teachers and bringing back what they’ve learned; teaching one another and reaching the clown-curious while also writing, producing and directing their own shows. Clowns, Clark explains, are also often a majority of the audience. “Every day we’ve got something to look forward to because we can be together, work- ing on something absolutely ridiculous,” Tanner says. “When the world gets really heavy, you need to realize that everything is absurd … and fi nd a way to make it worth something.” Clown shows have also become a staple at theaters like Chaos Bloom, The Bug and The Savoy. Performers share events for the committed and the clown-curious through the Clown Calendar website at Clowncal. com, and post fl iers on streetlight poles around Capitol Hill. There are also supportive artists who are not clowns themselves, but enjoy working with them. Dan Hartman, a sketch comedian and musician who has hired and worked with many clowns for his projects, says he loves that the clowns can handle anything that gets thrown at them. The Audience The audience in a clown show, Basishvili explains, is “a live entity. It’s a conversa- tion. There is never a fourth wall; you always interact with them, and it always af- fects you.” This was one of the ele- ments that Meghan Frank, another classically trained clown and Basishvili’s cre- ative partner, says she fi nds compelling about the art form. Starting in 2003, Frank traveled to refugee camps and places impacted by war and confl ict — including the Bal- kans, Afghanistan and Egypt — with Bond Street Theatre, a New York-based company that aims to provide levity and joy in diffi cult circum- stances through street the- ater forms, including clown. “Clown can travel across linguistic and ethnic borders. … There was no separation between me and the person sitting across from me, and that felt like a great equalizer,” Frank says. For Tanner, who also uses clown to inform her work as a writer, it’s “a way of accessing something that is universal. I’m not just be- ing myself, I’m being everyone,” she says. She’s currently workshopping a house goblin clown who transforms through the magical power of sweatpants. “It’s us seeing a part of ourselves refl ected that creates this funniness,” Frank says. “Wear- ing that vulnerability and allowing you to laugh at them so … you can laugh at yourself.” That is not to say that all performers at- tempting clown are capable of doing that. Kohl acknowledges that an experimen- tal clown show “might be the worst thing you’ve ever seen. But, at least, they’re doing something different … it feels really raw and earnest and honest. It doesn’t feel curated and practiced.” Kohl practices a form of clown called “bouffon,” which focuses on mockery. While clowns in general invite the audience to indi- rectly laugh at themselves by laughing at the clown, bouf- fon laughs directly at the au- dience, all of the audience. “They mock everything and anything,” Kohl says. “In that way, it’s very equitable, I want a radical leftist and a MAGA die-hard to both be able to sit side by side, and both feel they’ve been poked at and be able to laugh at themselves. … I believe that’s the only way that change can happen.” As the performer is freed from social constriction, so is the audience. When Acevedo is performing, he says he feels that release from the audience. “For a brief moment in time, it’s as if everyone in the room’s beliefs fade away. If you can really make people present, they’re no longer thinking about their anxiet- ies; they’re no longer thinking about what’s depressing and worrying them. For a moment, they are with you — and for just a moment, we’re all laughing,” he says. In the end, regardless of style, clown is an art form used to tell a story, adds Basishvili. “We are stories, everything is story around us,” he says. And the story each audience member takes away can be different. Acevedo recalled a piece he performed with Blake “Isaclown,” who runs the clown calendar website and prefers to use his stage name. The two of them got into an ebb and fl ow of offering games to an audience, then retreating to a fort made of cardboard boxes, isolating themselves and looking sad. “Then,” Acevedo says, “some audience member will inevitably say, ‘Hey! he looks sad!’” and encourage them to come back and play again. One audience member, Acevedo recalls, took it as a critique of automation, another as a metaphor for our interconnectedness, and one as a path to grappling with the death of their father. “Your version of clown is so playful,” Acevedo remembers them saying. “I haven’t done much playing since I was with my dad. He’d been sick for so long; the idea of playing hurts … but to see a sad clown play and come out of that sadness? It helps.” “What is so enticing about the world of clown is that it can mean so many things,” Kohl adds. “...It feels really raw and earnest and honest. We’re seeing a community of people who are watching this stuff and want to make it, similar to DIY scenes [that] have really grown. Let’s just make stuff, let’s just do it. ... The appeal of clown is you can have so many different kinds of fl avors, and it inspires the community to experiment more and make stuff.” Email the author at [email protected]. Buba Basishvili uses a leather bag, a curtain, and a red nose to transform himself into a “foolish king” clown. Meghan Frank shows off her custom clown teeth, which she says “give me huge confi dence.” GRACE WILSON FOR WESTWORD GRACE WILSON FOR WESTWORD Culture continued from page 10 Caroline Krantz (left) and Percy Linn take the concept of fear to a ten in a clown class led by Madly Regular Forsyth and Alice Gillette. GRACE WILSON FOR WESTWORD
