New clowns on the block: Denver is clowning around like never before
A clown with a cartoonish zit instead of a red nose awakes to a red feather sprouting from their crotch. The feather twitches; it wants things. At first it’s fun, but things devolve. The clown falls in love with Jesus, accidentally kills Jesus, becomes Jesus, all to the sound of live violin.
So goes the plot of “Featherbrain,” an award-winning clown show by Madly Forsyth.
Forsyth — known as “Madly Regular” to her fellow clowns — admits it’s hard to convey what she does. The common perception of clowning (or “clown,” in clown-speak) remains stuck in a fog of horror villains and birthday party misadventures, not avant-garde art about liberation, desire and religious trauma. “I can’t tell people I’m a clown; I usually say that I do comedy,” she says.
Forsyth is an ex-Mormon who left the church as a teenager, a theme that often finds itself in her work. She first tried creating stand-up routines, but it wasn’t the freedom she was looking for. “Stand-up felt like I was putting on this beauty mask. … If you bomb or mess up, you’re doing it wrong,” she says.
Kii Clark, a silent clown known as Skeleton Kii, started her path to clown while at work. “I literally walked off the graduation stage [of a musical theater program] into a grey cubicle and said, ‘I hate this,’ so I started watching clown videos at my desk,” she recalls.
Meanwhile, classically trained clown Buba Basishvili came to clown after feeling limited by mime as a member of the Republic of Georgia’s state pantomime group. “We’ve seen mimes trapped in walls; that is what happened to the theater itself, philosophically,” he says.
Forsyth, Clark and Basishvili’s stories are a variation on a common theme of comedians and artists looking for a release and finding clown.
The past five years have seen an explosion of modern clown, clown-prov and avant-clown in the Denver performing arts and comedy scenes, says Soleil Kohl, a clown and physical theater artist. “Maybe they don’t fit into stand-up,” Kohl says. “They want to perform, but they feel like it’s all too rigid, and now there’s this modern clown movement that is all about being honest, being vulnerable on stage, about heightening things that are uniquely you on stage and making those funny — a much more democratized system of performance as opposed to in an improv theater.”
Last year was the first year the Denver Fringe Festival had a clown genre. This year, one in every three acts was clown, 31 in total.
A clown’s ability to subvert social norms gives power to the fool to mock the king, a mirror to shine back the absurdity of our everyday lives and freedom for everyone — performers and audience alike — to laugh from the deepest pits of their bellies.
Forsyth’s first clown class was in 2023 with Nick Trotter, a long-time Denver-based clown and head of street theatre troupe Circo De Nada. Trotter started the class with an exercise called “magnets.”
During magnets, members of the class stand in a circle and make eye contact with someone across the circle, looking at one another without putting on any expression. The exercise fosters a central tenet of clown: there is no fourth wall between you and an audience.
“I felt the need to smile,” Forsyth recalls. “To just look at someone without any face, I felt I was being so rude, that they were thinking I’m awful … and I realized that it’s not the case. I don’t have to put on anything to make anyone else comfortable.”
One of Forsyth’s frequent collaborators and friends, clown and writer Mathea Tanner, also remembers the exercise’s impact on her. “Ever since I walked out of that class, I realized how much we spend our days doing what is expected of us and how often we’re masking,” Tanner says. “The absurdity frees you as the performer.
“Once you get on stage, dressed like a cat with an eye-patch over one eye, you realize that, maybe, you should put stuff into perspective,” she continues. “We’re constantly stressed out about stuff that we made up as a society. 401ks? Borders? None of it’s real! We made it all up; go make up something fun.”
A clown’s lack of deference to social cues gives them the ability to invert power, according to Forsyth. “It’s very necessary for the culture,” she says. “There needs to be someone to point out the absurd things the king is saying.”
“It’s resistance,” Basishvili adds.