Sporting soda-bottle glasses and a profusion of white facial hair, Dan Griffiths stood under the stage lights of his new venue one fall morning, gazed off into the distance and intoned, “I want to empower a whole bunch of people to go and be shamanic entities.”

He was talking about clowns.

他刚打开空间,小丑,教会San Francisco’s Visitacion Valley neighborhood, is both a training ground for new clowns and an altar for established ones. Griffiths is inaugurating it with a big splash: a two-month performance series called the Flop Festival, running through Sunday, Nov. 5.

To Griffiths, who once ran the Clown Conservatory at S.F. Circus Center, clowns aren’t diverting. They serve a vital societal function, mirroring us back to ourselves. As a hypothetical example, he gestured out his storefront window, across Leland Avenue.

“I go over there and dump garbage on the ground, and nothing happens.” But in a world where artists are properly situated, he went on, “The next week, two clowns would be making a show about how you’re the garbage dumper, and then you can’t do that anymore because you’ve been outed to your whole community.”

His space, a former Chinese grocery that sat empty for 15 years (the backstage is where the freezer used to be), crowns a local clowning scene, dating to the proud history of the Bay Area’s Pickle Family Circus and Make*A*Circus, that has long rendered the profession’s stereotypes irrelevant. In the Bay Area, clowning isn’t Pennywise from Stephen King’s “It” or Ronald McDonald or third-rate children’s birthday party performers.

It’s Fou Fou Ha, the 22-year-old troupe fusing clowning, burlesque, dance and bouffon. It’s in clowning’sVenn diagram overlap with drag樱桃可乐等,以当地的行为(who uses gender-neutral pronouns) of Oakland and Franzia Rosé of Santa Cruz, both of whom incorporate clown’s iconic white makeup into their drag personas. At a recent performance at the San Francisco Mint, alongside Menagerie Oddities Market’s artisan booths selling skeleton keys, stuffed animals with fangs and earrings that look like they fell off a gothic castle, Cherry Cola’s eye makeup was so elaborate you couldn’t quite tell when their eyes were open and when they were closed.

It’s Alicia M.P. Nelson, whose clown character, Baby Monkey, explores autonomy and self-possession. “I’ve definitely also considered, as a Black mixed woman: Am I making people uncomfortable by playing a monkey?” the Oakland resident said. That makes her think, “Let’s have that conversation. Why are you uncomfortable with that?”

It’sSabrina Wenske,an Oakland specialist in bouffon, the clowning subgenre defined by satire and costumes with grotesque bulges. In her recent “How to Catch a Karen,” which included a hilarious sequence of white women’s tears getting deployed like paratroopers, she uses the art form to explore white fragility.

“我能够经历一些我的想法around white women voting for Trump,” she recalled. “I was like, ‘Why is this happening? Why do people vote against their own interests?’ ”

It’sSara Toby Moore,who uses gender-neutral pronouns and who sees a sign of clowning’s growing legitimacy in the fact that they are “double funded” by the San Francisco Arts Commission. One grant is for an education program called Atomic Comics; the other is to develop a “clown opera” called “Cyclonauts.”

“Clown is the amplified human spirit,” Moore said at an interview near their Glen Park home, frequently crossing their eyes the way others might shake a fist for emphasis. “What this does for audiences is it makes them realize that their inner world is actually valid and real.”

Like Griffiths, Moore sees clowning as restorative. That’s the impetus behind the Medical Clown Project, which has worked at hospitals throughout the Bay Area since Jeff Raz and Sherry Sherman co-founded it in 2010. Healing also motivates the two professions of Mamafou, aka Maya Culbertson-Lane. By day she’s a psychotherapist. By night the Nevada City resident is what she calls a “psychedelic clown,” as the founder of Fou Fou Ha. Her clowns, with eyelashes as long as bird wings, hail from a neo-vaudeville aesthetic she describes as “foppish Marie Antoinette” fused with anime and cartoon, plus “a dash of trickster and a side of drag.” At a recentRuckus and Rumpus Revival,one “fou,” Roxy Mirage, used an angle grinder power tool to shoot a stream of sparks wincingly close to her bare flesh.

“We try to show our polished Instagram version — controlled, pretty — so much. But underneath it, we’re all just a mess,” Culbertson-Lane said. “Clown holds that and shows that.”

“The best therapists are the wounded therapists,” she went on. “Similarly, clowns are people who are connected to and acknowledge their brokenness.”

If exaggeration and brokenness are two components of clowning, others are vulnerability and submission to the present moment, both of which distinguish the art form from related ones.

Clowns, explained Culbertson-Lane, don’t just break the fourth wall.

“We’re pausing and looking maybe longer than usual at the audience to kind of see how they’re interacting.” Clowns let a few extra beats go by. It gets uncomfortable. Spontaneity is the only possible response. “The realm of clown is in that awkwardness, that wonder, that interstitial rawness, aliveness,” she said.

In Church of Clown classes, an early lesson that Griffiths and other instructors teach is to own one’s mistakes.

“In American culture, at least, if you make a mistake, you’re taught not even to admit it. But if you don’t make mistakes and admit your mistakes, you can’t learn jack.”

Sierra Camille, Church of Clown’s communications and program director, added, “I think people become boring, crabby adults because they stop being bad at things.”

Clown school isn’t just for aspiring professionals, Griffiths noted. “If you just want to learn to have a more genuine relationship with human beings on the whole, take a clown class.”

Reach Lily Janiak:ljaniak@sfchronicle.com