SAN FRANCISCO (AP) – The DNA Lounge was a real circus the night The Mutaytor came to town. The Los Angeles-based band looked like a bunch of clowns. Young contortionists folded their limbs like fortune cookies above and around the stage.

The 500 or so cognoscenti who paid $20 each to watch acrobats and aerialists on ropes perform to a live percussive beat weren’t complaining. Once a month, the techno dance club hosts the Bohemian Carnival, an informal gathering of troupes from the Bay Area’s underground circus scene and a bellwether of a subculture trend taking hold in a city near you.

“People are ready to be entertained on a much more visceral and darker level. There is this hunger to see something fancier,” said Mutaytor front man Buck Down, explaining why the group made clown costumes, fire spinners and jugglers part of its trance music act. “It pushes a button, and it’s a very primal button.”

Inspired by Cirque du Soleil and possessed of an advanced sense of the absurd, young adults who got their first taste of trapezes, tightropes and red noses at Burning Man or other indie art festivals are joining a growing number of small, alternative circuses with Big Top dreams.

San Francisco, with at least 15 groups, appears to be the American epicenter of the nouveau circus movement – a form that owes more to buskers and burlesque than Barnum and Bailey and already has swept Canada, Australia and parts of Europe.

But alt-circus arts are seeing a resurgence in other U.S. cities, too. Home to The Mutaytor-affiliated Cirque Bezerk, the Stilt Circus and the Lucent Dossier Vaudeville Cirque, Los Angeles has a thriving indie circus scene. Seattle boasts a few companies, including one, Pure Cirkus, whose novelty is performers getting strung up with hooks piercing their flesh. Saint Paul, Minn. and Grand Rapids, Mich. also have their own homegrown troupes.

“There are always people who see themselves outside the cultural box. Circus hits those archetypes really well,” said Cypher Zero, who founded a New York-based aerial acrobatics group and two years ago opened the city’s first dedicated circus school for adults, the New York Circus Arts Academy.

Explaining what separates the urban circus sub-genre from a traditional circus or the stylized drama of Cirque du Soleil can be difficult. Unlike Ringling Bros., the shows don’t feature animal acts. The proverbial three rings are abandoned for compact spaces where dancers, bands and acrobats do their thing simultaneously, or open-air venues where stilt-walkers and aerialists suspended from oversized sculptures mingle with the crowds.

“I think of it as ‘omnitainment,’” said Robbie Kowal, a San Francisco disc jockey and music promoter who helps put on the Bohemian Carnival. “There are very few firsts left in music. The answer is visual stimulants.”

Like Cirque, many of the neo-nouveau circuses weave stories into their performances, which tend to push the erotic edge. During a party held in the hospital wing of the old Alcatraz penitentiary, dancers from the Vau de Vire Society – one of the city’s most successful troupes – wore lab coats over bras and thigh-high stockings while cavorting with pretend patients on gurneys.

Erin Shrader, 27, Vau de Vire’s resident hula hoop whiz, gave up a job touring with the Florida-based Clyde Beatty Circus to try her luck with the fledgling San Francisco troupe. Vau de Vire allows her to be more creative and spontaneous than a conventional circus, she said.

“I’m always challenging myself to see if I can take it a step further. Whether it’s costuming, makeup or dramatic expression, I’m always asking myself, ‘How can you be as daring as possible without going too far?” said Shrader, who goes by the stage name Shredder.

Along with co-hosting the Bohemian Carnival, three-year-old Vau de Vire has performed with the San Francisco Symphony, toured with the Boston-based punk rock duo The Dresden Dolls and appeared at parties for Silicon Valley corporations. Five members of the group, which has a core of 12 to 14 performers, have been invited to study at Cirque du Soleil’s school in Montreal. A longtime aerial performer with Cirque, Angelo Rodriguez, frequently appears with Vau de Vire.

“We are becoming almost like a band. We have a following, which is why promoters are willing to bring us in to headline,” said Mike Gaines, 36, who started the company with his wife, Shannon, and describes it as a cross of cabaret, circus and dance.

Vau de Vire’s lineup includes a mix of trained dancers, gymnasts, and performers with previous circus experience, but it also has members who were self-taught or have acquired their skills on the job.

“It’s not about any one being the best performer,” Gaines said. “We are all living it. This is a life.”

Dream Rockwell, who founded the Lucent Dossier Vaudeville Cirque two years ago, also has built her troupe more around amateurs than seasoned professionals. The company, whose members range in age from 4 to 53, appeared in a circus-themed music video with the electronica band Panic! At the Disco, which won MTV’s video of the year. It also did a commercial for Farmer’s Insurance and has been hired to entertain at the official Grammy Awards post-party in February.

“I wanted to start something where it was possible for people who were unusual, who didn’t have the right training or the right body or the right look (for Hollywood) to achieve their dreams,” said Rockwell. “Every child has some kind of strange fantasy to grow up and join the circus or carnival and run away.”

Their avant-garde sensibilities aside, the small urban circus groups are actually part of a rich tradition, according to Janet Davis, a professor of American studies at the University of Texas at Austin who studies the role circus has played in society.

“We tend to think of subversive youth culture as being indicative of trangressiveness and all that is edgy,” Davis said. “Yet 100 years ago, the circus was a place where gays and lesbians found work. The whole idea of the female impersonator or the strong woman, this kind of bending of traditional categories. That tradition is still very much alive and has carried over.”

Downs, of The Mutaytor, said the underground circuses may be edgy, but their art is as mainstream as it gets.

“So much of what is considered indie and cool is predicated on, ‘I know something you don’t. This is predicated on something that is old as dirt,” he said. “Take the most terminally unhip person out there, take your grandmother. They get clowns. They get circus.”