About twenty feet off the ground in the darkness of a brewery storage warehouse, there’s a woman swinging around on a twisted sheet anchored to the ceiling. The only light is a black light and as she performs all kinds of aerial acrobatics, her outfit, a kind of neon-orange Spiderman costume, glows along with her pink and gray wig. The audience stares, entranced, at this act during the Moisture Festival, a three-week series of “Comedy/Varieté” shows held in the renovated back of the Fremont brewery Hale’s Ales.

The Moisture Festival is a yearly coming-together of circus, slapstick comedy, clowns, acrobatics, vaudeville acts, and the Bubble Guy (he’s filthy — the man can make a cube bubble). This all amounts to the entertaining equivalent of Olympic gymnastics meets that funky smelling street musician on Broadway.

As the show continues and the glowing woman climbs down from her sheet, the stage lights come on, revealing once again a stage decorated in circus motif and a house band off to the side. The master of ceremonies for the evening walks back out on stage and begins to introduce the next act to a crowd of families, slightly drunk adults, and slightly drunk adults with their families. But the event’s audience is an essential element and gives the night its distinct, faintly senile air. After the show, Esther Edelman, the florescent aerialist, said that she enjoys the crowds that variety comedy and circus arts draw.

“I love hearing the audience — they’re all for getting into the magic of the show,” says Edelman, founder of performance group Umo Ensemble and teacher of aerialist classes at West Seattle’s Youngstown Cultural Arts Center.

One of the most unique and defining things about the Moisture Festival is its location. Hale’s Ales supplies the alcohol for the evening, but they’ve also been a sponsor and venue to the festival since the beginning.

Every year in Oregon, there’s a big Folklife-like gala called the Oregon Country Fair. In 1996, the Bubble Guy, known to some as Tom Noddy, invited fellow fair attendee Ron Bailey to a Comedy/Varieté festival in Berlin and set the wheels and trapezes turning to create today’s incarnation of the Moisture Festival. Upon seeing the way artists and patrons flocked to Berlin to join in the craziness, Noddy, Bailey and a German friend of theirs enlisted the help of many from the Seattle and Fremont arts communities and decided to bring performers from Berlin and the Oregon Country Fair to Seattle.

Though it only ran for five days, the first Moisture Festival was successfully put on in a tent in Fremont during the spring of 2004. Even then, Hale’s Ales was bringing the kegs, one of which was delivered by brewery owner Mike Hale. When Hale saw the show, he started looking for a way to help out, and built one of his storage spaces into Hale’s Palladium, which would host the festival in the coming years.

Since its inception, the gathering of artists has grown into an event that exists not only to entertain, but also as a place for performers to connect.

“They come here knowing they’ll see each other, not that they’ll make money,” says Bailey.

One performer named Woody Kepple, part of a two-person comedy act called Foolz, sees the festival as a chance to get to know the people on the scene.

“The best part is the people you meet,” he says.

The final performer of the night, who goes by the name of Avner the Eccentric, was a gray-bearded, mostly-silent clown. Avner tours internationally, and played “The Jewel of the Nile,” a film about a quest for treasure in the Middle East. His career started, however, in an undergraduate chemistry and biology program. He didn’t mention at which university, but one rainy day on campus, he took shelter from the storm in a theater. When he walked in, the group in the theater happened to be having auditions and Avner went for it,

got a part, and ended up switching his major to theater.

As his career began, Avner traveled around, attending school all over the U.S. and in Paris, where he learned to tight rope walk in exchange for teaching some street performers to juggle. Avner now runs a physical comedy festival in Maine called Phyzgig, which he says gets ideas from the Moisture Festival.

After Avner walked off stage to a roaring ovation, we all questioned why you would ever celebrate the rainy moisture that was waiting outside the Palladium’s doors. There are few events of its kind in Seattle that get as much attention as the Moisture Festival, but as most of those involved will tell you, it’s about not about fame and fortune, it’s about the booze. And the art.