Mid February 2025, as winter released its final flurries of sleety snow, I was blessed with a heart-warming, life-affirming, well-filling weekend of play, connection, irreverence and depth in the enchanting Forest of Dean. 

The weekend was co-created with three fellow Fools, Naomi, Dominique and Chez, who all began their Fools’ training with me around 10 years ago. They have all taken Fooling into their individual creative practices and developed their own flavours of the form. This weekend was a chance for us to reconnect and share our current influences and fascinations with each other. This blog describes some of what we got up to on our Fooling Nerds Holiday.

Hang on, what do you mean by ‘Fooling’?

Ah yes, thanks for asking. Fooling is a form of solo improvisation where the performer walks on an empty stage and plays with whatever they find there, responding to the audience and their own sensations, emotions and thoughts, crafting a piece of performance moment-by-moment. 

Once upon a time, Dominique, Chez and Naomi were all members of Beyond The Ridiculous, our foolish theatre company, alongside a revolving cast of Bristol’s finest idiots. Before the pandemic, I used to offer regular company training and we’d perform entirely improvised shows at The Wardrobe Theatre, once a month. 

During the pandemic, led by the mutual need to play with all the emotions that were swirling around, and the deep desire to stay connected, Beyond The Ridiculous collectively got over our technophobia and figured out how to fool online. We presented two live shows: ‘Voices of Lockdown Live and Unleashed’ and ‘The New Normal.’

We haven’t performed any public shows since then, mostly due to me embarking upon an elaborate quest to heal my grief and solve burnout (I’m getting there by the way! If you’d like to know more about this, see the end of this blog.). In the meantime, clusters of Fools have been gathering together in secret locations to continue to explore our beloved art-form and its many iterations and applications. 

The first ‘Fools in the Forest’ retreat

The first Fools in the Forest retreat happened at the tail-end of lockdown, in October 2021. As we were taking tentative steps back into the world, Chez’s folks went away on holiday and let the four of us take over their gorgeous house in the tiny chocolate-box village of Pillowell for a long weekend of co-created goodness. I wrote a little poem about what we got up to back then. It was soooooo nourishing, wholesome and delightful, that we all agreed, “We should do this every year!”. Three and a half years later, the four of us finally returned to Pillowell for a second time!

Didn’t We Grow? Didn’t We Get Close?

Here’s ‘This Is The Kit,’ singing the soundtrack of the Fools in the Forest retreat 2025. You can find it here on YouTube. It’s a song called Moon. We danced to it on the first day and it promptly became the ear-worm of the weekend. You can play it over and over again whilst reading this blog and you’ll basically be there with us.

Moon - lyrics by This Is The Kit

Didn't we grow?
Didn't we get close?
We had the moon
Me and you
We had the moon
On our side
Moon
Didn't we grow?
Didn't we get close?

Friday - Building A Fools Nest

Mid February 2025. We arrived in Pillowell with the snow on Friday evening, laden bundles of blankets, warm clothes and slippers. Chez had made up the beds and Naomi had ordered the food. Two Fools cooked the dinner, whilst one lit a fire and another cranked up the music and opened up the snacks… and so began the effortless Fools’ murmuration. 

After dinner, we sat by the log fire and shared from our hearts. Although we’d all seen each other over these three and a half years, we’d not met in this combination with this much time to really learn about each others’ lives.

 ‘Didn’t we grow? Didn’t we grow?’ 

We spoke our needs for the weekend and laid out a banquet of explorations that we could each lead. We designed a loose schedule - with agreed meal times, a rota for cooking and time-slots for play. We didn’t know what exactly would happen in those play sessions and we agreed to put our trust in the unfolding process, giving ourselves and each other permission to take hold of leadership, whenever anyone felt the urge to make an offer or a request. 

Saturday - Coming Back Into Connection with Ourselves, Each Other and The Form

On Saturday morning, we traipsed down to the village hall where Dominique led a somatic dance-movement warm up, where we explored moving with and from sensations. I discovered that my body craved A LOT of contact with the floor. The ground gave me a sense of containment and helped me feel my edges. After we checked in, Chez offered an 80’s aerobic dance warm up and some physical voice release exercises to help us playfully connect through sound and movement.

Next, I offered a parts mapping exercise from Internal Family Systems (IFS), where we each explored our inner worlds through meditation and image making. We shared what we’d discovered with a partner through conversation and embodiment. 

In the afternoon Chez guided some group explorations in attuned touch. Each of us took it in turns to ask for specific qualities of touch from the others. Then we worked together as an ensemble to hold and massage each other in different ways. This exercise helped us to connect with our compassion and generosity, as well as increasing our capacity to receive care and support from each other. I felt moved, relieved and so, so happy to be held after many, many weeks of holding others. 

‘Didn’t we grow? Didn’t we grow?’ Didn’t we get close?’  

We were now ready to take the stage and each play a 15 minute solo. My solo felt like diving into deep, dark, cold water, after having not fooled for a while. The stage felt wild and unpredictable until I invited the ancestors in to help me steady the ship. This technique has been helping me in my IFS therapy and it felt lovely to bring my inner support system out onto the stage during my fooling. Having them there brought more spaciousness and ease into my play.

In the evening, after a delicious dinner, Naomi shared nuggets from her phD research. She’s been drawing on Fooling to develop an embodied interview technique. I’m intrigued to know more about the quality of responses that this technique evokes, compared to a straight interview… What wisdom does the body hold that the mind can’t access?

Sunday - Delving Deeper

On Sunday morning, Dominique offered Part Two of her somatic dance-movement warm up, exploring moving with and from sensation, in relation to the space, and each other. I then took the baton and offered a structure for solo and duo witnessed movement inspired by a score I learned from Eeva-Maria Mutka in her movement lab:

• A moves solo in the space. 
• B joins A, and they perform a short improvised duo together. 
• A leaves the space and B performs a solo.
• C joins B and they perform a duo.
• And so on…

This score allowed us all to continue to explore moving with and from sensation, whilst being witnessed by the others. Being witnessed can bring out a range of thoughts, feelings, sensations and impulses which are all invited into the Fools play. Witnessing the others felt like such a privilege; to have known these remarkable women for all these many years, to have witnessed their many evolutions and to have had permission to really see inside their souls through their Fools play… I sat with tears of gratitude and wonder pouring down my face. 

‘Didn’t we grow? Didn’t we grow? Didn’t we grow? Didn’t we get close?’  

We took some time to check-in with each other. Then I led an embodied voice warm up, inviting us to make sounds and feel them reverberate in our bellies, chests and skulls, before handing back over to Dominique to teach us an Irish Keening song. Keening is a tradition of releasing grief through singing. Once we got the gist of it, we took it in turns to softly improvise phrases and have the group echo them back.

We spilled out into the woods where we explored the trees, the moss, the earth and the sky through our senses. We each found a spot to play a 3 minute site-responsive solo for each other. Each Fool opened up another realm of sensory experience for the others, helping us to journey deeper into presence. 

Returning to the Keening song, we each found a natural object to represent something or someone we were grieving / letting go of. As our voices wove around each other, we slowly drifted down to the brook, where we gently released our objects to the flow of the water. Walking back to the house in silence, our hearts were soft and our senses sharp. 

In the afternoon we each took the ‘stage’ for a half-hour solo performance, or “Phatty Fool” as they are now known. Our combined care, compassion and creative, embodied investigations during the weekend had brought us close together, re-cementing our trust in each other and connecting us with our courage and creativity. 

The quality of our play was deep, tender and raw. I’m not going to tell you what happened, because you had to be there! But I can say that collectively, we embodied our grief, danced with our fear, played with our exhaustion, grappled with huge questions, tapped into our wisdom and shared our delight, as tears and laughter flowed in abundance. 

“We had the moon, we had the moon, we had the moon, we had the moon, we had the moon, we had the moon. On our side.”

Conclusions

I LOVE the Fools' work. I love the form as a playful and embodied way of exploring the self and I love it as a spontaneous and expansive live art form. I love how these two realms overlap. 

I love how IFS is integrating into my Fools toolkit, bringing more clarity, safety, depth and steadiness into my play and facilitation.

I love Fooling in nature and what the natural world draws out of us.

I love all the variations and investigations that each fool brought to the process and the new dimensions we discovered by smashing our worlds together throughout the weekend. I love the infinite nature of Fooling!

I love these women. After 10 years of working and playing together, we have a huge, encyclopedic shared language of practice and a deeply developed working culture based on care, compassion, honesty and integrity, which makes this kind of fluid murmuration / shared leadership relatively simple and easy. I do not take that for granted.

For the last few years I have been actively exploring co-creation / collaboration as an antidote to and preventative of burnout. To that end I have co-organised three creative labs with three different groups of people in the early part of this year; this one, a 5-day clown teachers’ lab in Hawkwood, Stroud and another one in April with the IFS / fool / clown research group in Yorkshire. 

These co-created labs give me a chance to watch myself with groups and notice my habitual patterns towards taking far too much responsibility for everyone and everything all the time! I have recognised this as one of the biggest factors in my repeated bouts of burnout. Through these creative labs, I get to consciously practice letting go of responsibility and see how that feels. 

Fooling and IFS give me structures to help me to meet, soothe and offer healing to the inner parts who struggle with letting go of responsibility. To many of my parts, taking responsibility is a matter of life or death - if I don’t take responsibility, everything will fall apart! To explore all this with the support of three of my long-term students felt significant. Through this work, I am learning how to step off the podium of expert / master and into the soup of shared exploration, which feels important not just for me, but for us as a community.   

The wise Buddhist monk, Thich Nhat Hahn was reported as saying something like, “The next Buddha won’t be one person, the next Buddha will be a Sangha.” ‘Sangha’ being the Pali term for community of practitioners. Our Fools in the Forest Retreat gave me a taste of the limitless potential of a deftly murmurating sangha. 

 Shared responsibility + mutual care = extraordinary unexpected magic.

Links

I'll be blogging about my adventures in co-creation over the next few months, so do swing by for the next update.

If you'd like to know more about fooling and Beyond The Ridiculous, check out this page.

If you'd like to know more about how I'm integrating Fooling with IFS, check out these blogs.

I've got two 5-day introduction to Fooling Courses coming up in Sheffield (19-23 May) and Bristol (30 June - 4 July) - check this page for more info.

If you're interested in attending any of my workshops, check out this page or sign up to the newsletter using the box at the bottom of this page.