In the first week of January 2022, Hawkwood Centre for Future Thinking in Stroud opened its loving arms to me and two collaborators, Dominique and Chez. We spent four days in and around a grand old Victorian stone built house, diving into my continuing exploration of body-based and nature-inspired approaches to writing, which formed the backbone of my Arts Council funded ‘Developing Your Creative Practice’ project in 2021. 

For our Hawkwood retreat, we added our shared practice of “Fooling” into the mix....The following blog offers a peek into our process.

These four fools escaped from their lives 

and fled to the country for a sliver of time,

To laugh and to play and to eat and to talk,

and listen and love and learn and walk

The following blog is written by Beyond The Ridiculous company member, Dominique Fester.

A Ship of Fools - Looking back on Fool’s Play 2021

At the beginning of March 2021 the fools of Beyond The Ridiculous forayed into delivering ‘Fool’s Play’. The course was designed to scoop up fools who had done Holly’s five day training and were hungry for more. What could the fools of Beyond the Ridiculous (Holly’s Professional Fooling Company) share from their own experiences with those relatively new to the fooling path?

Introducing the foolish facilitators for Fools Play Online!

This 6 week course starts on 25th Feb 2021. The deadline for applications is on Monday 1st February. It is only open to people who have completed Holly Stoppit's 5-day Fools School. 

Each week will be led by a different member of Hollys' fooling troupe, Beyond The Ridiculous.

We did it! Live art is still possible! Our documentary photographer, Joe Rosser captured the evening to give you a taste of how it felt to be in the Wardrobe Theatre during our first ever hybrid online / real life show, The New "Normal".

Here's the poem written by our Poet In Residence, Bee Golding, during Saturday night's performance of The New "Normal" by Beyond The Ridiculous.

I was interviewed by Pommy Harmar from The Quarantini, a Bristol-based podcast, which has been broadcasting since the beginning of lockdown.

Here's Holly Stoppit and members of Beyond The Ridiculous demonstrating what their improvisation form, 'fooling' is all about.

The Wardrobe Theatre presents Beyond The Ridiculous in a live, improvised, online celebration of the human condition!

Saturday 10th October 2020

“Both incredibly funny and incredibly moving.” -The Huffington Post

Do you remember midsummer's night, June 2020? Lockdown was beginning to ease and the fools of Beyond The Ridiculous took a moment to reflect on their journeys through the strangest spring they'd ever encountered, in their first ever online show, 'Voices of Lockdown, Live and Unleashed'.

Bee Golding, our poet in residence, took Orla's live transcription of the show and her own embodied memories from being audience, and created a collection of poems to capture the night.