In April 2024, eight wonderful Fools gathered together in a beautiful dance space for a 5 day experimental, experiential, emergent and engaged research lab, co-facilitated by Saskia Solomons and me.

What’s In The Blog?

• The story of how the 5-day Fooling + IFS research lab came to be

• An outline of what happened in the lab

• Little chunks of IFS theory from Saskia's morning talks

• Descriptions of some of the ways we integrated IFS, creativity and the body - you could have a go at some of these if you wish!

• A brief outline of our Fooling + IFS solo stage experiments 

• My key learnings

Holly Stoppit Workshops Poet In Residence, Beccy Golding strikes again!

We were very lucky to have Beccy amongst our tribe of fools on our new 5-day Site Responsive Fooling course over Easter. She documented her week by writing a poem every day.

Ah, the Easter holidays of 2022, back in the days when it was still cold enough to wear a coat, a gang of fools gathered in a school in central Bristol to explore Site Responsive Fooling.

It was such a beautiful week, that I wanted to share a taste of our time together. Below are pictures from the last day, when the fools all chose a performance site in or around the school.

Massimo “Max” Cavallini is an Italian clown and fool, living in the Netherlands. He invited me to talk about how the Fool meets the Clown, ahead of his new two day workshop called "The Fool through the eyes of a Clown.” 

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.

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

Hello dear readers, please welcome back to the stage, guest blogger, Holly Stoppit Workshops Radministrator and Poet in Residence, Bee Golding! 

I asked Bee to write about her experience of being part of the Fools Play group, earlier this year and here's what she wrote:

Yesterday, I had the pleasure of interviewing my wonderfool fooling teacher, Franki Anderson for Clown Power Live.

Another rainy morning in Bristol, what better to do than head out to Cafe Number 12 in Easton for eggs and chat with internationally acclaimed improviser, Joanne Tremarco.

I voice-recorded us chatting for 1 hour and 17 minutes and the following blog is an edited version of our conversation. It's the 5th in a series of blogs entitled “When Holly Met...”, capturing conversations with clowns and clown teachers, Joanne is the first fool / fooling teacher I've interviewed. 

It brings me great pleasure to present a guest blog from performer / writer and long-term collaborator, Helen Duff. Helen has been applying some of the techniques she learned in my performance workshops to her writing, with fascinating results... Over to you, Helen!