Holly Stoppit in The Guardian!

Jan 20 2025

Holly Stoppit
Image credit: Cover image for The Guardian article, featuring a photo of my clown students, out and about in Bristol city centre / by Joe Rosser

Last week, Amelia Hill, senior reporter at The Guardian interviewed me, along with a gaggle of clown teachers and students, to find out about the therapeutic benefits of clowning. She’d gotten wind of a growing trend of clown teachers offering workshops - not just to train people to become professional performers, but to also offer spaces for self-discovery and healing - and she wanted to know why!

Here is the article: ‘It allowed me to be more myself,” how becoming a clown can be therapeutic.

Although Amelia only printed a small fragment of what I said, and paraphrased my quotes, I think it’s a good article that is respectfully written and offering a fairly broad perspective as to why people might want to engage with clown skills training for therapeutic benefit (which was the subject of my MA dissertation, don’t you know?). 

It features quotes from two of my dear students - Lucy Heard and Olly Mead and two photos of my clowns around town, during my 5-day ‘Deepening Clown,’ workshop, taken by Joe Rosser, pre-pandemic. 

When I think back to those days, taking rabbles of clowns out into Bristol city centre with the aim of making new friends, I get a warm, fuzzy feeling in my heart. So many gorgeous memories of clowns wandering into shops, dancing to buskers and paddling barefoot in the fountains!

Holly Stoppit
Image credit: Me and my clown rabble / by Joe Rosser

My work has moved on a lot since then. I still offer the occasional clown workshop, if commissioned, but I am now mostly focussing on exploring embodied, creative, playful approaches to parts work, combining Fooling (solo impro where the performer embodies the voices in their head), Internal Family Systems (IFS), dramatherapy and mindfulness (more about that here). But Amelia wanted to focus on the clowning and I’m grateful to have been invited to contribute my experience to the article. 

It seems like therapeutic clowning is having it's moment! When I wrote my dissertation, 12 years ago, I could only find two papers that explored clowning for therapeutic benefit. There were plenty of papers exploring the efficacy of clown doctors - clowns who work in hospitals with children and their families - but very little on finding therapeutic benefit from clown skills training.

I think it's important to say that there isn't a particular model of therapeutic clowning that we are all working from, each individual practitioner is drawing on their own training and experience to offer their own personal take. If you're considering exploring this path, it's worth taking some time researching the teacher to find out if their values align with yours. I am really glad that Amelia included a note of caution towards the end, quoting Lorna Rose Treen:

“…those considering taking up clown for therapeutic reasons should take care. “Therapeutic clowning is a very specific thing: it’s not what mainstream clown classes or clown school are about: those techniques push you into uncomfortable places that require huge resilience.""

Having spent most of my 20’s curled up foetal and sobbing in the corner of many a (non-therapeutic) theatre clown workshop, it was only in my 30’s when I was training as a dramatherapist, that I started to realise that I had been using theatre clown workshops for therapeutic purposes, and that the teachers were neither trained nor equipped for that!

I am eternally grateful for all the clown teachers that helped me develop my pedagogy - both to those who taught me how I didn’t want to work and to those who modelled kindness, care, compassion, clarity, spaciousness and love. You can see a list of all my teachers here.

These days, having qualified as a clinical supervisor, I am delighted to be supporting a range of clown teachers, facilitators and practitioners through my one-to-one supervision and creative consultancy services. 

I am looking forward to partnering with Robyn Hambrook to present an exploratory clown teachers lab at Hawkwood Centre for Future Thinking in Stroud in February. This could be the beginning of a new model of peer-support for clown teachers...

Robyn and will be opening up our exploration of the future of clowning to the wider clown community at the Clown Congress in Bristol in April. You are very much invited!

Here is The Guardian article once again: ‘It allowed me to be more myself,” how becoming a clown can be therapeutic.

To find out about my Playful Embodied Creative Approaches to Internal Family Systems workshop click here.

Watch this space or sign up to my newsletter below to find out more about my offerings.

Holly Stoppit menu