2025 UPDATE: Wise Fool has lost their long-time studio space off Siler Rd. We are currently operating as a "traveling circus" while we seek a new home by bringing our award-winning youth programs into partner organizations through local collaboration. Wise Fool is a beloved and award-winning non-profit organization at the center of Santa Fe's community arts scene. Our mission is to ignite imagination, build community, and promote social justice through performances and hands-on experiences in the arts of circus, puppetry, and theatre. We serve 2,000 youth and adults with hands-on activities and 14,000 audience members annually with high-quality experiences built upon our core values of community, arts accessibility, and social justice. Our name honors the court jester or "wise fool," who in European medieval times was able to address controversial matters to the king and those in power without fear of retribution, as wise fools would often draw upon disarming spectacle and humor to do so. Over the past two decades, Wise Fool New Mexico has been utilizing this "back door" approach to opening dialogue in otherwise touchy situations in the creation of productions about social issues such as censorship, water rights and land use, domestic violence, immigration and borders. As a pioneer in the emerging North American social circus movement and the only contemporary circus arts company in New Mexico, Wise Fool is further evolving circus as an art form by developing quality productions, professional artists, and expert teachers for circus-based arts curriculums. Encouraging audiences to jump the bounds of possibility and recognize that we are all capable of the extraordinary, we offer first-hand explorations and skill-building experiences in which participants discover and develop their own connection to the arts.
