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The Deep Play Institute

@deepplayinstitute

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To explore life’s biggest questions through transformative play.

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The Fools Research Lab: Compos(t)ing Realities is an international, interdisciplinary collaboration between Fools’ Valley, The Deep Play Institute and Candies and Catharsis.

We are bringing together contemporary dance, theater, experience design, psychosomatic techniques, relational & healing arts practices to research and develop frameworks for innovative, immersive performance and transformative ritual.

We are currently in the initial conceptual research phase. We are standing at the beginning of this journey and want to meet potential long-term collaborators who share our interests and experience. Our long-term vision is to form a dedicated, cohesive core crew that will continue to research, rehearse and perform in regular blocks each year.

This initial residency is a space for deepening practice, artistic research, and collective experimentation.

We are investigating what happens when we combine aesthetic composition practices with methods that draw out and embody hidden or challenging psychological content emerging within us (personally, interpersonally and systematically).

Over the seven days, we will introduce distinct practices from different traditions to see how they intersect, collaborate or create productive friction. Some of these practices include: Contact Improvisation, Psychodrama, Circling, Authentic Relating, Clowning, Butoh, Corporeal Mime, Real Time Composition, Process-Oriented Psychology, extended vocal techniques, and improvisation in experimental and physical theatre.

We hope to end our week having developed a psychospiritual game piece or ritual performance which will be offered to the larger community.

Our program will take place at Fools’ Valley, a research lab and residency space exploring how diverse practices — ranging from movement to dialogue, the introspective to the interactive, the improvisational to the reflective — support cognitive, emotional, and spiritual development. by @deepplayinstitute

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15 days ago

Inner Constellations Lab is a monthly Saturday program in Portland that gives participants an opportunity to experiment with a psychodrama-inspired inner partswork constellation practice called Clearing.

Clearing begins as all participants sit in a semi-circle. After a few moments of silence, a participant stands up and elects themself to be the protagonist-director. They begin in neutrality, waiting to see what arises in their inner world. When they notice an inner part emerge—an emotion, an image, a voice, or an energy—they move somewhere in the room and embody that part using gestures, movement, sound, and words. Shortly afterwards, they then invite another group member to step in and embody the part they inhabited. As new parts emerge, the protagonist invites additional participants to embody them, creating a living, dynamic tableau of interconnected parts. The protagonist begins to subtly direct this constellation, experimenting with spatial positions, postures, movement, and dynamics. They might re-join a role, converse with their parts, make certain parts louder or quieter, or dismiss and re-role parts as their inner landscape unfolds.

Each moment involves waiting, sensing, seeing, and shifting the emergent system to see what happens if we step deeper into a part, move further away, or bring parts closer together. The practice encourages experimentation as a kind of “tinkering”—not merely for the sake of experimentation, but for liberation: for seeing ourselves more clearly and unfolding the beautiful imaginative depths of our inner worlds. At times, this might involve healing or reconciliation between parts; at other times, it can reveal the subtlety, intensity, complexity, collaboration, and conflict inside of us. One intention is to allow our inner worlds to become outer, and to play with what is often held only inside our own minds and bodies. Another is to experience stepping into the parts of others, embodying our own parts and emotions as they map onto another person’s inner world. We might come away feeling more connected, seen, changed, refreshed, shaken up, delighted, overwhelmed, and/or alive. by @deepplayinstitute

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15 days ago

Join The Deep Play Institute for a workshop exploring the aesthetic and transformative connections between psyche and dance.

By psyche we mean the rich, animate field of images, voices and sensations that seem to come from within us but actually permeate a larger field around and between us. We could call these our feelings, moods, attitudes, personas. But psyche is richer than emotion alone. Our anger, our yearnings, our depressions have direction, movement, and a constellation of images that come with them.

Our orientation for the workshop will be to open ourselves up to what moves through us, finds us, or comes to us. That means we will spend much less time willfully trying to embody a particular archetype or character, and much more of our time seeing what archetypes or characters are organically arising out of the moment. We will aspire to hold, play and beautify this content through dance and expressive movement. For instance, when we are upset at someone, or irritated by a distraction, or desperately wanting to change something in our lives can we foster both love and distance from those attitudes so they doesn’t totally wash over us? And then instead, can we guide it, dance it, voice it, and follow it on its own terms into something aesthetically interesting?

We’ll draw on techniques from authentic relating, psychodrama, process oriented psychology, butoh, authentic movement, and clowning. Each gives us a container for waiting and seeing what emerges, whether feelings, parts of ourselves, energies, or voices, and a way to work with it through movement. We’ll meet this material both intrapersonally and relationally, mostly through the body and voice, with words playing a smaller role.

MOtiVE Brooklyn 68 Jay St Studio 621 Brooklyn NY
Saturday Oct 24th 2-7pm by @deepplayinstitute

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15 days ago

The Deep Play Institute's Fall 2026 Class Series

A 6-week semester of deeply playful curriculum for the post-disciplinary imagination

Sundays Sept 13 – Oct 18 |10 AM–12 PM PT / 1–3 PM ET / 7–9 PM CEST

[with recordings available for those who are unable to join synchronously]

cost is entirely by donation

***

Welcome back to school! And join the Deep Play Institute for our Fall Semester of deep play classes.

Our curriculum is more experiential than didactic, offering workshops that are experimental, playful, transformative mixtures of art, mindfulness, therapy and performance.

Classes will meet on Sundays from Sept 13th to Oct 18th on zoom, from 10am-12pm PDT / 1-3pm EDT / 7-9pm CEST

Participants must sign up for the entire series. Classes will be recorded, so if you can’t attend one you can still watch the recording. See below for our list of classes and facilitators.

Cost is by donation, taking inspiration from the dana practice in Buddhist monastic settings. We believe that this play is deeply important and liberatory, and offer the series as an act of service towards collective healing and transcendence. Please give what you can and find appropriate to support our organization and skillful facilitators, and we welcome you regardless of that number. by @deepplayinstitute

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2 months ago

Join the Deep Play Institute for 3-days of collective experimentation into the aestheticization of group process.
Our goal is to peer into the layers of our group process* and to experiment with methods for expressing our emergent joys, turmoils, and mysteries that arise within our group using tone, gesture, word, dance, and other expressive mediums. We (Aaron and Netta) have been researching techniques to express emergent group process for an audience, and we are looking for fellow enthusiasts who have some experience in this field to play and research together.

Last year, we began this research in earnest with a LARP pretending to be a theater troupe that had been working together for 5 years, developing avante-guard experiential group process theater, culminating in a (real) live performance and talk-back for an audience on the final day.

This year, we’ve decided to move away from both the LARP and the outside audience, and to instead focus on the real emerging group process, and on ourselves being the audience for one another. We will divide our group in half to function alternately as audience and performer. This will allow us to study, evaluate, critique, and iterate on the performance from the audience’s perspective, with an eye for how to effectively and creatively translate group process, without being rushed towards a final product.

Some of the practices that inspire us in our investigation are: Psychodrama, Fools Expression, Internal Family Systems, Meisner’s Repetition, Contact Improvisation, Circling, Butoh, Group Relations, Fool’s Expression (a clowning-adjacent practice). taken in Brooklyn, New York by @deepplayinstitute

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2 months ago

The Deep Play Institute will be hosting a 6-week virtual series of workshops held over zoom during September-October 2026. DPI is seeking facilitators to lead a 2-hour workshop for the series. The deadline to apply is July 5th.

Here’s a brief writeup of the same workshop series offered in last fall (2026): Welcome back to school! And join the Deep Play Institute for our first Fall Semester of deep play classes. For those who miss the whole theater of school, we’ll be playing it up with homework assignments, readings, and a virtual community of fellow students. Our curriculum will be more experiential than didactic, offering workshops that are experimental, playful, transformative mixtures of art, mindfulness, therapy and performance.

We are looking for classes that teach something to participants – some kind of "deep play" skill, where skill can be a term held quite loosely. But yes, the idea is that participants will come away having learnt something. The classes will be recorded, and the content of the class should be able to be easily learnt for participants who will not be able to attend live. A formula for a class can be something like the following, but not necessarily in this order: warming up (5-10 minutes), lecture (15-20 minutes), entire group activities (40-60 minutes), doing a demo of some activity that involves 1-3 people but in front of the entire group (15-20 minutes), breakout rooms (5-10 minutes), conversation and questions (15-20 minutes).

Facilitators will be paid between $100-250 USD for their workshop (depending on # of registered participants for the entire workshop series). by @deepplayinstitute

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4 months ago

About the Deep Play Institute The Deep Play Institute is a nonprofit organization committed to exploring life’s deepest questions through transformative play. DPI’s facilitators – therapists, artists, coaches, and philosophers – aim to use play to bring people into an experiential questioning of what it means to exist. Each program that DPI runs is a unique container, creatively constructed and inspired by practices that include: Gestalt therapy, Process Work, Psychodrama, Internal Family Systems Therapy, Tavistock Group Relations, Relational Psychoanalysis, Authentic Relating, Nonviolent Communication, Circling, coaching, performance art, contact improvisation, experimental theater, LARPs, surrealism, existential games, and various schools of meditation.

https://www.deepplayinstitute.com/events.html by @deepplayinstitute

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6 months ago

EXISTENTIAL PLAYGROUNDS
A free, virtual event series dedicated to playfully experimenting with transformative play

MAY 12, JUNE 2, JUNE 23
9am PST / 12pm EST / 5pm GMT

Our existence is fluid. What it is to be, is to be in relation to others, and the embedded rules that define our togetherness. In Existential Playgrounds we play with those rules, by breaking them, questioning them, and re-making them. Each playground creates an immersive container around a particular theme, technique or practice. Existential Playgrounds are free! This is an opportunity to come together and play without financial exchanges — a time to gather, connect, play deeply, and converse. This is also a great opportunity for people to explore what The Deep Play Institute is about, to get to know us, and feel into what we do, and how we do it. Think of it like recess!

In spring of 2026 Existential Playgrounds will dip into a simmering pool of archetypal depth psychology following the thoughts of the radical Jungian thinker James Hillman. We will begin to imagine our psyche's complexes (or inner parts) as entities worshipping a constellation of archetypes, gods, or modes of being. We will play with psychodramatic and imaginal techniques that help us re-orient to a worldview and way of "playing with our parts" that is perhaps more intrinsic to the fertile, wild, and awe-inspiring animate realm of images and voices that we call "our own".

https://www.deepplayinstitute.com/existentialplayground.html by @deepplayinstitute

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6 months ago

Between the "Real Me" & the Me that I Play | A 5-day Deep Play Workshop Series in Berlin | Tuesday June 16 - Saturday June 20, 12:00-17:00 (2026)
Studio 2 Bethanien, Berlin
250€ early bird before June 1st.

This workshop series is a collection of experiments aimed at combining, remixing and integrating two distinct lineages of practice: 1) performing arts practices — in particular improvisational & expressive movement, dance and theatre, and 2) healing arts — in particular somatic-psychodramatic practices, as well as here & now practices oriented towards authenticity.

On one side are practices of healing, transformation, and group process — Circling, Authentic Relating, Authentic Movement, Processwork, Partswork, Family Constellations and Psychodrama, among others. These practices are typically more for ourselves than for an audience, and more for collective transformation than for aesthetics. They attempt to strip away performative personas and ask with penetrative honesty: what is really happening?

On the other side are performative, dramatic, and dance practices that favor aesthetics — contact improvisation, Viewpoints, butoh, physical theatre, performance art, etc. These practices are devoted to the fascination, depth, composition and texture of our expressions. They value beauty as something which strikes and inspires us, whether pleasant or unpleasant, numbing or provocative, dangerous or safe, good or bad.

https://www.deepplayinstitute.com/berlin.html taken in Berlin, Germany by @deepplayinstitute

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6 months ago

Psychodrama is one of the original western methods of drama therapy. The founder of psychodrama, Jacob Moreno in Vienna in the 1920s defined it as, “the science which explores the truth by dramatic methods.” Psychodrama is practiced as a director guides a participant (or “protagonist”) through a dramatic exploration of their psyche. Scenes of the past, present or future, conflicts and resolutions, and/or dynamics between inner parts, are all expressed through gesture, sound, movement and words and then mapped in physical space as participants (or “auxiliaries”) stand-in for parts or internalized others. The core method of psychodrama involves role reversals, whereby the protagonist oscillates dynamically between the roles in whatever scene they are exploring, enabling empathy towards our dynamic self through dialogue. Directors typically guide a scene to not only repeat and reveal dynamics, but also modify them, allowing trauma to be re-negotiated through the power of our collective imaginations. A typical psychodrama lasts anywhere from 30-120 minutes.

Our practice will include warm-ups, sociometry (to explore group dynamics), small group exercises, and full psychodramas. The weekend begins Thursday evening with gentle openings, gradually building toward full-length psychodramas, which most participants will have the opportunity to enact if they choose. Along the way, we’ll also break the practice into its core techniques—role reversals, doubling, empty chair, and more—so participants can engage both as protagonists and as auxiliary roles, learning and practicing the essential tools of psychodrama. The weekend may also include a few adjacent psychodramatic techniques designed for exploring inner parts.

Our collective intention is that this weekend will provide us with a greater capacity to hold, nourish and beautify our psyches (the rich and dynamic breadth of images, voices, parts, internalized others, complexes, and archetypes) and provide renewed creative vitality and agency to play with these inner worlds together towards the collective goal of healing and self expression.

https://www.deepplayinstitute.com/psychodrama-2026-summer.html by @deepplayinstitute

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7 months ago

One of the biggest shadows in Contact Improvisation is the experience of REJECTION. Without the container of the length of a song, we often find ourselves wondering: Is this dance over? Is my partner still enjoying this? Am I? Rejection shapes how we enter, stay in, and exit eachdance. And it influences the rhythm and texture of the dance itself, surfacing as doubt, second-guessing, or careful negotiating of space.

We’re told we can leave a dance at any time, no explanation necessary, however, many of us develop elaborate strategies to protect ourselves from rejection. If someone leaves us, we’re told not to take it personally. Yet, there are many reasons why we might want to end a dance and sometimes it does have to do with the other person, or least with what they are doing or how they are behaving. This knowledge, delicate though it may be, can offer us a valuable mirror to our own patterns and choices.

In this workshop, we lean toward discomfort rather than away from it. Through warm-ups, facilitated conversation, authentic relating exercises, simple role-play, and dancing with verbal reflection, we will explore the what, how, and why of rejection and notice what emerges when we name it and its motivations alongside our dance.

The What, Why & How of Rejection in Contact Improvisation
Monday, April 13, 6-8:30pm
Dumbo, Brooklyn
$25-55 - registration required
Link in bio

Participants should have some CI experience, however beginners are warmly welcomed. What’s most needed is curiosity and a willingness to play and be honest. by @deepplayinstitute

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7 months ago

How can I connect with my true feelings, and dance, move and voice my authenticity moment by moment? How can I dance hidden depths beneath me (grotesque, murky, imploded, hopeless feelings, etc) and also dance hidden heights above me (ethereal, subtle beauty, serenity, tenderness, etc)? How can I refine, curate, cultivate, and nourish these authentic movements into something deeper, more precise, more exquisite and sacred? What does it do to orient towards presence and authenticity in three different registers – within me, between us, and in some kind of field that is greater than us? How do I discern between the different emotional threads I am feeling at a given moment and "choose" which one to follow? What does it do to stay with one emotional register vs flit between multiple? And more...

The workshop/lab will have 3 parts to it:

Part 1 (Thursday 6-9pm) We will orient towards presence as something inside of us. We will use solo and partner exercises to explore how to work with that which is deeply alive in us (and dead in us) and then use witnessing and mild feedback to bring out what facets of that can be carried forth, integrated, re-shaped and refined. This section will combine techniques from Process Oriented Psychology, Authentic Movement and Fool Expression (Christie Animas).

Parts 2-3 (Friday 3:30-8:30pm) Part 2 will orient towards presence as relational. We will begin with some techniques drawn from circling, authentic relating and sociometry to bring us authentically into the relational sphere, and then integrate that presence with some clowning techniques and our work from the first part of the workshop to try to dance what is between us. This section will mainly be in dyads. After a short break (participants are encouraged to bring a light dinner with them) we'll transition into Part 3, which will be an orienting towards the transpersonal, i.e. thinking of presence as something beyond us – a field stretching and permeating between me, you and the world. We'll begin with imaginal techniques drawn from butoh, working with collective images.

https://www.deepplayinstitute.com/dancedeep.html taken in Portland, Oregon by @deepplayinstitute

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8 months ago