Fall 2021 Semester
Workshops for playfully diving deep into life's biggest questions
The Deep Play Institute launches our first full semester of workshops. Each is facilitated by one of our brilliantly talented team members. Most of our workshops are online, with one in-person workshop to be held in Philadelphia, PA. Classes begin in early October, and last from anywhere between 4-10 weeks. Most classes are held on weekday evenings, or weekend afternoons and are suited for North/Central/South American time zones, and some also for European time zones. Our workshops are priced to make our work sustainable for our facilitators and organization, however we are also deeply committed to making our programs accessible to participants from diverse economic backgrounds. We believe that this work should be available for all who need it. If you are in need, please contact us ([email protected]) to discuss a sliding-scale tuition fee that would be suitable for you.
OPEN HOUSE
Sunday Sept 26th, 7:30-9:30pm EST
an evening of free samplings/tasters of our Fall workshops
Sunday Sept 26th, 7:30-9:30pm EST
an evening of free samplings/tasters of our Fall workshops
PLAYING WITH WHAT
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LOVE GAMES
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PLAYING WITH WHAT WE LOVE MOST
INSTRUCTORKhuyen Bui is an author, speaker and well sought after guide who specifically works with purpose-driven leaders, community builders and coaches to level up their impact. Graduated cum laude from Tufts University studying Computer Science and Philosophy, he thrives in bringing analytical rigor into his fascination with human messiness. Khuyen enjoys writing & storytelling and has won several awards, notably Peter Drucker Challenge and The Moth Boston. His first book, Not Being - The Art of Self-Transformation, is about how our sense of self shifts from a separate entity into a wider sense of togetherness. He is currently based in Vietnam, pioneering this new yet ancient way of living, working and playing together, incorporating many modalities such as writing, coaching, contact improvisation, poetry, meditation and circling. His eyes lit up upon beautiful questions. Find him at khuyenbui.com
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What do you love the most? Have you given yourself to it, and if not, why? What dampens that fire? What is possible when it is sparked more?
In this brand new month-long series, we will be playing with what we love the most. We will court them, play with them and likely be enthralled by what we found. This series will be most suitable for those who are contemplating a change, such as browsing around for new places to live or work with. It is also for those who have been going through a transition, exploring a different way of life that goes beyond the usual mode of productivity and achievements. What we love the most is often elusive, and its very elusive nature is what makes the play so tantalizing. Sure you’ve heard of the infamous line "do what you love", but what if it really is "flirt with what you might love?" Finding your passion isn't a serious business. It really is a risky play. Somehow in the course of life, we lose touch with that vitality, what the Greek once calls "eros". If you ever felt meh and want a reset button, this series is for you. It will rekindle that fire, reboot your adventurous side that WE ALL KNOW YOU HAVE BUT ALAS WHERE IS IT NOW, make you laugh and facepalm. You will leave the series with a new affair for that elusive thing called "what you love". Who knows, you might get into a romance with it :-) HOW? The special aphrodisiac for this includes: Courtly Questions: Question is the way to organize the unknown. If what we love remains elusive, we will need suggestive questions that will coach and coax out your core. Embodiment: physical engagement to lure yourself out of mehness, making sure you don’t just love the idea but also know intimately the sensations of that which you love. Collective Presence: through the practice of circling, we will closely accompany each other to spark the aliveness already here, the eros of life. In between sessions, we will have a few sign spotting games to continue brewing your insights on that which you love and a dedicated group conversational channel to share them. Curious to know more? - check out this YouTube link DATES: Cycle 1: Oct 3, 10, 17, 24. Cycle 2: Nov 7, 14, 21, Dec 5 (4 sessions) TIME: Sundays 10am-12pm EST LOCATION: Zoom MAX CAPACITY: 12 Participants TUITION: $250 Early Bird Registration before Sept 27 (please contact us for sliding scale tuition options) |
LOVE GAMES
INSTRUCTORNetta Sadovsky, MFA, LSW (she or they) is an artist and therapist living in Philadelphia, PA. She provides group and individual counseling specializing in alternative sexualities and relationship structures at West Philly Therapy Center, and is a teaching artist at Center for Creative Works. Netta is a student of Internal Family Systems, Tavistock Group Relations, Relational Psychodynamic Therapy, Mindful Facilitation, Theater of the Oppressed, and Psychodrama, and makes artwork that borrows from and experiments with these practices under the moniker Suso Phizer.
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Love Games is a 10 week workshop exploring romantic love. We will use a variety of therapeutic, somatic, meditation, and pedagogical practices to structure our time together. We will learn from our group members’ experiences in the past and present, and support one another's imaginings into the future. We will sometimes explore our experiences of love in the here-and-now of the group, which will be aided by an agreement that no romantic relationships may be started during the 10 week workshop. These here-and-now explorations will allow us to also notice and investigate love’s relationship to other feelings that often show up alongside it, including hate, like, shame, euphoria, and arousal. We will set a norm of acceptance towards the many forms love can take, with a special attention to sending acceptance towards the ways that differences in gender, sexuality, race, age, ability, neurodiversity, and other identities can inflect our preferences and norms. We will work together to maintain and grow the safety of the space so that our group’s diversity can be seen and worked with.
I will draw from a series of practices to help us deepen our questions, including Psychodrama, Process Work, Internal Family Systems therapy, Contact Improvisation, Tavistock Group Relations, and Theater of the Oppressed. These methods will aid us to move beyond analytical conversation into more embodied and experiential ways of learning and knowing. Our time together will also be supported by readings including On Love by Eve Sedgewick, Polysecure by Jessica Fern, and All About Love by Bell Hooks. We will use these texts to help us wonder about how our understandings of love have political roots and implications. As a group we will collaborate to find our questions about love. Some that I anticipate bringing into the space with me include: what is love? How has the concept been taught to me? What about love have I given up on? How does my understanding of love relate to my ethnic/cultural backgrounds? How does my understanding of love reflect a political project beyond me? What happens to love when it intersects with judgments and disliking? What happens with love when boredom is present? What has it been like to love while also hating? DATES: Oct 5, 12, 19, 26, Nov 2, 9. 16, 30, Dec 7, 14 (10 sessions) TIME: Tuesdays 7:30-9:30pm EST LOCATION: MAAS Building, 1325 N Randolph St. Philadelphia MAX CAPACITY: 12 Participants TUITION: $500 Early Bird Registration before Sept 27 (please contact us for sliding scale tuition options) COVID POLICY: All participants will be required to show proof of covid vaccination, and will be required to wear masks at all times during the workshop. Deadline to apply is Sept 30th |
CONTACT (MORE OR LESS)
INSTRUCTORSarah Ledbetter is a dancing writer and a body-based psychotherapist whose work has been presented or published nationally and internationally at such cool spots and publications as the Sans Souci Festival of Dance Film, the Berlin Black Film Festival, Earthdance E|Merge Interdisciplinary Arts Residency, the Body Mind Centering Conference, floromancy, Fourth River, Right Hand Pointing, and R and R Literary Magazine. Her main interest is how the fiesta of being in a body flows reciprocally into creative, social, site-specific, and therapeutic process. She is currently based in Nashville, Tennessee and Skull Valley, Arizona where her body-based creative and psychotherapeutic practice is anchored and winged.
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Imagine for a second that you’re in a mosh pit or on a crowded subway – does this exhilarate you? Gross you out? Do you miss it or do you secretly dread the “return to normal” (whatever that is, whenever that may be?) Or perhaps it’s all of that – a swirl of desire and anxiety with contact is perhaps a defining feature of the mammalian class. So much focus on the distance between our bodies has left what happens WITHIN the “six foot life preserver” neglected.
CONTACT (more or less) is an experiment and an exploration of contact--wanting more, wanting less, and playing with what’s actually already here in our own breathable bubbles. This playful, immersive, and also restful workshop will accompany participants through embodied awareness practices, contact improvisation scores for beginners, and experiments with social space as it intersects with the imagination, on a mercurial quest to reclaim our very own kind of contact with the life that is already here. The 6 weeks of discovery are organized a bit like nesting bowls. We’ll start with the most granular of questions and move out to more subtle and spacious ones, each layer containing and holding the prior ones and building towards a big state of wonder about what it means to share ourselves with one another – our weight, our momentum, and our moment – across the vastness that now connects us. Week One: How round is the earth--in your experience? Week Two: Rebound/bouncy boundaries: where do you end and I begin? Week Three: Introversion Inversion: What’s wrong with being shy?? Week Four: Inner volumes and Outer Space/Alien intelligence? Week Five: Languid Language in the Chaise Lounge Week Six: Adult Swim: Advancing a constant operative of discovery DATES: October 16, 23, 30, Nov 6 & 13 (6 Sessions) TIME: Saturdays 3-4:30pm EST LOCATION: Zoom MAX CAPACITY: 20 Participants TUITION: $350 Early Bird Registration before Sept 27 (please contact us for sliding scale tuition options) Image Credit: Jeri B. Ledbetter, "BLANCHE, mixed media, 2021". |
GAMES WE PLAY WITH OURSELVES
INSTRUCTORNatalia Stroika (she/her +/-) is an Existential Game Maker/Destroyer. She is the creator of Ludic Liberation, a practice of collective play aimed at revealing & releasing our internalized limitations. You can read more about the Ludic Liberation philosophy at www.ludicliberation.com, join a monthly Ludic Liberation Lab to help R&D new liberatory game mechanics, read The Lab Report of past experimental results and existential game theory, or work with Natalia directly on tuning up or redesigning your Personal Existential Game (PEG). Natalia has a Doctorate in Learning Sciences (the science and art of how people learn!) and training in Transformational Social Therapy and the Warm Data Lab process. Natalia lives in so-called South Philadelphia and as mummer with the Vaudevillains New Years Brigade, she has been a hoagie, a tree, a rainbow, a butterfly, a feral cat mother, a fish, a planet, and a pterodactyl.
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As children, we talked to imaginary friends, built forts and arranged dollhouses, daydreamed about fantasy worlds, and pretended to be magical beings. But when we got “all grown up,” these varied forms of solo play have all but dissolved. As adults, we still play sometimes, but our play is mostly designated to certain contexts: the phone screen, the video game console, the weekly RPG night, sometimes, perhaps, the bedroom.
Whatever happened to those childhood games of ours? In this 6-week workshop series for adults, we’ll consider the possibility that we didn’t just outgrow imaginative solo play; rather, we’ve adultified it – made it complicated, work-like, self-important. In fact, we played our games so well into this next level that we forgot that we were even playing. In the process, we also lost the most important rule of childhood play–the one that says that you can always change the rules. This series will invite us to reveal our secret adult gameplay dynamics and – if we desire – to re-envision our existential playbooks using the methods of Ludic Liberation. Ludic Liberation is a practice of collective play designed to explore and experiment with conventions, norms, mainstream concepts, and commonly-held beliefs. The goal of Ludic Liberation practice is to playfully make the familiar strange, and in the process to uncover a deeper, more essential truth that has been covered by the illusions and contradictions of living in society. Some adult-level games we might collectively redesign during “Games We Play With Ourselves” include:
This series is for existential players who are feeling the call to adventure, are intrigued by the power of the reversal, are willing and ready to question (at least a few of) their beliefs, and are brave enough to experiment with different rules for playing the game of life! DATES: October 6, 13, 20, 27, Nov 3 & 10 (6 Sessions) TIME: Wednesdays 7-8:30pm EST LOCATION: Zoom MAX CAPACITY: 12 Participants TUITION: $350 Early Bird Registration before Sept 27 (please contact us for sliding scale tuition options) PERK: One-on-One Session on your Personal Existential Game |
WEEKLY SESSION DESCRIPTIONS
WEEK 1: EXISTENTIAL GAME RETRIEVAL. In this session we will (imaginatively) journey to a magical place where all our childhood play experiences are safely stored. We will explore our personal core play orientations, why we might have forgotten or abandoned certain games, and retrieve forms of play we want to bring back with us into our present lives.
WEEK 2. GAMES OF ASPIRATION. A category of imaginary games we continue to play as adults are games of “aspiration.” We love to imagine our future selves – better and richer and wiser and perfectly fit, living in our (always clean) dream home. In this session, we’ll luxuriate in our future perfection to uncover the hidden rules of this class of games, how they may be sabotaging our fun and happiness, and consider if they might need a tune-up.
WEEK 3: REGRET GAMES. Whether it’s the “spirit of the stairs” from the last conversation with an acquaintance, the lover that got away, or that dumb thing we did when we were nineteen, many of us are haunted by regrets. What if we’d made that other choice? In this session, we will experiment with ways we might STILL live out alternate lives, in the process altering our present reality. YES, have your cake and eat it too! Delicious regret cake!
WEEK 4. PLAYING WITH ATTENTION. Zen teachers cryptically suggest that awakening is attention. Poets say that attention is what the soul is made of. Mystics say that ecstasy is attention at its highest. Meanwhile, what’s left of our attention after email and social media have stolen most of it, keeps… wandering? In this session we will observe and manipulate the powers of our senses to learn to play the most important game of all: the game of being present to what is (and receiving its many presents!!!).
WEEK 5. THE GAME OF BEING YOU with guest facilitator Indigo Esmonde. BE YOURSELF! “All the other jobs are taken.” But how do we know to be ourselves, really? Do we try to repeat who we were yesterday? In this session with Daydream Artist and Failure Consultant Indigo Esmonde, we will act out and play with re-directing the scripts of our personalities.
WEEK 6. PEGGING OURSELVES. In this final session, we’ll put together all what we’ve discovered about our personal existential games and decide if we want to reinvent them using the many ludic and liberatory mechanics explored throughout the series. Players will walk out with a new set of rules for their own life!
WEEK 1: EXISTENTIAL GAME RETRIEVAL. In this session we will (imaginatively) journey to a magical place where all our childhood play experiences are safely stored. We will explore our personal core play orientations, why we might have forgotten or abandoned certain games, and retrieve forms of play we want to bring back with us into our present lives.
WEEK 2. GAMES OF ASPIRATION. A category of imaginary games we continue to play as adults are games of “aspiration.” We love to imagine our future selves – better and richer and wiser and perfectly fit, living in our (always clean) dream home. In this session, we’ll luxuriate in our future perfection to uncover the hidden rules of this class of games, how they may be sabotaging our fun and happiness, and consider if they might need a tune-up.
WEEK 3: REGRET GAMES. Whether it’s the “spirit of the stairs” from the last conversation with an acquaintance, the lover that got away, or that dumb thing we did when we were nineteen, many of us are haunted by regrets. What if we’d made that other choice? In this session, we will experiment with ways we might STILL live out alternate lives, in the process altering our present reality. YES, have your cake and eat it too! Delicious regret cake!
WEEK 4. PLAYING WITH ATTENTION. Zen teachers cryptically suggest that awakening is attention. Poets say that attention is what the soul is made of. Mystics say that ecstasy is attention at its highest. Meanwhile, what’s left of our attention after email and social media have stolen most of it, keeps… wandering? In this session we will observe and manipulate the powers of our senses to learn to play the most important game of all: the game of being present to what is (and receiving its many presents!!!).
WEEK 5. THE GAME OF BEING YOU with guest facilitator Indigo Esmonde. BE YOURSELF! “All the other jobs are taken.” But how do we know to be ourselves, really? Do we try to repeat who we were yesterday? In this session with Daydream Artist and Failure Consultant Indigo Esmonde, we will act out and play with re-directing the scripts of our personalities.
WEEK 6. PEGGING OURSELVES. In this final session, we’ll put together all what we’ve discovered about our personal existential games and decide if we want to reinvent them using the many ludic and liberatory mechanics explored throughout the series. Players will walk out with a new set of rules for their own life!