Playing w/ Transformation (Fall 2022)

Playing with Transformation - Improvising Healing Arts Practices & Techniques
A Virtual Workshop Series (Oct 13 - Nov 17 2022)

REGISTRATION DEADLINE IS SUNDAY OCT 9TH

The Deep Play Institute presents Playing with Transformation - Improvising Healing Arts Practices & Techniques. This is a 1-month workshop series designed for creative skill sharing and form-building in healing arts practices. Our series contains two blocks. The first block offers experiential tastes of a handful of vibrant contemporary healing practices including: Internal Family Systems, Circling, Voice Dialogues, Developmental Transformations, Family Constellations, and Psychodrama. The second block offers more divergent and creative articulations of transformative techniques blending somatic practices, roleplay techniques, guided meditations, and dramatization methods.

Participants may choose up to six workshops – three in block one, and three in block two. All workshops will be video recorded, allowing all participants to gain access to all the workshops (including ones they did not attend synchronously). Videos will be accessible online for 30-days after the workshop series. The workshops will be conducted over Zoom. Workshops cater to Eastern Time zones (EST), and will be mostly held on weekday evenings and weekend days. Each workshop is two hours long.

REGISTRATION INCLUDES:
Opening & Closing Workshops (synchronous)
6 synchronous workshops (you select 3 from each block)
Access to video recordings from all 15 workshops (accessible until Dec 15th)

Sliding Scale Tuition = Tier 1 $400 / Tier 2 $300 / Tier 3 $200 / BIPOC Tier 3 (Tier Info)

INTRODUCTION

all registered participants are invited

Thurs Oct 13th 8:00-9:00pm EST

Opening Talk w/ Aaron Finbloom & Netta Sadovsky

Join Aaron Finbloom (director) and Netta Sadovsky (assistant director) as we launch our workshops series. We’ll explain DPI’s approach to play, transformation, techniques and practices, and give brief overview of some of the offerings for the series. Then we will showcase a few transformative techniques, and together begin to play with them.

Netta Sadovsky, MFA, LSW (she/they) is an artist and therapist living in Philadelphia, PA. They provide individual and relationship therapy specializing in Internal Family Systems (IFS), working with kink, polyamory, the hardships of artmaking, and healing from relational trauma at West Philly Therapy Center. They also provide Psychedelic Psychotherapy at Voyage Healing in Philadelphia, with a specialty in using IFS with Ketamine Assisted Therapy. Aaron Finbloom is a philosopher, artist, pedagogue and counselor. Finbloom's lifework involves expanding transformative inquiry through games, performance, and structured play. He holds a PhD in relational practice from Concordia University's Interdisciplinary Humanities & Fine Arts program, and teaches philosophy at the City College of New York and The University of Portland.

BLOCK 1

experiential tastes of vibrant contemporary healing practices including IFS, Psychodrama, Family Constellations, DvT and more
all participants choose 3 below

Tuesday Oct 18th 7:30-9:30pm EST

Mapping the Plurality of Self through IFS w/ Netta Sadovsky

During this workshop, participants will be invited to focus inside themselves to discover what subpersonalities, or parts, of you are present in the here-and-now of the workshop. These parts might show up as sensations, emotions, images, a tone of voice, numbness or blankness, or something else. We will spend some time meditating and journaling together on the parts-of-self that are present, and then the facilitator will provide a live demo of the Internal Family Systems process of "parts mapping" - a process of tracking the relationships between parts. Participants will then have a chance to try this process with one another in dyads.

Netta Sadovsky, MFA, LSW (she/they) is an artist and therapist living in Philadelphia, PA, and the assistant director at The Deep Play Institute (DPI). They provide individual and relationship therapy specializing in Internal Family Systems (IFS), working with kink, polyamory, the hardships of artmaking, and healing from relational trauma at West Philly Therapy Center. They also provide Psychedelic Psychotherapy at Voyage Healing in Philadelphia, with a specialty in using IFS with Ketamine Assisted Therapy. Netta is level 1 trained in Internal Family Systems, small group consultancy trained in Tavistock Group Relations, and is a student of Relational Psychodynamic Therapy, Mindful Facilitation, Theater of the Oppressed, and Psychodrama. They make artwork that borrows from and experiments with these practices under the moniker Suso Phizer.

Wed Oct 19th 12-2pm EST

Voice Dialogue w/ Christie Animas

Voice Dialogue is an embodied and energetic process that allows us to recognize, access and get to know in an intimate way the different aspects in us. Most importantly, this process fosters an access to what we call the ‘Aware Ego Process’. This is the place within us where we can become aware of the different polarities in ourselves, where we can modulate and tend to them energetically and where we can allow more aspects in us to come through. This process uses focusing, constellations of parts in a room, biographical and somatic exploration of parts, energetic awareness and witnessing position.

Christie Animas has a decade of experience in creative and embodied personal development practices showing people how to access, befriend and harness the energy and wealth of all the different aspects in us. Christie has a background of being a wild kid, escaping school to spend time with horses. Later on she got a degree in occupational therapy to explore how she could help people through creativity and connection with animals. She specialised then in child psychiatry before training as a Voice Dialogue practitioner in Dorset, UK, and as a Fool facilitator with Franki Anderson. She now focus all her work in working with adults who want to access more inner freedom, play and creativity in their life. She is offering her work in the UK and throughout Europe, and has created and gathered an expanding, vibrant community of players in the South West of England. She also works one-to-one using the Voice Dialogue process.

Friday Oct 21st 3:00-5:00pm EST

Psychodrama w/ Aaron Finbloom

Psychodrama is an action method (developed in the 1920s by Jacob Moreno in Vienna) in which participants use spontaneous dramatization, role playing, and dramatic self-presentation to engage a situation or encounter. It is an incredible performative practice for diving deeply and playful into intra/inter-subjective facets of self and other. Psychodrama is practiced in a group, whereby one participant volunteers to be the protagonist who then acts on their "drama" with the aid of other group members as auxiliaries. It is a highly structured technique with forms that establish safety, minimize projection, and create the capacity for extremely deep and transformative expression. During this workshop we will translate some key psychodramatic techniques into solo work (i.e. skills that participants can use on their own), and also explore some shorter vignettes in a group setting.

Aaron Finbloom is a philosopher, artist, pedagogue and counselor. He is also the founder and director of the Deep Play Institute. Finbloom's lifework (and PhD in relational practice) involves expanding transformative inquiry through games, performance, and structured play. After an initial 40-hour psychodrama training in 2018, Finbloom co-led a psychodrama group in Montreal, and has directed dozens of psychodrama sessions in the forthcoming years. His facilitation style is informed by training in Circling, Authentic Relating, Vipassana Meditation and inspired by key theoretical aspects of Internal Family Systems. Finbloom has seen clients for over 2+ years using transformative deep play techniques derived from these aforementioned practices. He holds a PhD in relational practice from Concordia University's Interdisciplinary Humanities & Fine Arts program, and teaches philosophy at the City College of New York and The University of Portland.

Sunday Oct 23rd 11am-1pm EST

Developmental Transformations w/ ME Louis

DvT theory is a transformative play theory based on the assumption that Being is inherently unstable, and that form arises in the service of stabilizing Being. Sources of instability include the perception of difference in the world, which gives rise to desire, whose aim is to eliminate difference and this leads to suffering. Desire leads to the formation of territories such as concepts, roles, and identities. By manifesting presence in DvT we aim to achieve a continuous flow or process of difference, formation, and then de-formation, which follows the ever-changing, transforming nature of Being. The main areas that people experience instability include the Body, Others, and Change, and DvT targets these areas of experience by attending to embodiment, encounter, and transformation. DvT workshop will help you practice this flow. by experiment this practice together!

ME Louis is originally from Belgium and has been living in Montreal since 2007. They hold a Master's degree in Drama Therapy from Concordia University in Montreal (2010) and a Master's degree in Couple and Family Therapy from McGill University (2022). She was co-director of the Institute of Developmental Transformation in Montreal from 2016 to 2021 for which she gives the monthly training. Through their work, they have always wished to give body and voice to queer women and people who are silenced by society; whether it be in the prison environment, in shelters for women in difficulty, immigrant women or queer women and people who have experienced incest. They currently work in an eating disorder clinic as an individual, couple and family psychotherapist. They give workshops in Quebec and Europe and receive clients in private practice.

Monday Oct 24th 7:30-9:30pm EST

Psychodramatizing Our Internal Family Systems w/ Netta Savosky & Aaron Finbloom

Netta Sadovsky and Aaron Finbloom will demonstrate a virtual method for combining Internal Family Systems (IFS) and Psychodrama. The workshop will begin with a brief overview of these techniques, and quickly move into experiential learning with volunteers, using Psychodrama techniques to concretize the insight work of IFS. This workshop is open to all experience levels, and is especially well suited to people with some experience with IFS and/or Psychodrama, or other experiential therapies.

Wed Oct 26th 7:30-9:30pm EST

Family and Systemic Constellations w/ Luisa Muhr

Family and Systemic Constellations is energy healing work which looks at one's blocking patterns, rooted deep within the soul, in one's ancestry. Through guided healing movements and the help of representatives, change is being brought into these dynamics, which lead to deep release within the self and so, translate to the outside and one's everyday life. We will look at: Who is missing in one's family and/or present system and/or who has not been given a place (yet)? As well as: Who doesn't have their rightful place in our family and/or present system (yet)? Be prepared to dive deep

Luisa Muhr is a New-York-based artist and Family & Systemic Constellations practitioner, originally from Vienna, Austria, with Hungarian and Anatolian-Greek roots. She was first introduced to Family Constellations in her early childhood in Austria and studied with her mentor Dr. Peter Orban, one of Bert Hellinger's early students. As a Family and Systemic Constellations practitioner she currently works and has worked at OHM Center, MINKA Brooklyn, Balance Arts Center, Maha Rose, and is scheduled to offer Constellations at Kripalu, Center for Yoga and Health. Muhr has also been featured on Kimberly Ann Johnson’s renowned "Sex, Birth, Trauma" podcast, amongst others. Muhr has also been featured on Kimberly Ann Johnson’s renowned "Sex, Birth, Trauma" podcast, amongst others.

BLOCK 2

divergent & creative articulations of transformative techniques blending somatics, role play, guided meditation, and dramatization.
all participants choose 3

Thurs Oct 27th 7:30-9:30pm EST

Statework w/ Julia Gladstone

In this workshop participants will be led through altered states of consciousness. We will explore somatic strategies that enhance receptivity and deepen attunement to the trajectories of emotions within our bodies. Unusual imagery, embodiment, and rhythm will make way for generative distortions of time, space, self, and other. The practices are guided by an embrace of disorientation as a key towards transformation. Participants are encouraged to attend this workshop from a comfortable space where they will be able to move freely.

Julia Gladstone is an artist and social worker. In her artistic practice, she operates within the expanded field of choreography to figure socialities. Forms take shape through performance, sculpture, video, relational encounters, and experimental pedagogy. Her work has been presented in France, Belgium, Israel, and across the U.S. She is a recipient of the DAAD Fellowship in Performing Arts, organizes Clouds Gathering performance festival, and is a certified facilitator of Deep Listening. She received an MFA from University of Pennsylvania, and is in the process of completing her MSW from Simmons University.

Sun Oct 30th 12:00-2:00pm EST

Somatic Experiential Group Work: Together in the Gap w/ Sarah Ledbetter

This workshop will guide participants through a form of therapeutic group work that centers the perspective of the body and cultivates the lived experience of empathy, of witness, and of participation in one another's liberation from exhausted stories towards more adaptive and vitalizing ones. Rooted in SomEx, a somatic and experiential approach to relational trauma for individual and group psychotherapy, participants will guided along an arc that begins with warming and loosening the pathways of body and voice with a combo of pop music and primordial yawps, eases into cooling inquiry, opens into witnessing, and culminates in experiences of sharing, revisiting, and revising an important lived story or two from the perspective of the body, both personally and collectively. What is it like to take part in another person's experiences with our own flesh and its ways of knowing? How do we tolerate the wilderness of the gap between the way we so often recall an experience and the way it moves in us now as a seed of possibility? There are no answers here, only options and choices and curiosity, grounded in safety and care.

Sarah 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.

Wed Nov 2nd 7:30-9:30pm EST

Inviting our Monsters to Dance w/ Anna Costa e Silva

The roles and parts we play are usually connected to past experiences and traumas; they are forms to protect ourselves from coming back to difficult emotional places. Behind each mask, there lies a monster who is afraid to be faced and discovered. Monsters are our fears, the parts of us that we deny and that impede us to move forward, restraining our movement to the same forms. “Inviting our monsters to dance” is workshop in which we will get in contact with our shadows and fears in a playful way. Through one on one connection, this workshop will exercise an empathic feel towards our monsters, our parts and one another. Drawing, fictionalizing and dancing will be our paths to lighter and ludic ways of looking at our masks. This is a profound work that happens in a playful manner.

Anna Costa e Silva is an artist, director and professor from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Owner of an MFA in Visual Arts from the School of Visual Arts, NYC, she works in the intersections between visual arts, performance, social practice and healing. Since 2019, she teaches ArtLife Practices at Parque Lage visual arts school, an interdisciplinary course that mixes art, life and healing. As a director, she directed the 24 episode TV documentary series “Gaze” about contemporary artists for Arte 1 channel. Anna is represented by Superfície Gallery and has works in public and private collections, including MAR – The Museum of Art, Rio de Janeiro.

Sat Nov 5th 12:00-2:00pm EST

What is my life? w/ Indigo Esmonde

In this game, we’ll play with identities by asking ourselves the question: What is my life? When we humans describe ourselves, we’ll tell you what we’re like (I’m a baker, I’m an introvert, I’m grumpy), and what we’re not like (I don’t like rules, I never listened to disco, I’m not a gender). Finding out that we’re the same as other people can be fun and affirming (“Oh! You bake too!”) or uncomfortable (“Oh. You bake too. SAD EMOJI” ) In this game, we’ll play with identities by describing ourselves and our lives to one another, and creating a giant spider web that keeps track of how we are the same and different. Hopefully by the end of the game, everyone will feel a bit less certain about who they are and less able to answer the question “what is my life?”

Indigo Esmonde is an artist and songwriter living in Montreal. Currently, they are doing a performance art series about how to destroy your own ego. You can find their work at daydreamsandassociates.com and realitycalibration.com. Indigo has been described as 'brilliant and terrifying,' 'naive,' 'an acquired taste,' 'a bit overbearing,' 'the best at throwing online parties' and 'lives on their own planet.'

Wed Nov 9th 7:30-9:30pm EST

Collaborative Imagining w/ Chloe Engel & Anna Kroll

"Collaborative Imagining is a practice in which a group collectively devises an imaginary shared experience. Interacting with and within an imaginative landscape creates opportunities for understanding ourselves and others outside of conventional logic. In this method, time is malleable, sensation is magnified, and cause & effect hold poetic meaning. A sigh can cause a hurricane. A tear can become a flood and suddenly you are an island. We practice with cameras turned off and an internal focus. Using structured improvisational play, facilitators will guide the group through a series of verbal scores. Once these scores become familiar, they are combined to generate an improvisational field of creation and existence. Through imaginary play, we can both experience and witness ourselves navigating the relationship between autonomy and consensus. Together, in virtual space, we will explore questions of shared reality: How do I imagine you? How do you imagine me? Can we ever really imagine the same thing?"

Chloë Engel and Anna Kroll are improvisers, dancers, and listeners. We create improvisational practices to build skills that are necessary for a collaborative world. We begin from the acknowledgment that change is inevitable and imminent and our bodies are with us. Our work has been presented as part of re:semblance at New Media Artspace (NYC/ online), in Spark IV: A New World? (Baltimore / online), and part of The Mind on Fire Variety Show (Baltimore). We’ve taught independently and through Deep Play Institute. We are currently working on a tabletop game called The Space is a Body and You Are In It.

Sat Nov 12th 12:00-2:00pm EST

PEGging Yourself: Playing Existential Games for Personal & Collective Liberation! w/ Natalia Stroika

This workshop will invite participants to design their own “Personal Existential Games” (PEGs) using techniques of Ludic Liberation. The practice of existential gamemaking involves analyzing the games we unconsciously play and feel “trapped” by in order to transform the game rules into ones we can more consciously enjoy. Existential games have big existential themes like love, desire, death, time, loneliness, order, mystery but use the contexts and situations of our everyday lives as the playground! Ludic Liberation is inspired by a number of eclectic traditions such as Non-dual Shaiva Tantra, Existential Kink, Pleasure Activism, Situationists International, Drag, and more. During the workshop we will explore how these theories influence the practice, analyze the components of our personal existential games, and explore strategies we can use to alter the rules.

Natalia 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).

Sun Nov 13th 12:00-2:00pm EST

Sailing Through Life's Greatest Challenges with Identity Massage w/ Khuyen Bui

We all get stuck sometimes. Work becomes chore, relationships get stale and life loses steam. The question is not how to get unstuck. It is: How do we get stuck in the first place? Who is the person that gets stuck? This workshop will explore these questions and equip you with a powerful & fun set of tools, including 1) inquiry 2) language and 3) somatic experiences. We will draw from principles and practices of 1) circling, 2) embodiment and 3) identity work. Whether you are someone looking for ways to better your own life, transformation enthusiasts who love new approaches or seasoned helping professionals (therapists, coaches), you will find yourself learn, laugh, and love a lot here. Who knows, you might find yourself accidentally unstuck on something very important!

Khuyen 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. He is currently a PhD student in Management at Bayes Business School, London, pursuing the scholarly path while incorporating many modalities such as coaching, contact improvisation, poetry, meditation and circling. His eyes lit up upon beautiful questions. Find him at khuyenbui.com

CONCLUSION

all registered participants are invited

Thurs Nov 17th 7:30-9:30pm EST

Closing Playground w/ Aaron Finbloom

We will join as a larger group for one last play-structure for experimenting with transformative technique combinations that we have collectively learned. This is a chance to take some of the techniques we have learned together, and play with fashioning these techniques into micro-practices (games?) for transformative play.

Aaron Finbloom is a philosopher, artist and pedagogue. He is the co-founder of The School of Making Thinking (SMT) and the founder & director of The Deep Play Institute (DPI). His practice involves expanding transformative inquiry through games, performance art and structured play. With training in Circling, Authentic Relating, and Psychodrama, he also facilitates experimental individual and group sessions inspired by these practices. Finbloom has presented works internationally at venues which include: The Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, Gallery 151 (New York), Maschinenhaus Kulturbrauerei (Berlin), UNAM (Mexico City), and MainLine Theatre (Montreal). He holds a PhD in Interdisciplinary Humanities & Fine Arts from Concordia University in Montreal, and is currently teaching Philosophy at the City College of New York and The University of Portland. finblooming.com

Playing with Transformation - Improvising Healing Arts Practices & TechniquesA Virtual Workshop Series (Oct 13 - Nov 17 2022)