About the deep play institute

The Deep Play Institute is a non-profit organization whose mission is to explore life’s biggest questions through transformative play.

What is deep Play?

Deep Play is a dance between heaviness and buoyancy. By believing that our most knotted complexes can be played with, we allow our games to transcend frivolity and escape. The weighty can be wondrous. The playful can be profound.

At The Deep Play Institute we make experiments, games, and rituals that play in some of life’s biggest questions. We don’t promise answers or healing, but a refuge in which to live these questions out.

On the one hand, we play to transform. In doing so, we honor and draw inspiration from transformative practices and their techniques. On the other hand, we play for the love of exploration itself. We re-mix and re-invent existing practices. We see our programs as art pieces, experimental structures, performative rituals, live action role plays, or co-created relational games. 

Through these structures we invite our wildness and complexity: our fears and dreams, the images that float across our psyches, our bodies’ impulses, our assumptions, judgments, and longings towards one another and towards the non-human other. We deeply and playfully pay attention, returning, again and again, to what is already here, allowing it to unfold into something strange, sacred and luminous.

What is deep Play?

Deep Play is a dance between heaviness and buoyancy. By believing that our most knotted complexes can be played with, we allow our games to transcend frivolity and escape. The weighty can be wondrous. The playful can be profound.

At The Deep Play Institute we make experiments, games, and rituals that play in some of life’s biggest questions. We don’t promise answers or healing, but a refuge in which to live these questions out.

On the one hand, we play to transform. In doing so, we honor and draw inspiration from transformative practices and their techniques. On the other hand, we play for the love of exploration itself. We re-mix and re-invent existing practices. We see our programs as art pieces, experimental structures, performative rituals, live action role plays, or co-created relational games. 

Through these structures we invite our wildness and complexity: our fears and dreams, the images that float across our psyches, our bodies’ impulses, our assumptions, judgments, and longings towards one another and towards the non-human other. We deeply and playfully pay attention, returning, again and again, to what is already here, allowing it to unfold into something strange, sacred and luminous.

Our Key Practices

Developed by Jacob L. Moreno in the early twentieth century, psychodrama explores personal and interpersonal experience through action rather than discussion alone. Participants enact real-life situations, inner conflicts, dreams, or relationships using role-play and role reversal to discover new perspectives and insights.

Developed by Richard Schwartz drawing on Family Systems theory, IFS views the psyche as an ecosystem of distinct parts, such as protectors, critics, and wounded exiles, organized around a deeper core awareness called the Self. The practice involves building relationships with these parts through guided inner dialogue, helping them shift from rigid survival roles toward greater harmony and trust.

Developed by Arnold Mindell, Process Work follows subtle signals, body symptoms, emotions, dreams, and interpersonal dynamics as expressions of a deeper unfolding process. Practitioners amplify and explore these signals through movement, dialogue, role-play, and awareness practices to uncover unexpected meanings and possibilities.

Emerging in the mid-20th century in Britain from the psychoanalytic tradition, this approach studies unconscious processes in groups and organizational life. Participants learn by engaging in and observing real-time group behavior, treating the group itself as a temporary organization for exploring power, authority, identity, projection, and other manifold group dynamics.

Developed through the human potential movement by various practitioners including Guy Sengstock, Decker Cunov, and many others, Circling is a relational awareness practice focused on what is happening between people in the present moment. Participants attend closely to sensations, emotions, perceptions, and relational impact, using curiosity and direct communication to deepen awareness of themselves and others.

Performance and Visual Arts encompasses a wide range of creative practices that use image, movement, sound, performance, and making to explore, convey, and transform experience. Our programs draw from practices including: contemporary theater, contemporary dance, painting and drawing, clowning, performance art, and video art.

Originated in the early 1970s by Steve Paxton and others in the postmodern dance field, Contact Improvisation is a movement practice built around touch, shared weight, momentum, and somatic listening. Participants continuously respond to one another’s movements, touch, and embodied expression in real time to create the improvised dance, as well as responding to the nonhuman — gravity, architecture, light. The dance form deemphasizes appearance in favor of somatic experience.

Nordic LARP is a tradition of live-action role-play that developed in the Nordic countries in the 1990s that emphasizes collaboration, safety and shared reponsibility to play with heavy themes. Some these include: power, intimacy, violence, social exclusion, identity, ethics, and collective responsibility.

our Core Values

By believing that our most knotted complexes can be played with, we allow our games to transcend frivolity and escape. The weighty can be wondrous. The playful can be profound.

If play is a mode of being, then curiosity is one of its moods. Curiosity is open, never too certain, and able to see possibility. It runs its fingers through the untethered, fluid unknowns of existence. It delights in unanswerable questions.

We don’t just play with thoughts and feelings, we play with how to structure thoughts and feelings. We step inside of play and we are immersed. We step outside, look around, reflect, and see how we can adjust. We design play-structures, we try them out, we redesign them. The essence of meta play is experimentation.

We play with our edges. This means playing with what is somewhat emotionally hard, uncomfortable, or dangerous. We do this to invite a fuller kind of play, a play that expands our sense of aliveness and possibility. Through edgy play we un-conceal that which we’ve unconsciously prevented ourselves from thinking, feeling, and therefore playing.

Playing curiously at our edges facilitates organic transformation of self, and transformed relations to others and the world. We value this transforming: into beings who can play more deeply, with richer access to curiosity, and with greater openness and awareness.

Although we value transformation, we do not play to transform. In our work there is no set goal except to play within an emergent process. We see this non-purposiveness as a critical ingredient for unfettered play, curiosity, and creativity. By temporarily suspending pressure towards productivity of any kind, we surrender to playing out the present moment.

We see connection as an openness and availability to others. Our play relies on, and cultivates, connection: between people, between parts of self, and between the human and non-human.

Creativity runs through all levels of our work – from the sound of our timers, to our chair arrangements, from roleplaying with facilitator personas, to deciding which virtual platform to implement. We see creativity is a devotion to the experimental, the aesthetic, the pleasure in design, the delight in juxtapositions.

Anti-oppression statement
Anti-capitalism statement

Core Team

A philosopher, artist and psycho-spiritual facilitator whose work aims to expand transformative inquiry through relational games, role play, performance art, and conversation scores. 

He co-founded The School of Making Thinking (SMT) and is the founder and director of The Deep Play Institute (DPI). His projects have been featured internationally at venues such as the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, Gallery 151 in New York, Maschinenhaus Kulturbrauerei in Berlin, UNAM in Mexico City, Performance Works Northwest in Portland, and Fonderie Darling in Montreal. He has training in Circling, Psychodrama, Buddhist Meditation, Butoh and Processwork, and has over 20+ years experience as a musician, contact improviser and performance artist. Aaron holds a PhD in relational studies from Concordia University in Montreal’s Interdisciplinary Humanities Program, and teaches philosophy at the City College of New York.

netta_about

Netta is a therapist and artist living in Philadelphia, specializing in Somatic Internal Family Systems (IFS) with individuals, and Relational Psychodynamic therapy with dyads and groups. Netta has a Master’s in Social Work and Social Practice from Bryn Mawr, Level 1 training in Internal Family Systems, and an MFA in visual art from Tyler School of Art. She also has training in Tavistock Group Relations, Psychodrama, and Psychedelic Assisted Therapy. Netta leads retreats and workshops in their role as Assistant Director at The Deep Play Institute, building community at the intersection of relational, meditative, and creative practices.

Collaborators

Anna costa e Silva

artlife practices

Christie Animas
Christie Animas

fooling, voice dialogue

Daniel Rudolph

laughter yogi

Dara Bramson

anthropology, healing arts

Faith Danforth

tarot, women’s mysteries

Gabrielle Revlock

contact improv, somatics

hamsa
Hamsa Fae

performance, erotics

Ifetayo Harvey

POC Psychedelic Collective

Ilana Simons

group radical partswork

Indigo Esmonde

Daydreams & Associates

James Boutin

conflict improv

Julia Gladstone

IFS, EMDR, Dance

Khuyen Bui

coach, human development

Martje Witzel

relational arts, coach

megan may

embodied collective healing 

Nicole Orabona

mover, theatre-maker

Sarah Ledbetter

somatic therapist, artist

Advisory Board

Sharon Mashihi works in audio, performance, and film.  Her radio drama, “Appearances,” described by NY Magazine as “a breakthrough for the [podcast] form”, was named a 2020 Best Podcast of The Year by multiple outlets including The New York Times and was optioned by A24.  Sharon’s performance and installation work has been shown internationally, most recently at The ICA in Richmond, VA. For many years, Sharon was the editor for the podcasts, “The Heart” and “Bodies”.  In 2018, she won the Third Coast International Audio Silver Award for her audio documentary, “Man Choubam (I Am Good.)”  Her most recent project is the 2025 audiobook, “30 Days to Rediscover Your Creativity” which she created for Audible Originals

Anique Vered is an interdisciplinary researcher, curator and development practitioner renowned for the capacity to connect unexpected partners on unprecedented projects to mobilise impact. Through research-creation, public programming and participatory development innovations, I work at the intersection of community and network building, spaces of experimental learning and co-creation, decolonisation, and social innovation to unleash a new kind of networked agency. With fifteen years experience in communities and organisations across Australia, North America, Asia, the Middle East & North Africa, and Europe; recent projects include co-curating a Forum on Egalitarian, Sustainable Communtarian Organization for Art and Culture with Filipino artists and activists, as well as research and content for Diversity Arts Australia’s Creative Equity Toolkit.

LM

Lina is a Latin American artist and educator based in Montreal. Currently, they are dedicated to providing project management support to strengthen the design of emergent processes within organizations. Lina holds an MA in Art Education from Concordia University and currently works as Head of Organizational Process Design at inPath.

Explore Upcoming Events

At The Deep Play Institute offers a variety of virtual and in-person events predominantly in: New York City, Portland (OR) and Philly. Occasionally we hold workshops in other locations such as: Asheville, Vancouver, Victoria, Toronto, Montreal, and Devon (UK).

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We, the leadership and facilitators of The Deep Play Institute, want to speak to what it means for us to hold authority in our programs. We want to acknowledge the lineages of what we are offering, as well as our ignorance of many of the branches of those influences. In this acknowledgment, we borrow heavily from the language of Hana Van Der Kolk in their facilitation of somatic practices. The methods we offer are only in small part influenced by our own creativity—they derive from a complex interweaving of teachings and teachers, who themselves are complex interweavings of teachings and teachers. We will name these teachers, lineages, and influences wherever we are aware of them. However, as Hana writes: “We recognize that colonization, white supremacy, and globalization have erased some of the clarity of influence. We will do our best to unforget in the context of a culture that actively produces ignorance.”

At DPI we see it as our responsibility to explore barriers to play—to explore the question of: “What makes play hard?” We work this question into the structure of our play so that we don’t miss out on the wisdom that’s offered by participants of various social identities, legacies, and landscapes of ability. People of different races, classes, ethnicities, ages, neurodivergences, sexual orientations, abilities, and genders may find particular play with particular people and leaders challenging in ways that reflect the impacts of their intersecting identities. Rather than orient toward these hardnesses as obstructions, we work to see them as opportunities to play more deeply and reverentially with one another’s perceptual gifts. The play becomes magical, political, and deeply experimental as it continually welcomes friction as an impetus for creativity.

We recognize that people from marginalized groups—whether due to visible or invisible identities such as race, age, ability, or disability—often carry a heavier burden in shared spaces, including our play spaces. For someone with relative privilege, it might feel brave to say something like, “I feel shy” or “I’m struggling to speak up.” For someone from a marginalized identity, however, speaking a simple truth—such as acknowledging the discomfort of being the only visibly disabled person in the room—might feel profoundly vulnerable—in large part because they might reasonably expect the dominant group to struggle to gracefully receive this. The challenges and tensions in these spaces are not evenly distributed, and there can be an illusion of equality when everyone is invited to “speak hard truths.” At DPI we are committed to exploring ways to reduce and cope with this inequity. We also believe profound creativity and resilience can emerge when people play with these tensions, and discomfort can be redistributed in ways that are meaningful and liberatory for all involved.

When friction arises during our workshops, we observe it through the lens of the inequities and dynamics we’ve described. In these moments, we improvise to understand the unfolding group process and learn from the experience rather than rigidly follow our original plans. This is much easier said than done, however, and we recognize that as facilitators, our various privileges and limitations can impair our skillfulness in navigating how to responsibly and reverentially hold authority. Sometimes, our own shame, resistance, and avoidance prevent us from seeing, let alone playfully encountering, these frictions. We see these moments as some of our most profound opportunities for growth and seek feedback throughout our programs to that end. We hope for your grace and patience as we continue to refine our practice.​

This statement marks a shift in our orientation. While the values we describe have been an undercurrent of our work, they’ve drifted in and out of our awareness alongside other, sometimes contradictory, currents. Through writing this statement we attempt to swim in this one more faithfully:

Some strains of Buddhism and psychoanalysis meet in an anti-capitalist critique pushing us to look at the nature of desire as an endless self-perpetuating cycle of attainment and loss. The marketing for a product explicitly or implicitly says something like, “if you buy this product it will relieve your suffering.” These promises fail to disclose the truth about desire, at best, providing bandaids, or temporary resting places along a journey. At worst, their marketing and our participation in the fiction of fulfillment perpetuates even deeper and more prolonged suffering.

We aspire to consciously uncouple from the logic of commodity in what we offer at DPI. We attempt to disclose the truth regarding desire itself: that it endlessly perpetuates, and that no material or immaterial substance given to our psyche will ever truly nourish us; we are hungry and insatiable.

Through this orientation, where commodity acquisition offers transcendence, we attempt to offer immanence. Like monotheism’s vision of the afterlife as a relief from the present, capitalist consumption dangles a more pleasant future just ahead. We design structures and rituals to sanctify the mess of the now.

Even as we attempt rigor in this regard, we constantly fall into traps of desire. It is endlessly tempting to read salvation into our offer to sanctify the messes of the present. As facilitators we too want to be saved from suffering, and we unknowingly bake that longing into our offerings and affects. The same unfortunate situation occurs within both Buddhist and psychoanalytic traditions, where students encounter the truth of each system as a salvific balm.

Our task then is to keep insisting that we will not heal you. That you are always broken. And that playing with your brokenness, our primary task, will ultimately fail as well. And that, as Pema Chödrön insists, real bravery is not about holding on to hope, but about allowing ourselves to touch hopelessness directly. That when we lean into our groundlessness, rather than scrambling to escape it, we discover a deeper kind of courage — the willingness to rest in the unknown. Can we hold that immeasurable loss? Can we at least touch this loss together? Can we play with it not by only offering lightness and buoyancy to it, but also by merely sitting with each other with our shrunken, bated breaths, as we encounter aloneness together? That is the kind of deep play we aspire to offer.