Between the “Real Me” & the Me that I Play

June 16–20, 2026
Location: Berlin
Workshop

Tuesday June 16 - Saturday June 20, 12:00-17:00 (2026)

Where? Studio 2 Bethanien, Berlin

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.
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Running through these two traditions are questions of truth, authenticity, and identity. Who is it that is performing? What me is present? What masks am I upholding? Does my art touch a deeper self, a more personal self, a more tender self?

Between performing and being (between the real me and the me that I play) there is a strange and incredibly fertile grey zone. Many of us have had the experience of watching someone perform and then, over a drink afterward, feeling far more connected to something real in them than we did during the show. Or the experience when someone begins playing music in the middle of a serious conversation, and suddenly the mood has entirely shifted. Or a moment when we are playing with a character whose emotions overwhelm and overtake us. Can we stay longer in these liminal in-between places, hold them open, and keep them from collapsing into one side or the other? Can we find the moment when play feels genuinely uncertain, when we are not quite sure if we are playing, and rather than retreating, stay there? Can we bring enough safety to keep going, to fold playfulness into existential questions, to take real moments of shame, embarrassment, anger, or blame and find the aesthetic beauty inside them? Can we hold open the spaces where we aren’t quite sure if this is art or healing? Can we hold open the moments where our “real” self bleeds into our “performance” self? And once there, can we create and co-create even further, even deeper, even more? These are some of the questions that we will explore together in this workshop series.

Who is this for?

This workshop is for anyone curious about where these two worlds meet. For artists, dancers, and performers who want to bring transformative-healing arts, somatic practice, and authentic relating into their work. For therapists, coaches, facilitators, and somatic practitioners who want to lean into the aesthetic — to let expression, play, and performance become part of their practice. And for anyone drawn to these questions without a home in either world. It is recommended that participants have some prior experience in dance, theatre or movement practice.

Schedule

  • Day 1 — Expressions of Truth | Tuesday, June 16 “What am I now? And now? And now?” This day draws from Authentic Movement, clowning, Fools Expression, Processwork, and Authentic Relating to explore a simple and surprisingly difficult question: can I bring what is actually true in me out into my body, my gestures, my voice? We’ll draw from practices that each approach this differently — some with tenderness, some with humor, some with a kind of unflinching attention, some more with our bodies and others more with our words. The thread running through all of them is asking what kind of “me” shows up across different activities and bringing in a deepened honesty and authenticity.

    Day 2 — The Relational Field | Wednesday, June 17 From out of the first day’s exploration of “what is happening inside me?” on our second day together we will begin deepening into the question of “what is happening between us?” Through contact improvisation and Authentic Relating we’ll turn our attention to the relational field — the charged, living space between us. We’ll work with and without words and we’ll play with the fluid edge between self and other. We’ll also draw on scores from Sara Shelton Mann’s Solo/Neutral/Follow.

    Day 3 — Group Work, Group Expression, Group Transformation | Thursday, June 17 We’ll continue to scale outwards — from the individual, the relational dyad, to the group as a whole. On Day 3 we will dive into the here & now practice of Circling to notice together what is happening between us as it occurring. And then we will try out an adjacent practice called “Parts Circling” where we embody inner parts while we Circle. Then we’ll move into Psychodrama (and related practices) in efforts to dramatically map our inner and collective turmoils and joys with the group. 

    Day 4 —  Composition | Friday, June 18 With the material, explorations and sediment built from the first three days we will now play with styles of composition. We’ll move through contact improv scores that explore emergent composition, and then explore two practices that play with composition through the role of a director. Conductor is a vocal game in which one person shapes the group’s sound in real time. Clearing is a psychodramatic form in which relational and emotional material gets staged as live composition. Both ask what becomes possible when one of us tries to hold the tension between the playful and the serious.

    Day 5 —  Scoring | Saturday, June 19 On our final day together we will lean into the process of co-creating scores. We’ll begin by looking at some examples of scores related to our workshop’s exploration — fluxus scores, Pauline Oliveros, Tino Sehgal, John Zorn, Alexandra Bosetti, Brian O’Doherty’s Structural Plays, and some past conversation scores developed by the facilitator. Then we will create short performance pieces using the entire group as material, drawing on everything we’ve discovered and accumulated throughout the week.

practical details

costs

250€ early bird before June 1st.

300-400€ sliding scale after June 1st.

A limited number of reduced price tickets are available for those in extreme financial precarity. Partial attendance options are also possible depending on which days you are able to attend, so please reach out with your specific request.

Cancellation Policy

Refunds are available up to 20 days before the event – minus a 20 processing fee. After this time we are unable to provide a refund for the event.

registration & questions

Please email: thedeepplayinstitute@gmail.com for registration and any questions. 

“…These kind of physical and emotional experiences feel like a central part of the answer to a world that increasingly feels chaotic and fractured. I will definitely be doing more DPI events!”

“I could really explore important places I needed to get into and the experience was incredibly powerful and rewarding. I would come back in a heartbeat.”

​​”Aaron and The Deep Play Institute’s Psychodrama workshop was a joyous, deep, uplifting experience.
 I felt both held in safety and able to expand my range.”

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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.

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.​