Fools Research Lab: Compos(t)ing Realities

November 14–22, 2026
Location: Portugal
Residency
Circling, Contact Improv, Group Process, Interdisciplinary, Performance, Psychodrama, Real Time Composition, Somatics

Open Call: Residency & Crew Invitation

Fools Valley Research: Lab
Nov 14-22, 2026 Ericeira, Portugal
€350 | includes lodging in a dorm and 3 meals per day
Apply by Oct 15th (applications reviewed on a rolling basis)

APPLICATION

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.

The Residency: Focus & Intent

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.

Who we are Looking For?

We are seeking artists, researchers and practitioners who possess solid experience and value the approach to collaborative creation. You should have a background in at least two of the fields below. 

  • Psychosomatic group processes or somatic research
  • Psychodrama / Constellations / Radical Partswork 
  • Contact Improvisation
  • Real Time Composition / Instant Composition
  • Theater/ Clowning/ Performance
  • Ritual-/Experience Design, LARP
  • Social Design

Because we are building a foundation for the future, we are especially looking for individuals who are open for a long-term artistic commitment and are interested to explore at the intersection of deep psychological material and performance.

How to Apply?

Please fill out our short application form by Oct 15. 

Applicants will be accepted on a rolling basis, so please apply as soon as possible to reserve your spot. Spaces are limited to ensure a focused research environment. 

We look forward to moving, researching, and building with you!

About the Facilitators

Aaron Finbloom is a philosopher, artist, and psycho-spiritual practitioner 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 MainLine Theatre in Montreal. Trained in Circling, Psychodrama, Buddhist Meditation, and Processwork, Aaron holds a PhD in Interdisciplinary Humanities from Concordia University in Montreal and teaches philosophy at the City College of New York. www.finblooming.com

Nia Lejander is a multifaceted artist and theater pedagogue. She likes to play with light, colors, words, sounds, the body, the senses, roles, rules, and realities. Born and raised in Vienna, she discovered her passion for theater during childhood, which continues to accompany her to this day. For more than ten years, she has been performing on stage with various ensembles in Berlin and Portugal while also leading workshops and continuously developing her skills. Two years ago, she co-founded the performance and artivism collective “Candies and Catharsis, ” with which she developed her own participatory performance format called “The Imaginarium. ” This format synthesizes her diverse experiences from various fields of work into one single piece.

Chris Wray is a philosopher, behavioral science researcher and co-founder of Fools’ Valley. The aim of his research is to explore how diverse practices — ranging from movement to dialogue, the introspective to the interactive, the improvisational to the reflective — support cognitive, emotional, and spiritual development.

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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.​