Gloam Ensemble

September 26–28, 2025
Location: NYC
Intensive (non-residential)
Group Process, Performance, Psychodrama, Somatics

Gloam Ensemble

Brooklyn Art Exchange, 421 5th Ave Brooklyn NY
Friday Sep 26 – Sunday Sep 28 2026

Gloam Ensemble is a 3-day immersive experience structured as a Nordic LARP. We will play a self described avant garde theater group that has decided it is ready to come out to the public.  A little-known curator has contracted the group to do a single performance at PS1 for a hand selected audience, and we reluctantly decide that after 5 years of research and practice, we are ready to debut our unique style of psychological here-and-now theater. The LARP is set in the last few days of our rehearsal, struggling to design a small private showcase for friends that is meant as a practice round for the PS1 debut.

Why?

We, Netta Sadovsky and Aaron Finbloom, have (genuinely) been experimenting with the line between therapy and performance for years, practicing and studying forms of performing somatic, experiential parts work. We share a fantasy of forming a real theater group like the one in the LARP, and we want to use the technology of the LARP to play with and inside of this dream. We are fascinated by the aestheticization of emergent emotional experience, and we want to call in others who feel similarly to play with us as though we have been for many years. 

Methods that inspire us include: performance art, Family Constellations, Psychodrama, Internal Family Systems, Process Work, Fooling, clowning, Authentic Relating, Tavistock Group Relations, and Contact Improvisation. 

But why is it called a LARP? Is that like swords and elves and knights? No it’s really not. We’re drawing on the tradition of Nordic LARP, which unlike regular LARPing is minimalistic, usually centers around realistic circumstances, and invites contemplation through slightly tilting something about reality to see what emerges. Think of it like sci fi: an opportunity to live into a world that is not-quite-this-one, as someone who is not-quite-you. 

The LARP is simultaneously a tool of exploring the intersections of here-and-now parts work within the realms of aesthetics and spectacle, and an attempt to peek into an idealized future in which these interests have blossomed into an invested, multi-year collaboration with fellow artist-researchers. 

Our primary intention is to use the fiction of the LARP to immerse ourselves ever-more-fully in these practices. We are experts. This practice is our life blood. This added layer can help us to embody focus, intensity, and devotion. The fiction of us having worked together for years will have an effect in our actual bodies and relationships – helping us to push past inhibitions and play more loosely and extravagantly.

How?

Participants will have an opportunity to play a character that is similar to but slightly different than themselves. The character will push edges of personality in ways that interest them. For example, a participant who is less confident in group settings might choose to play a flashy showman, or a near-silent priest. A participant who struggles to assert their opinions might like to play a stubborn ideologue. A participant who fears showing sadness might play up despondency or exaggerate their cheeriness. 

The LARP will involve character and relationship development, world development, and the teaching of a form of here-and-now somatic group work that we will perform together. The form will be an assemblage of Circling, Fooling, and Psychodrama, and you need not be familiar with these to participate. The basic form of the performance will be designed in advance by Netta and Aaron, and within the LARP we will have a chance to make aesthetic and structural decisions and alterations to that form.

Please note that this LARP requires participants to have some familiarity and ease with expressing emotionality and being in front of an audience. Keep in mind the LARP fictional world can help some to push us past the uncomfortable edges of expression.

This is Intended for People Who:

  • Do not have experience with LARPing or role play. Those who do have experience are also welcome it’s just not a requirement
  • Have familiarity or deep interest in embodied psychotherapeutic practices such as: Psychodrama, IFS, Family Constellations, Gestalt, somatic parts work, Meisner or Chekov’s psychological gesture work, Hakomi, Alexander Technique, Drama Therapy, etc. 
  • Have familiarity or deep interest in dramatic improvised theatre, roleplay or expressive art practice
  • Are interested in radically honest expression, and the refinement of this expression through imaginative exercises
  • Are not averse to rules and structures
  • Are comfortable knowing their boundaries, expressing a “no” within dynamic and intense relational contexts, and understand/consent to the potentiality of emotional fallout that occurs within relational here-and-now explorations
  • Have emotional support and resources in place, in case they are needed for aftercare
  • Are comfortable giving and receiving non-sexual, physical touch with strangers

Practical Details

Price

Tuition price is tiered based on an sliding scales of income/subsistence.

Financially Abundant $400
Financially Secure $325
Financially Strained $250

Please try to reasonably and honestly select the price that reflects your economic situation. If you are unable to find a price that is suitable for you, please get in touch:[thedeepplayinstitute@gmail.com]

We are committed to covering our basic costs, while also making this possible for everyone who needs it. 

 

Rough Structure

Friday 
7:15-9:15pm Opening Circle, Safety Agreements, Workshopping our Characters and World [OUT OF CHARACTER]

Saturday 
10am-12pm Warmup and Teaching Final Score [IN CHARACTER]
Lunch from 12-1pm [OUT OF CHARACTER]
1-6pm Rehearsal [IN CHARACTER]

Sunday
10am-12pm Rehearsal [IN CHARACTER]
Lunch from 12-1pm [OUT OF CHARACTER]
1-4pm Rehearsal [IN CHARACTER]
4-5:30 Performance [IN CHARACTER]
5:30-6:00 pm Discussion [OUT OF CHARACTER]

Participants will be responsible for bringing their own lunch or finding lunch nearby.

Cancellation Policy

Refunds are available up to 30 days before the event – minus a $20 processing fee. After this time we are unable to provide a refund for the event. Refunds might be given if a cancellation takes place under extenuating circumstances (e.g. a death of a 1st or 2nd degree family member, serious non-preventable illness or accident requiring hospitalization). Refunds in such cases remain at the discretion of the local organizers and will be decided on a case to case basis according to the timing of the cancellation and other factors.

Partial Attendance

Given the intimacy, trust building and shared creative practice inherent to this intensive, we highly recommend that all participants plan to stay for the entire weekend. We may be able to make accommodations for participants to end early, or miss a section of one day; however, late arrivals cannot be accommodated. 


Maximum Participants: 25

Note on Emotional Regulation

This program will involve the exploration of diverse emotional landscapes that unfold within and among our psyches. Many of the practices we explore are designed to cultivate vulnerability, with its pleasures and hardships, and might be compared to the way one’s deepest romantic relationships sometimes surface one’s most challenging psychological material. Conflict and hurt may arise that might conventionally be quieted or minimized. It is not uncommon for participants to encounter triggers of psychological wounds within these practices, and this should be considered a possibility. 

The facilitators will use techniques to contain and care for what arises, but will not be able to provide ongoing care for emotional fallout. We invite you to be watchful of one’s own safety and opt out in little and big ways as needed, and to have emotional processing methods in place (such as therapy, meditation, journaling, processing with friends, etc) that can help you learn with and from what happens at the intensive. Additionally, we ask that you have some inner settledness and calm available so we can play deeply together. If at this moment in your life you find you are highly activated by something you cannot set down, it may be best not to participate at this time. We understand that therapy can be very expensive and trusted therapists are hard to find, and there might be some temptation to come to this group for that kind of care, but it is not designed for that kind of individual attention.

Facilitators

Aaron Finbloom is a philosopher, artist, and psycho-spiritual counselor 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

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.

 

About the Deep Play Institute

The Deep Play Institute is a nonprofit organization committed to exploring life’s deepest questions through transformative play. DPI’s facilitators – therapists, artists, coaches, and philosophers –  aim to use play to bring people into an experiential questioning of what it means to exist. Each program that DPI runs is a unique container, creatively constructed and inspired by practices that include: Gestalt therapy, Process Work, Psychodrama, Internal Family Systems Therapy, Tavistock Group Relations, Relational Psychoanalysis, Authentic Relating, Nonviolent Communication, Circling, coaching, performance art, contact improvisation, experimental theater, LARPs, surrealism, existential games, and various schools of meditation.

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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.​