Playing when the Playing gets Hard 2026

January 4, 2026
Location: Virtual
Immersive Experience, Online Series

Playing when the Playing gets Hard

a 6-week virtual journey through playful practices to help us find play in the most unplayful of moods

6 Sundays 1/4 – 2/8 2026 Virtual (Zoom)

10am-12pm PST / 1-3pm EST / 6-8pm GMT

At The Deep Play Institute we believe that play can be deep, profound, serious, heavy, challenging and intense. But sometimes, the weightiest of weights don’t want to be played with. It might feel like the last thing in the world you are able to do is reflect, let alone bring levity, creativity, or play. What do we do then? Join the DPI Team as we take you on a 6 week journey through a variety of playful practices that offer ways to find play in the most unplayful of moods. This is the 3rd iteration of an incredibly transformative series, so we hope you join us for some deep play during the wintery season when play can feel so very hard.

Classes will meet Jan 4th until Feb 8th on zoom, on Sundays from 1-3pm EST (or 10am-12pm PST, or 6-8pm GMT). Participants must sign up for the entire series. Classes will be recorded, so if you can’t attend one you can still watch the recording. See below for our list of classes and facilitators. 
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Cost is by donation, taking inspiration from the dana practice in Buddhist monastic settings. We believe that this play is deeply important and liberatory, and offer the series as an act of service towards collective healing and transcendence. Please give what you can and find appropriate to support our organization and skillful facilitators, and we welcome you regardless of that number. 

SCHEDULE OF CLASSES

1/4
​Introductions: The Pre-Party Party Favors
Aaron Finbloom & Netta Sadovsky

Welcome to our series! We’ll introduce ourselves, say some words about the series and its guiding ethos, then we’ll go over some agreements. Then we’ll spend the bulk of our time during this first session playing some shorter games inspired by Internal Family Systems, Psychodrama, Butoh, and Imaginal Practice. We (Aaron and Netta) have spent years developing and iterating on games and structures such as these and we’ll be sharing some of the flowers that grow on the trees of our studies.

Bio: Aaron Finbloom is a philosopher, artist and pedagogue. He is the co-founder of The School of Making Thinking (SMT) and the director of The Deep Play Institute (DPI). His life work (and play) involves expanding transformative inquiry practice through games, performance art and conversation scores. Aaron has training in Circling, Psychodrama, and Processwork and holds a PhD in relational practice from Concordia University in Montreal.

​Bio: Netta Sadovsky (they/she) is a therapist and artist living in Philadelphia. They organize gatherings at the intersections of therapeutic, meditative, and creative practices through their role as Assistant Director at the Deep Play Institute. 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. 

1/11
Good Vibrations: Micro-Encounters for When Socializing Feels Stagnant
Gabrielle Revlock
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When socializing feels boring, effortful, or strangely distant, it’s easy to become jaded or uninspired—even when the desire for connection is real. This workshop is a playful laboratory for experimenting with micro-encounters that bring depth and delight back into everyday relating. Through guided prompts, fun facts from the science of rapport, and a series of unconventional breakout-room encounters, participants will explore ways to generate warmth and authenticity even when they’re not “in the mood.”
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Bio: Gabrielle Revlock is an NYC-based artist and educator whose work blends movement, social practice, and relational experimentation. Her participatory projects—The Apocalypse Singles Club, Anonymous Apologies, and Restorative Contact—create playful and meaningful pathways for connection. She teaches Contact Improvisation (CI) locally and abroad, emphasizing mutual support and innovation. Her writing on CI’s therapeutic applications appears in Resistance and Support: Contact Improvisation at 50. More at GabrielleRevlock.com

1/18
Unleashing a Can of Worms
alvie & momo

“What if we opened the can of worms and treated them as medicine?” Like freeing worms from a can back into their vital role in the soil ecosystem, in this workshop we will invite our most exiled emotions to the surface to wriggle, writhe, and rouse rabble. In this container of compassionate collective witness, we will approach them not as problems to solve, but as portals to explore and characters to play with, rich with information about our needs, desires, and deepest wisdom. By bringing silliness and curiosity to what often feels most heavy and hard to access, we hope to build capacity to be with the range of our emotions and get curious about what lessons they hold for our personal healing and collective humanity. Using a combination of guided visualizations and journaling, embodied character-building, improvisational interactions, and collective imagining, we will give these emotions permission to play, agency to speak their truths, and power to change us and writhe up to mold the world we most desire. Let’s dig in together! 

Bio: momo (she/they) is a queer neurodivergent artist, educator, care-worker, and abolitionist organizer most at home in the liminal where the wild things grow. she is passionate about bringing play, magic, and storytelling into community trauma healing in service of building a softer world, and believes deeply in grief-tending as a practice of personal transformation and collective liberation.

alvie (they/she // tee/hee) is a queer disabled AuDHD gremlin shapeshifting between roles as interdisciplinary artist, caretaker, bodyworker, gardener, facilitator and community organizer forever longing, dreaming, and scheming up how to build a better world with curiosity, play, improvisation and experimentation at the forefront of their creative explorations. Their M.O. as a performance artist, butoh dancer, and somanaut is to confront the elephant in the room, hold up a mirror and ask the important questions to allow a deep well of inner wisdom to be revealed and yielded as a source of empowerment and transformation. 

​TLDR: We’re just a couple of silly little guys who love to f*ck around and find out!

1/25
Snakes & Ladders: Playing with Judgement
Christie Animas

What if your inner psyche was a playground, and you could become the game maker? Most of us grew up inside a set of behaviours that were quietly laid down long before we arrived; invisible rules, pre-set moves… In this workshop, we use both the snakes and the ladders to come back to ourselves. If you remember Snakes and Ladders, you know the feeling of suddenly climbing to a new level or finding yourself right at the bottom again. This workshop uses the game as a metaphor to help you move from stagnation into discovery. We will use judgment as a fuel to enter the game. Come if you feel curious to enter more of your exquisite inner landscape and to explore the alchemical places we tend to avoid. We will meet them together, through openness, embodiment, and playfulness. You will leave with a powerful, playful practice that you can use in daily life to keep unfolding the deeper layers of your Inner Village.
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​Bio: Christie is a playful human researcher exploring consciousness through embodiment, parts work and play. She is a Voice Dialogue therapist and Fool Expression Workshop Facilitator, trained in Body Informed Leadership. She works 1:1 with clients and offers group workshop in the UK and Europe.  https://christieanimas.com/

2/1
​New Year Parasitic Cleanse
PLAYGRND

We all have parasites in our lives…parasitic behaviors, relationships, habits that are draining our energy. As we kick off 2026, we have the distinct honor to step into our play power and decide: to integrate, or to purge? Be aware! Not all parasites are bad! Some co-evolved with us and support us to digest elements of our environments. Together, we will choose which ones to keep and which ones to lovingly release. Our team of parasitic play experts are at the ready to facilitate a proper preparation and nourishment of our gut biomes for this annual cleanse. As a crew, we will develop the characters that represent these parasites, offer up “garlic” cleansers as needed, and bless them along their way through our collective digestion and probiotic experiences.
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Bio: PLAYGRND is Bean, Oona, and Selena. We invite participants to take the stage in improvising new and ancient worlds where all is possible. Through games, song, and movement, we bring people together in play, drawing inspiration from our body’s wisdom and our collective imagination to build dreams of joyous futures. Logging on from Ohlone lands in the Bay Area, we bring years of experience facilitating spaces for play, weaving together inspiration from traditions including Theater of the Oppressed (especially Rainbow of Desire), Playback Theater, Psychodrama, Internal Family Systems, Nonviolent Communication, and Transformative Justice. We are artists who recognize that imagination doesn’t end in childhood. We make-believe to empower co-creation and craft narratives for a liberated future. Find out more about us at www.playgrndexperience.com/

2/8
Play Away the Winter Blues: Digital Devising & Collaboration
Nicole Orabona
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Play Away the Winter Blues is intended for anyone interested in shaking off the winter blues and playing when the playing gets hard through collaboration and exploration  – all from their own space. Through a variety of devising techniques (adapted forms of viewpoints, moment work, and divining) participants will explore the process of creating art and connecting via digital platforms. While this workshop will be taught through the lens of theater, creative artists of other disciplines—as well as anyone ready to discover their creativity––are welcome and encouraged to participate. Participants will be asked to bring a double sided object (such as a coin) and word, phrase, or idiom of either how they feel when they are feeling uninspired, or something that has brought them inspiration. Through randomized discovery, we take some of the pressure off our brains to “create create create” and simply let the universe guide our play.

Bio: Nicole Orabona (they/she), is an actor, producer, zine maker, and committer to the bit. With partner Nathan Leigh, they co-founded cirqueSaw Productions to produce remote work at the intersection of live performance, film, and games. Together, they created the award-winning interactive pieces labRats (NarraScope 2025 Featured Showcase), Void Main and POV: You Are An AI Achieving Consciousness (Young-Howze Awards Immersive Production of the Year 2023, No Proscenium Special Editor’s Award 2024). TV credits include “Fleishman is in Trouble,” “Poker Face” & “Law and Order.” @knuckle_sando

“…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.”

​​”The Deep Play Institute’s 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.​