The Second Gloam Ensemble

October 16–18, 2026
Location: NYC
Intensive (non-residential)
Circling, Performance, Psychodrama, Somatics

The Second Gloam Ensemble

Brooklyn Art Exchange, 421 5th Ave Brooklyn NY
Friday Oct 16 – Sunday Oct 18 2026

Apply

Applications due Aug 30th

Join the Deep Play Institute for 3-days of collective experimentation into the aestheticization of group process.

Our goal is to peer into the layers of our group process* and to experiment with methods for expressing our emergent joys, turmoils, and mysteries that arise within our group using tone, gesture, word, dance, and other expressive mediums. We (Aaron and Netta) have been researching techniques to express emergent group process for an audience, and we are looking for fellow enthusiasts who have some experience in this field to play and research together.

Last year, we began this research in earnest with a LARP pretending to be a theater troupe that had been working together for 5 years, developing avante-guard experiential group process theater, culminating in a (real) live performance and talk-back for an audience on the final day.

This year, we’ve decided to move away from both the LARP and the outside audience, and to instead focus on the real emerging group process, and on ourselves being the audience for one another. We will divide our group in half to function alternately as audience and performer. This will allow us to study, evaluate, critique, and iterate on the performance from the audience’s perspective, with an eye for how to effectively and creatively translate group process, without being rushed towards a final product.

Some of the practices that inspire us in our investigation are: Psychodrama, Internal Family Systems, Meisner’s Repetition, Contact Improvisation, Circling, Butoh, Group Relations, Fool’s Expression (a clowning-adjacent practice).

Our application process is meant to select participants experienced in some form of here-and-now group process, and who have some comfort in expressive embodied performance of parts-of-self.

NOTE: the application includes a short video submission. Recording this video should take no more than 10-15 minutes of your time. Also, we understand applications like this can be annoying and elicit perfectionism, fear of judgment, shame, etc. We hope you will take a short time to answer these questions. Please answer off the cuff, and we prefer if you do not worry too much about editing or polish.

* We use the term group process to refer to the evolving interpersonal, systemic, and psychosomatic relationships that emerge moment-to-moment among members of a group.

Practical Details

Price

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

Financially Abundant $400
Financially Secure $325
Financially Strained $250
BIPOC $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 Oct 16
7-9pm
 
Saturday Oct 17
12-7pm (with a short snack break)
 
Sunday Oct 18
1-7pm (with a short snack break)
 

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.

Scroll to Top

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.​