EXPLORING PSYCHE THROUGH EXPRESSIVE MOVEMENT & PLAY
Fools’ Valley | Portugal | June 8, 2025 | 10am-5pm
€40-80 sliding scale
“Allow the original sacred madness already within you to speak.” -Alexander Jodorosky from “And If the Fool Spoke”
This workshop is a space to explore what's moving inside us—and to give it shape through the body, voice, and group connection. Using methods from psychodrama, contact improvisation, Theatre of the Oppressed, clowning, processwork, and contemporary performance, we’ll experiment with ways of expressing what we often leave unspoken - the rich tapestry of our inner worlds. Our goal is to bring awareness and beauty to our inner experience, and to meet the wildness within us with care and curiosity.
A BIT MORE…
The heart of our approach lies in learning to sense, witness, and transform our inner landscapes through collaborative play, expression, and spatial mapping of parts. You'll discover how to stand as both protagonist and conductor of your psychological symphony, inviting others to embody aspects of your interior world. This creates a living, breathing constellation where subtle shifts in proximity, posture, voice and intonation can reveal profound insights. Like skilled improvisers, we'll practice the art of "beautiful tinkering"—not forcing change, but gently inviting transformation through attentive experimentation. In this laboratory of the psyche, we create a container where the hidden, neglected, and emerging parts of ourselves can be honored, expressed, and reimagined with both playful curiosity and reverent care.
PRACTICALS:
Our workshop will begin at 10am on Sunday, June 8th. We will take a 1-hour lunch break, and lunch is included in the price of registration. The workshop will conclude at 5pm. All participants are invited to stay after for dinner and sauna for an additional fee.
Contact [email protected] to RSVP
NOTE ON EMOTIONAL SAFETY: The practices on offer are designed to cultivate vulnerability, with its pleasures and its hardships. The practices tend to surface conflict and hurt that might conventionally be quieted or minimized. It is common to experience triggers of past psychological wounds within this practice, and this should be accounted for as a possibility. The intimacy of these practices might be compared to the way one's deepest romantic relationships sometimes surface one's most challenging psychological material. The facilitators will use techniques to contain and care for what arises, but will not be able to provide ongoing care for emotional fallout. The invitation is 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 workshop
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.
Aaron Finbloom is a philosopher, artist, therapist, and educator 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. Learn more at www.finblooming.com / www.deepplayinstitute.com
👉 Have a question? Reach out to Aaron Finbloom the group admin and deep play director @ [email protected]