EXISTENTIAL PLAYGROUND #4 THE ROOM

Event: ​Saturday July 10, 12-3pm EST
​Integration: Tuesday July 13, 12-1pm EST

Existential Playground is an ongoing virtual event dedicated to playfully experimenting with the essential questions of our existence. Each playground creates an immersive container meant to catalyze questions around a given theme. For roughly 2-3 hours, we will live questions, try on questions (like outfits), breath in the space around the questions, and watch as more and more questions percolate. Deep play is the fodder for our questions – the play of our senses, feelings, thoughts, bodies, hearts, brains, relationalities, interiorities, voices, memories, edges, and shadows.

You are in the real world, in a real room. I am in the real world, in a real room. We both close our eyes and enter another space. Together, we illustrate our surroundings. Everything in this room is built through our words. Together, we build something outside ourselves that belongs to both of us. It’s surprisingly intimate to create a world for each other. In this world, limitless creative potential is tethered by accountability. This world is both a dream and an ecosystem. Everything is available but all choices must coexist with those that came before them. Each moment is idiosyncratic, emerging from the relationality between you and the others crafting this imaginary scene.
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The Room, designed by artist-improvisors Anna Kroll and Chloë Engel, is a structured exercise in collaborative imagination. The Room begins with a warmup, where we are together in small groups practicing a series of verbal scores – Action, Sensation, Space. Once these verbal scores become more familiar, they are combined to create an improvisational field (a shared language) of creation and existence which is The Room.

The Room asks us: can we share a space, a dance, a body, when we are not physically together? What happens when we attempt this imaginary togetherness? What new sense of encounter is afforded in this playful imaginary? What can become when the laws of physics are made a bit looser? What new paths of intimacy are carved in this fantastic terrain? Each moment offers an opportunity for reflection – what do we remember, what did we feel, what would have changed? What did we need that we didn’t have? What did we have that we didn’t need?

Anna Kroll’s and Chloë Engel’s work draws from both of their experiences as dance artists and improvisers. They began this collaboration in the Fall of 2020 developing the practice through weekly phone calls that began with the prompt – how can we create a spoken dance?

Workshop Details:
Event: Saturday July 10th 12pm-3pm EST
Integration: Tuesday July 13th 12pm-1pm EST
Tickets: Early Bird Tickets (available until July 1st) are $33. Please contact The Deep Play Institute for sliding scale options if needed. Our event will be located on Zoom, and a ticket gives you access to the entirety of the event and integration. No prior experience in play, playgrounds, or existential playgrounds is necessary.

Anna Kroll is a dancer, choreographer and interdisciplinary artist. Anna’s performance work has been shown at No Theme Festival (Poughkeepsie, NY) in Philadelphia Theaters, Rivers and Subway Underpasses at FringeArts’ Scratch Night, Open Call Guerilla Outdoor Performance Festival, Invisible River’s Schuylkill River Arts Day, Cathy Weis' Sundays on Broadway (NYC), and Danspace's Draftwork series (NYC). Her pieces aqueousness (an Instagram feed), and #AllYourMarketing (a live video feed) were in the Digital Fringe portion of the Philadelphia Fringe Festival. Alluvium and Inlet were commissioned by the Painted Bride Art Center for their expanded archive of Philadelphia, “Re-place-ing Philadelphia”. Her looping video piece your toes, your skin, your heart, your bones was included in the online film festival “Trans(m)it”. She is currently an MFA student at UMBC in Intermedia & Digital Art. She received her BA from Bennington College and is an alum of the Headlong Performance Institute. annakroll.com

Chloë Engel (she/they) is a performer, improviser, teacher, and nanny currently based in Brooklyn, NY. Chloë makes performance about Madness, hazy trauma, nostalgia, and queer reverie as rebellion. Chloë’s performance work has been shown at Open Performance, No Theme Festival (Poughkeepsie, NY), Little Berlin (Philadelphia, PA), Middlebury College, Bennington College, and AUNTS Festival (Brooklyn, NY). She teaches a weekly online associative meditation class called: suggested methods to feel your feelings. chloeengel.org