Mask & Mirror
Practice the art of seeing yourself clearly
Friday, October 16 - Sunday, October 18
Baltimore, MD
Mask & Mirror is an immersive weekend of art, improv, nervous system practice and Sacred Theater designed to help you recognize the roles you've learned to play, understand what they've made possible for you, and consciously choose what you want to carry forward.
Is this you?
🎭 Maybe you’re the person who always has it together. The funny one. The competent one. The easygoing one. The caretaker. The peacemaker. The person who can read a room in seconds and become exactly who the moment seems to require. Or maybe you’re the one who freezes when you come face to face with the very thing you desire. The one who knows your worth, but asks for much less.
🪞 These different ways of being have served you beautifully, even if they’ve frustrated you to no end. Maybe they’ve helped you build relationships, succeed at work, make people laugh, keep the peace, or find belonging. Maybe they’ve protected you from losing your mind.
You’ve gotten so good at playing certain versions of yourself that you can’t tell where the mask ends and you begin.
❤️🔥 You’ve gotten so good at playing the characters that life has assigned you, that you don’t feel seen by those around you. You don’t even feel like you see yourself clearly. You do not have a problem being who you need to be to show up for your life. But when you look in the mirror, you see a character, not yourself.
Mask & Mirror is a weekend devoted to seeing yourself clearly.
In design, you don't start by designing the future state. You start by understanding the current one.
You start by investigating what is actually happening. Only then do you begin to imagine what could be different.
But personal development often asks us to skip that step. We move quickly toward healing, changing, optimizing and becoming without first taking the time to ask: What is actually here? What is working beautifully? What have you learned to do in order to belong? What parts of yourself have you amplified? What have you learned to conceal? Which adaptations still serve you? And which ones are beginning to cost you something?
Mask & Mirror creates space for that depth of seeing.
We spend so much of our lives learning, developing, healing, improving and trying to become. But how often do we stop long enough to actually see what is already here? Not every adaptation needs fixing. In order to transform, you don't need to become a new person. But you do deserve the opportunity to recognize the roles you're playing and decide for yourself which ones you still want to inhabit.
Our masks aren't the problem. But there can be a cost to staying in character.
What is the cost of staying in character?
Mask
In ancient Greek theater, masks weren't used to hide the actor's face. They were designed to project the actor's voice.
The shape of the mask's mouth amplified the actor's voice so it could reach the back of the amphitheater, while exaggerated features communicated emotion long before a single word was spoken.
Every mask reveals just as every mask conceals.
Masks continue to serve us thousands of years later. Even if we don’t need to project our voice into an amphitheater, we all still wear them. Our nervous systems learn what helps us belong, what keeps us safe, what earns approval, and what protects us from hurt. Those adaptations harden as masks. They become so practiced that they often stop feeling like masks at all. They begin to feel like identity.
The prankster mask. The overachiever mask. The peacemaker mask. The nice guy mask.
These masks are not mistakes. They are intelligent, creative and adaptive responses that help us amplify ourselves into the environments that shaped us.
The invitation isn't to get rid of our masks. It's to become aware of them.
What do your masks amplify? What do they project? What do your masks hide, quietly out of view? And, most importantly: what is the cost of staying in character?
Mirror
A mirror serves a different purpose.
Unlike a mask, a mirror doesn't amplify or conceal. It just reflects what is there. Flips and reflects.
And yet mirrors have a funny way of changing us.
We straighten our posture. We soften our face. We notice things we couldn't see before simply because they were impossible to observe from the inside.
Relationships are mirrors, too.
Our nervous systems are constantly reflecting one another. We smile because someone smiled first. A yawn catches fire and spreads throughout the conference room. We relax in the presence of someone whose body communicates safety. We discover parts of ourselves through relationship that we could never discover alone.
We see each other through each other. We are each other’s clearest mirror.
When we engage in play, we tap into our beautiful biologies that support mirroring - this is why we see ourselves so clearly in theater and often reach our greatest discoveries while at play.
Sometimes it takes another person to hold up a mirror before we can see the mask we've been wearing all along.
Mask & Mirror isn't about uncovering some mythical "true self." It's about taking the time to notice the ways you’ve cemented your identity, and to do so with greater awareness, compassion, and choice. The moment a mask becomes visible, it becomes something you can consciously choose rather than unconsciously inhabit. That is the practice of seeing yourself clearly.
Why play?
We can understand our patterns intellectually and still keep performing. Play gives us somewhere to practice choice.
Mask & Mirror is NOT a weekend of sitting in a circle talking about your patterns.
We’ll work with the body through somatic and nervous system practices. We’ll work with relationship through improvisation and play. We’ll work with imagination through art-making. And through Sacred Theater, we’ll create opportunities to integrate, embody, exaggerate, disrupt, and experiment with the roles we’ve learned to play.
Improv is one of our greatest tools in practicing to see ourselves clearly, because you can’t fully plan who you’re going to be. So you discover who you emerge as. When your plan stops working, you have to meet what is actually happening. You meet yourself.
Play gives us a beautiful playground to practice being and seeing ourselves clearly.
You don’t only get to notice the character you’ve been playing. You get to experiment with differences. To speak loudly. To take action. You get to be less helpful, and more ridiculous.
For a moment, you get to discover what else is available, and all else that is available.
What becomes possible when you can see yourself clearly?
❤️🔥 You might notice yourself becoming the peacemaker, realize you actually disagree, and choose to voice your opinions from a place of neutral confidence.
❤️🔥 You might feel yourself reaching for the joke, recognize that you’re hiding behind humor, and decide to let the sincere thing come out instead.
❤️🔥 You might notice the CEO taking over, acknowledge how exhausted you actually are, and ask someone for help.
🤯 You might discover that your role of mother, which you thought was a caretaker mask, is actually something you genuinely love about yourself.
🤯 You might catch yourself preparing to perform and realize, in that tiny moment of awareness, that you have a choice.
The goal isn't to stop playing characters. It's to remember that you're the one playing them.
What We’ll Do Together
Meeting the other in play
Improv invites us into genuine spontaneous relationship. Through laughter, spontaneity, and shared play, you'll experience how connection becomes a mirror, revealing habits, assumptions, and possibilities that can only be discovered with another person.
You’ll leave with a felt experience of staying connected to yourself while responding spontaneously to someone else, and greater awareness of what happens inside you when you can’t plan what comes next.
Seeing the self through art
We’ll create physical masks as both artist and explorer. Through mask-making, you'll discover what your nervous system has learned to project, what it has learned to protect, and how creativity can become a mirror for self-awareness.
You’ll leave with a physical representation of the roles you’ve learned to inhabit, and a new way of relating to them with curiosity rather than judgment.
Remembering the divine through sacred theater
Performance has long been used as a doorway to something larger than ourselves. Drawing from Sacred Theater, ritual movement, and embodied presence, we'll explore performance as a practice of remembering our wholeness and our connection to something greater.
You’ll have the opportunity to step beyond your familiar ways of being and experience yourself as something larger, stranger, more creative, and more alive than the identities you carry through everyday life.
The Details
Mask & Mirror will take place at the beautiful Ruscombe Mansion in Baltimore, MD.
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Arrival, opening ceremony, shared dinner & our first steps into Mask & Mirror
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Improv & embodied play, mask-making, Sacred Theater, reflection, integration. Spacious breaks for lunch and rest.
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Morning practice, integration, closing ritual & carrying the work home
Investment
Visionary
$395
Through September 15
Includes one 60 minute coaching session with Emily.
Scholarships, financial assistance and work/study exchanges available
Just in Time
$495
Through October 15
Includes one 60 minute coaching session with Emily.
Scholarships, financial assistance and work/study exchanges available
All In
$595
Through October 15
Includes three 60 minute sessions with Emily.
Scholarships, financial assistance and work/study exchanges available
What’s Included
14+ hours of guided facilitation over the weekend
WhatsApp group for connection before, during and after the weekend
All mask-making supplies and creative materials
Improv, Sacred Theater, and embodied play experiences
Nervous system education and somatic practices
Gentle movement, meditation, and guided reflection
A thoughtfully curated workbook and integration resources
Dinner on Friday evening
Light refreshments and filtered water throughout the weekend
An intimate group experience with plenty of space for connection and individual attention
What’s Not Included
Lodging or overnight accommodations
Meals on Saturday and Sunday
Transportation to and from the venue
Pressure to be funny, vulnerable, or "good" at improv
Therapy or mental health treatment (while this work can be deeply meaningful, it is educational and experiential rather than clinical)
Meet your guide…
I started doing improv because I wanted to learn how to be funny.
I stayed because, somewhere along the way, I realized I was learning how to be a better person. I was learning how to not freeze in uncomfortable social situations, how not to fawn and acquiesce, and how to directly articulate my desires. I was learning the art of presence.
Improv kept putting me in situations where I couldn't perfectly prepare. I couldn't control what another person was going to say. I couldn't figure out the “right” response before I gave it. I had to listen, and commit. I had to listen to myself, and commit to myself, too. I got good at trying things before I knew whether it would work, and holding success and failure very loosely.
After a big breakup with Ritalin, a pharmaceutical medication for ADHD, I became fascinated and obsessed with why improv had been so transformative for me.
That curiosity eventually led me into nervous system work, somatic coaching, Ayurveda, and Sacred Theater. I began to see that many of the capacities we practice in improv are also capacities of a flexible nervous system: presence, responsiveness, connection, curiosity, adaptability, and the ability to remain with uncertainty without immediately needing to escape it.
My teaching practice stopped focusing on “excellence in improv,” and more on how play can make us more present to life.
Over and over, I've watched people discover through play what they couldn't quite reach through analysis alone. Not because play gives us a better answer about who we're supposed to be, but because it interrupts our ability to perform the answer we already know how to give.
Mask & Mirror grows from body of work. And I can’t wait for you to see yourself here.
Frequently Asked Questions
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Not at all! Emily is a seasoned improv teacher and will cover all the basics you’ll need to know during your time together. No experience required!
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Perfect. This is not a weekend about being the loudest person in the room. There will be moments of play and connection, but also reflection, art-making, gentle movement, meditation, breaks, and integration. You will not be asked to become an extrovert. You’ll be invited to notice what becomes possible when you feel safe enough to experiment.
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You don't have to perform vulnerability here. You are always in choice about what you share. Some of the most meaningful discoveries in this work can happen through laughter, absurdity, art, movement, or simply noticing what arises. There is no prize for being the person who shares the deepest thing.
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Then you may especially appreciate this experience. Mask & Mirror isn't designed to give you another framework to understand yourself. It’s an opportunity to practice differently. Sometimes we can understand a pattern beautifully and still find ourselves performing it. This weekend gives you a place to bring what you already know into the body, into relationship, and into play.
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Totally get it! Masks are scary; performing in front of other people is scary; improv is scary; doing new things is scary! It makes a lot of sense that you are scared. AND I think you’ve made it this far because there is a part of you that really wants this, despite being scared. What if you let that little voice lead? What if you came scared?
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While we completely understand, Mask & Mirror is a complete experience. In order to attend, you must be able to stay for the duration of the weekend, barring unforeseen emergencies, of course.
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We cannot guarantee refunds. We want you to be sure before committing.
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Yes! Please reach out to Emily’s team if you have any need of financial assistance. hello@emilyiannuzzelli.com
We want you here.
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Reach out with any other questions you have and we’ll be happy to chat! hello@emilyiannuzzelli.com
