The Joyful Institute for Adequate Studies
A place where you are enough. A critique of excellence and optimisation culture. A sanctuary for your second-best self. A place to recover, tune in, reconnect with others, and be nourished — through joyful adequacy.Here, failure is a portal. Doubt and boredom are fellow playmates. Staying with the trouble is the invitation.Founded by performance artist and practice researcher Dr Anthea Moys, the Institute draws on twenty years of making unwinnable games — participatory structures, temporary trust ecosystems — to create spaces where adults can stop performing and start actually living.The Joyful Institute for Adequate Studies starts in the body, in play, in the small, brave act of being genuinely present with another person without needing to win.Trust is a muscle. Joy is not a luxury. And adequacy — the radical decision to show up just as you are right now — might be one of the most political acts available to us.This is where we practise together.
What we offer
Play Portals — Workshops & Facilitation: Unwinnable games invite you to stay in relation when certainty disappears — noticing what happens when doubt, ambiguity and discomfort enter the room, and discovering how joy can become a bridge across difference rather than an escape from it. Games you can't win, drawing you can't get wrong, play you don't have to earn: half-day and full-day formats for organisations, institutions and community groups ready to test what trust actually does in the body.Talks with Dr Anthea Moys: Dr Moys draws on 20+ years of artistic and research practice to explore what failure, adequacy, doubt, and complexity reveal about critical thinking and how we trust one another. Best paired with a Play Portal workshop — talk + play is the full package.Play Retreats: Multi-day immersive world-building experiences co-creating new ways of being together. For groups ready to go deeper into play, rest, and collective joy.One-to-One Play Dates & Joy Consultations A personal session with Dr Moys. Have you forgotten how to play? What joy feels like? This is a space to find out — at your own pace, without winning.*Fees vary depending on the context, organisation, and scope of work. Corporate, institutional, and community rates are available. Get in touch to discuss what's right for you.
Coming up!
The Juicy Space: Unwinnable Games for Trust
Oxford, 22 April 2026 — co-facilitated with Gia Thom at the Marmalade Festival. A two-hour laboratory for noticing your own trust patterns through play. Sign up hereA Carrier Bag of Tricks
Artistic Practice as Research and other ways to build Trust — workshop for CounterPlay festival at Kolding Design School, Kolding, Denmark, 7–11 May 2026.Play Portals: Summer Solstice Session If play is a portal — what is it a portal to? Deeper relationships? Failure? Boredom? Joy? To doubt as a fellow playmate via mucking about? come find out! For adults who've forgotten they're allowed to mess about. Edinburgh. Link to follow soon!
About Dr. Anthea Moys
Dr Anthea Moys is a performance artist, practice researcher and unwinnable games facilitator who has spent over twenty years finding out what happens when you remove the possibility of winning.With failure and contradiction as essential ingredients, she has been a cyclist in a race going nowhere, a Scottish piper against a battalion of redcoats, and a rugby ball in a rugby game. Her PhD (Northumbria University) developed ambidlala — a reflexive decolonial methodology for play research that acknowledges power in play. She is a Research Fellow at UNISA and recently completed a British Council 90th Anniversary Research Fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, University of Edinburgh.The Joyful Institute for Adequate Studies is her attempt to make all of this useful — and available — to anyone who needs permission to stop performing and start playing.
