Here are my creative projects. As the focus on the live player experience is prioritised, some documentation is more incidental or text-based than others. You are welcome to organise any of my larps for non-commercial purposes, the design documents are below each text though please contact me first.
|
SpilloverSpillover (2023) is a non-verbal chamber larp realising the effects of deforestation and colonialism on bat habitats and human vulnerability to modern-day pandemics. Through human and bat characters, players communicate with touch and sound, yet also using the playing space as a way of interacting through the lopsided presence and absence of props. The larp explores the power and vulnerability of both sets of characters; players alternating between the two adds a heightened sense of understanding for the plight of the others. The title comes from the process of zoonotic spillover; pathogens transferring from wild animals to humans. It is also a reference to 'Game Over' and its association with a state of abrupt solemnity, 'spill' meaning game in Norwegian.
Played at Blackbox CPH 2023 - Copenhagen
Transmigration of SoulsTransmigration of Souls (2022) was designed in various lockdowns, with a longing for human connection. It's non-verbal, inspired by ecstatic dance and movement meditation, players inhabit a soul character which remains with them throughout the play, as well as an animal character which comes and goes as the animal's life expires. As this happens, the ecosystem consumes the vanishing body of the animal through players performing multi-sensory baths, a combination of scent, touch and sound. The larp asks how we are connected in space and time, for players that's a connection to their own bodies as well as the space that is shared with others. For characters, it's their disappearance and reappearance through reincarnation which suggests they are part of a bigger whole.
Played at Grenselandet 2022 - Oslo, Blackbox CPH 2022 - Copenhagen, The Smoke 2022 - London Lost and Found: Belongings That BelongLost and Found: Belongings That Belong (2020) explores what happens when lost property becomes lost and therefore ceases to become property. Players use their own and each others' belongings to build characters based on inanimate objects and create an absurdist limbo inside a train station lost property office. It explores themes of community, political agency and existentialism, asking questions of their new freedom and what to do with it.
Played at The Smoke 2020 - London, Grenselandet 2021 - Oslo
3 Sided Football3 sided football is a practical demonstration of Asger Jorn's philosophy of triolectics, an extension of Marxist dialectics. It is played with 3 teams and 3 goals, the team conceding the fewest goals winning. Rather than stay inside the boundaries of conventional football and sport, it figuratively and physically permeates those, becoming a game to bleed into the real world. Through site-specific performative games in forests, rivers, and atop a castle on a mountain, the game of 3 sided football is a vehicle for chaos magic, a ritual to disrupt, suspend and create reality.
Antiuniversity NowAntiuniversity Now is a radical participatory experiment in education to remove hierarchies between teaching and learning, and through anarchist pedagogies, remove financial, intellectual and cultural barriers to learning. Using the Antiuniversity in London of 1968 as a starting point, the programme facilitated discussions, workshops, walks, interventions across Britain. I was co-founder and co-organiser until 2017, the project continues to this day.
|
Other Minds (co-designed with Nina Runa Essendrop)Other Minds (2023) is a sensory and non-verbal larp which allows players to abstractly explore non-human animal intelligence and sensory perception.
The larp is inspired by locations where octopuses have been discovered to exhibit culture, or socially learned behaviours specific to these environments. The interaction with the environment and props in the playing space as a mechanic for wider questions possibilities of new cultures and languages emerging from their ecosystems. Vision is partially obscured which facilitates the sensorial touch-based language inspired by a differently evolved non-human intelligence. Using breathing and bodily attention, unusually slow and explorative movement and touch techniques, an alien world is created. This larp is co-designed with Nina Runa Essendrop. Played at The Smoke 2023 - London It Could Be YouIt Could Be You (2021) is an online larp exploring speculative livable futures. Set on the fictional island of Notland and beginning on the day it gains independence, the government is decided by lottery. By using inexperience of the characters as an alibi, players collectively dream by experiencing the society they create for themselves and discovering a plethora of future possibilities.
It is played on Discord and players will need access to an internet connection, microphone and camera to play. Played at Now Play This - London/Online 2022 Green BasiliskGreen Basilisk (2019) is an urban drift with a larp framework. Using psychogeography as a starting point, the larp explores the Green Basilisk as an environmental disaster, and time-travelling characters are tasked to deduce what the Green Basilisk is by seeing its effects in real time, diegetically or non-diegetically, by exploring city streets. By playing with a linear cause and effect through time travel and casting a fiction over the outdoor infinite play space, the route and narrative can take unlimited possible directions. The larp is named after and inspired by a card found in the street.
Played at Antiuniversity Now 2019 - London Urban PokerUrban Poker is an extension of the psychogeographical dérive, a playful interaction with urban space which invokes emotions or ambience from its activity. It's a game of continuous game of poker, to be played with found playing cards, connecting the geography, activity and events surrounding the card's discovery and observation as an event in itself, a totem for the power of chaos magic. The act of finding a card is noted by the player and returned to during the poker game in order to build and weave collective narrative.
|