Nordic Larp

Tag: Ritual

  • Larping Anthropology in the 1970s and 1980s: A Look Into the Birth of Performance Studies and Experiential Ethnography

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    Larping Anthropology in the 1970s and 1980s: A Look Into the Birth of Performance Studies and Experiential Ethnography

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    The historical precedents similar to Nordic larp range from ancient Egyptian ritual dramas (Pohjola 2015) to psychological techniques in the Austro-Hungarian Empire (Fatland 2016), from the war gaming associations of American campuses (Peterson 2012) in the 1970s to Hungarian children’s camps (Túri & Hartyándi 2022). Sometimes a trail of influence can be drawn, at others it is a question of parallel evolution. Yet, no matter how distant the relation, lessons can be learned across millennia by studying similar practices earlier on.

    One such example is the fruit of the auspicious friendship between anthropologist Victor Turner and theatre director Richard Schechner. Their mutual fascination towards aspects of their respective fields which we might now consider larp-like led to the development of performance studies and experiential ethnography.

    The work of both pioneers has been cited in works exploring the lineage of Nordic larp, such as Play To Love: Reading Victor Turner’s “Liminal to Liminoid, in Play, Flow, and Ritual; an Essay in Comparative Symbology” (Ericsson 2004), Chorus Novus: Or Looking for Participation in Classical Greece (Pohjola 2015), and The Classical Roots of Larp (Pohjola 2017). However, the interaction between Schechner and Turner and their experiments actually aligning with larp has not been discussed before.

    Victor and Richard

    Victor Turner (1920–1983) was a British cultural anthropologist best known for his work on symbols, rituals, and rites of passage. 

    The focal point of his extensive field studies were the Ndembu, a Bantu ethnic group in Zambia, with whom he and his family lived for fifteen months in grass huts. Victor and his wife Edith, also an anthropologist, would study the Ndembu and home school their children. At nights Victor would read the freshly published The Lord of the Rings to the kids (Baer 2016). The Turners’ son, poet Frederick Turner describes his parents

    They went there as traditional, structuralist, functionalist anthropologists with a Marxist background. They were both Atheists … Their primary interest was studying the structure of roles, statuses, and relationships – kinship – in the culture, and seeing them as a system for survival. They had expected to find that economic factors would be the primary forces in the culture, but they discovered, instead, that it was really ideology, ideas, religion, ritual, and ritual symbolism that were running the society… So my parents were struck with the power of religion and ritual in the Ndembu culture, and they became world renowned experts on those subjects (Baer 2016).

    Meanwhile, Richard Schechner (1934–) is a theater director known for his radical interpretations of classical plays, the editor of The Drama Review, and a performance theorist with a major interest in rituals.

    Schechner’s seminal work had been the participatory play Dionysus in 69 staged in New York. It was based on Euripides’s play The Bacchae but deconstructed the text, and invited the spectators to become active participants. Schechner says they wanted to transform an aesthetic event into a social event and managed to create “an atmosphere in which participation ranged from clapping and singing to spectators stripping and joining in the ritual celebrations and dances” (Schechner, 1973).

    If Dionysus in 69 sounds suspiciously like the rituals that take place at Nordic larps and larpers’ gatherings, it is no coincidence. Both Schechner and Turner have been a major influence on many larp designers and scholars. The three rules for participation Schechner (1973) detailed were:

    1. The audience is in a living space and a living situation. Things may happen to and with them as well as “in front” of them.
    2. When a performer invites participation, he must be prepared to accept and deal with the spectator’s reactions.
    3. Participation should not be gratuitous. 

    These rules are not met by all contemporary immersive theatre productions, but they are met by most, if not all larps. 

    When Turner was studying the Ndembu and when Schechner was transgressing Euripides, they had not yet met, but they were certainly aware of each other’s work. Schechner described their first meeting like this:

    Turner and I first met face-to-face after he phoned me in the spring of 1977. “I am in New York to introduce a lecture by Clifford Geertz at Columbia,” Turner said. “Why not you and I go out for a beer after?” Knowing Turner’s writing, I was eager to meet him. When we did, what should have been a 45-minute getting-to-know-you chat turned into a 3+ hour seminar-of-two. Really, we were made for each other: inquisitive, good sense of humor, wide-ranging interests, not afraid to go out on a limb, rampant with appetites. And, of course, performance. What Vic called “process” I called performance. It was social drama, liminal-liminoid, communitas, ritual, and more. Vic’s mother was an actress; theatre was in his upbringing. He had an urgent belief in the efficacy of human enactment, and a delight in it also (Schechner 2020).

    This first meeting quickly grew into a collaboration that lasted until Turner’s untimely death in 1983. They worked together on three conferences sponsored by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, and crucially, on a two-week workshop sponsored by School of the Arts, New York University (Schechner 2020).

    The symposium in which they first collaborated, Cultural Frames and Reflections: Ritual, Drama and Spectacle, was held at a castle in Austria. The symposium was “a performance in itself” (Stoeltje 1978, 51), bringing together “anthropologists, literary critics, folklorists, a historian, a semiotician and impresario, a dramatist and stage director, novelist, poets, and an ethnopoetician – participant observers and observer-participants preoccupied with many kinds of cultural performance” (MacAloon 1984b, 2). Interwoven with the conference papers were poetry readings, dramatic techniques, storytelling, and viewings of Fellini’s La Strada and the film version of Dionysus in ’69, the avant-garde play that had established Schechner’s reputation in theater. … the symposium altered the models of reality that the participants brought to the table in the first place (Stoeltje, 451), and each of them returned to their work at least slightly transformed (Brownell & Frese, 2020).

    The Groundbreaking Workshop

    The symposium resulted in a workshop which was held at Schechner’s Performance Garage in Soho, where Schechner’s company, The Performance Group, had given groundbreaking performances such as Makbeth, Tooth of Crime, and Dionysus in 69. This summer workshop was a key point in the development of their art.

    Schechner invited Victor and Edith Turner, anthropologist Alexander Alland, and sociologist Erving Goffman to join himself and 27 participants to take part in a two-week workshop (Schechner, 2020). The participants were graduate students, professors, performers, and devisers of performance, and numbered 16 women and 11 men. 

    The participants had applied based on an announcement where the workshop was described like this: 

    This is an intensive workshop – two sessions daily, 5 days per week with all faculty participating in most of the sessions so that there will be maximum interaction among faculty and among faculty and students. The workshop will explore the interface between ritual and theatre. […] The aim of the workshop is to shatter boundaries between performance and social sciences and between art and cognitive studies. […] participants will be selected to ensure a balance between artists, scholars and scientists (Schechner, 2020). 

    The workshop turned out to be groundbreaking for the participants and for the fields they presented. It also seems to have many parallels to early forms of American larp and quasi-larp that were already in existence in the late 1970s such as Society for Creative Anachronism, the Model United Nations, and Society for Interactive Literature.

    According to Schechner (2020), they “talked, performed, partied (some), took a weekend trip to Baltimore for a theatre festival, and dove deep into each other’s ideas and felt experiences.” Victor Turner himself describes the workshop in great detail in his article “Dramatic Ritual/Ritual Drama: Performative and Reflexive Anthropology” (Turner, 1979):

    Even the best of ethnographic films fail to communicate much of what it means to be a member of the society filmed. … How, then, may this be done? One possibility may be to turn the more interesting portions of ethnographies into playscripts, then to act them out in class, and finally to turn back to ethnographies armed with the understanding that comes from “getting inside the skin” of members of other cultures, rather than merely “taking the role of the other” in one’s own culture (Turner, 1979).

    Turner emphasizes the difference between playing a character of one’s own culture and playing a different culture altogether. Later on, he would also find joy and enlightenment in the former. 

    This is similar language that is used of playing characters in larps: “Most players report having the phenomenological experience of immersion in role-playing games, using phrases such as ‘losing myself in the game’ or ‘the character took over’” (Bowman, 2018).

    Turner continues: 

    …at Schechner’s summer institute, I tried to involve anthropology and drama students in the joint task of writing scripts for and performing ethnographies. It seemed best to choose parts of classical ethnographies that lent themselves to dramatic treatment […] But time being short (we had only two weeks), I had to fall back upon my own ethnography both because I knew it best, and because I had already, to some extent, written a script for a substantial amount of field data in the form I have called social drama (Turner, 1979).

    The “script” in question was two social dramas Turner described in his book Schism and Continuity in An African Society (1968), describing life in the Ndembu village. 

    Schechner sees the actor, in taking the role of another — provided by the playscript — as moving, under the intuitive and experienced eye of the director/producer, from the “not-me” (the blueprinted role) to the “not-not-me” (the realized role), and he sees the movement itself as constituting a kind of liminal phase in which all kinds of experiential experiments are possible, indeed mandatory (Turner, 1979).

    The “not-me” or “the blueprinted role” would traditionally mean a role described in the play text, and here, a person from the ethnographical description of village life and ritual. In a larp context, it would refer to a character description provided by the larp designers. The “not-not-me” or “the realized role” in a larp would be the larper’s interpretation of the character, the character as it is actually played.

    Turner uses the word “liminal” a lot. It comes from the Latin word limes, meaning “border”. Liminal events happen when crossing a border, entering the world of the ritual or enacted social drama or larp. Participants leave behind their everyday identities and “absorb a new ‘liminal’ identity for the duration of the ritual, and relate to each other through that identity. … [O]ther participants have a similar role, and only see each other through that role” (Pohjola, 2015).

    To get things started, the group had read the social dramas by themselves, and then Turner read them out loud, offering necessary commentary along the way. The dramas dealt with “Ndembu village politics, competition for headmanship, ambition, jealousy, sorcery, the recruiting of factions, and the stigmatizing of rivals” (Turner, 1979). These are key components in many a larp plot, as well.

    But how does one turn a larp script or a social drama script into something that lives and breathes?

    When I had finished reading the drama accounts, the actors in the workshop told me at once that they needed to be “put in the right mood”; to “sense the atmospherics” of Ndembu village life. One of them had brought some records of Yoruba music, and, though this is a different musical idiom from Central African music, I led them into a dancing circle, showing them to the best of my limited, arthritic ability, some of the moves of Ndembu dancing (Turner, 1979).

    The second social drama contained a name inheritance ritual (Kuswanika ijina), and the group decided to try to recreate it with the limited props available at the Performance Garage. This impulse turned the workshop into what seems very much like a larp festival. The ritual 

    …marked the temporary end of a power struggle between the stigmatized candidate for headmanship, Sandombu, and Mukanza, the successful candidate. Sandombu had been exiled from the village because he was accused of killing his cousin Nyamuwaha through sorcery. Sandombu had been gone for a year and sympathies had turned for him. In a b plot there was illness in the village and at the same time many dreamed of Nyamuwaha. The Ndembu interpreted this to mean that Nyamuwaha’s shade was disturbed by the troubles in the village, and used this as a pretext to invite Sandombu back to ritually plant a tree that would appease Nyamuwaha. Officially the ritual would involve Nyamuwaha’s eldest daughter Manyosa inheriting her name, but this was the context for it (Turner, 1979).

    As any amateur game master would, Turner cast himself in the key role, playing Sandombu. He then had to find someone to play Manyosa. “Someone whom we shall call Becky, a professional director of drama, volunteered” (Turner, 1979).

    I asked Becky to give me the name of a recently deceased close female relative of an older generation who had meant much in her life. Considerably moved, she mentioned her mother’s sister Ruth. I then prayed in Chilunda to “village ancestors.” Becky sat beside me before the “shrine,” her legs extended in front of her, her head bowed in the Ndembu position of ritual modesty. I then anointed the shrine-tree with the improvised mpemba, white clay, symbol of unity with the ancestors and the living community, and drew three lines with it on the ground, from the shrine to myself. I then anointed Becky by the orbits of her eyes, on the brow, and above the navel. I declared her to be “Nswana-Ruth,” “successor of Ruth”, in a way identified with Ruth, in another replacing her, though not totally, as a structural persona. I repeated the anointing process with other members of the group, not naming them after deceased kin but joining them into the symbolic unity of our recently formed community of teachers and students (Turner, 1979).

    The workshop participants had discussed the ritual enactment for hours and agreed it was the turning point after which they understood both the factions and scapegoating within the village and also the sense of the village belonging together, as well as the affectual structure of the social drama (Turner, 1979). The physical and mental motions enhanced their collective and individual understanding of the conflict situation.

    This was their first foray into “larp”, and it led to many more. They wanted to stage the ritual dramas in their entirety, not just individual  rituals. One question was whether this would be a realistic larp or a fantasy larp: “some events … would be treated realistically, naturalistically; but the world of cultural beliefs, particularly those connected with sorcery and the ancestor cult, would be treated symbolically” (Turner, 1979). They talked about making a film to be shown in the background. Whether the end goal of the enactment would be to perform to a regular theatre audience or for the participants to understand the culture by exploring the rituals, was also up in the air.

    It is clear from his writing that after these exercises Turner himself started to strongly identify with and root for the character he played: “In capitalistic America, or socialistic Russia or China, a political animal like Sandombu might have thrived. In Ndembu village politics, however, a person with ambition, but procreatively sterile and without many matrilinear kin, was almost from the start a doomed man” (Turner, 1979).

    The workshop was over before they could portray all the social dramas they had planned, but a spark was ignited, something that would continue in further conferences, and in the works of Schechner, the Turners, and many of the students who were present. “There is nothing like acting the part of a member of another culture in a crisis situation characteristic of that culture to detect inauthenticity in the reporting usually made by Westerners and to raise problems undiscussed or unresolved in the ethnographic narrative,” Turner writes (1979). 

    The workshop was a turning point for Schechner, as well:

    I made more than 50 pages of notes. These tell me of vigorous discussions among Turner, Goffman, Alland, and I — especially during the [three] days Goffman was there. … Turner was a transgressive superstar for sure. The takeaway, 41 years later, from that workshop is a flash of memories. Sitting in a circle on the second floor of The Performing Garage in SoHo. Participating in, evoking, and responding to Vic’s ebullience, brilliance, jouissance, and appetite to go where few if any anthropologists have ventured. This in contrast to Goffman’s profound skepticism and irony and Alland’s academic probity. And to recall that Edie [anthropologist Edith Turner] was there with Vic, coaching and coaxing, sometimes critiquing, never passive, a player (Schechner, 2020).

    Subsequent larps, I mean, enacted social dramas

    After the two-week workshop in Soho, Victor and Edith Turner kept exploring what is essentially larping. With New York University drama students, they performed Central African and Afro-Brazilian rituals, “aided by drummers drawn from the appropriate cultures or related cultures” (Turner & Turner, 1982).

    The Turners continued these experiments at the University of Virginia where they taught anthropology. The social dramas were enacted in the large basement of the Turners’ home in Charlottesville.

    Our aim was not to develop a professional group of trained actors for the purposes of public entertainment. It was, frankly, an attempt to put students more fully inside the cultures they were reading about in anthropological monographs. … What we were trying to do was to put experiential flesh on these cognitive bones (Turner & Turner, 1982).

    They had already moved away from the constraints of stage play with an audience and clearly were only interested in the experience itself. In a way, ritual drama turned into larp, showcasing the similarities between the two forms.

    The Turners’ own analysis of what went on has been contradicted by the experiences of some of their students who have since become anthropology professors in their own right:

    I was not a member of the inner circle of faculty and graduate students who prepared and organized the reenactments. … I had the impression that Vic was less interested in how the reenactments complemented ethnographic texts and more interested in whether the ritual itself had an impact on the participants even if they were not immersed in the culture from which it came (Brownell, 2020). 

    This sounds very much like a newbie coming to their first larp and feeling left out of key plots and social cliques. But also like someone recognizing a nascent art form and wanting to make it even better by inventing their own way of doing it better. This, to me, echoes the sentiments of the early Nordic larp scene in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

    The social dramas enacted included the Cannibal Dance of the Kwakiutl, a First Nations group in Canada, a ritual of the Barok people from Papua New Guinea, the midwinter ceremony of the Mohawk of Canada, and a completely made-up fake ritual created by students. Douglas Dalton, then a student who participated in the Cannibal Dance and now a Professor of Anthropology at Longwood University, commented after the experience: 

    As the ceremony progressed I felt not so much the antagonistic rivalry that was overtly expressed in the ceremony between the bear clan and the killer whale clan, but the fact that we were collectively doing something really important—something essentially correct. There was so much power flowing all over the place in the longhouse (the Charlottesville basement) that night! The spirits were really at work that evening and we had to keep everything in line so all that power wouldn’t destroy everything! (Turner & Turner, 1982).

    These narratives bear a striking relationship to people coming back from their first larp and wanting to explain everything that happened and flailing at articulating just how meaningful it all was.

    A Virginian Wedding

    It was not all about exploring “the other”, however. Richard Schechner famously sees almost every mundane task as something that can be viewed as performance, echoing Erving Goffman’s previous observations (Goffman, 1956). In that spirit, one of the Turners’ graduate students, Pamela Frese, designed and ran a performance about a contemporary Virginian wedding in 1981. This was a topic of her own anthropological studies.

    The entire anthropology department were cast as participants. The Turners played the bride’s parents. According to the Turners, “the bride and groom were identified primarily because they were not in the least a ‘romantic item’”(Turner & Turner, 1982). According to Frese herself, the opposite is true: “[the students playing the bride and groom] did joke about this afterward since they really were a ‘thing’ as my students would say today. The Turners apparently didn’t realize this at the time, but their relationship was why I asked them to play the role in the first place” (Frese, 2020). And indeed, the bride’s player had reservations about her own marriage. Talk about playing close to home.

    The other participants played wedding guests with roles such as “bride’s sister”, “groom’s ex-girlfriend”, “groom’s grandfather”, “bride’s drunken uncle”, and so on. The minister was a graduate student of Religious Studies. A relationship map was pinned up in the department office several weeks before the event and people started filling out their loosely sketched characters and relations. 

    One of the faculty members declared, as father of the groom, that his “side” of the wedding represented $23 million of “old New England money”. … Victor Turner was an old proletarian Scots immigrant who made vulgar money by manufacturing a cheap, but usable, plastic garbage can, and who quoted Robbie Burns, often irrelevantly (Turner & Turner, 1982).

    Note that the Turners do not write that Victor played the part of a proletarian immigrant but that he was a proletarian immigrant. The character had taken over.

    The wedding ceremony took place in the Turner’s basement which this time had been turned into a church and was followed by a reception upstairs with real champagne and festive foods (Frese, 2020). All the guests had brought gifts to the happy couple, presented by hand-made item cards. As the evening progressed, some stayed in their characters continuously while others reverted to being out-of-character and only “larping” when something exciting happened. 

    Others were taken over, “possessed” by what Grathoff and Handelman have called “symbolic types” — priest, bride, bridegroom, and so on, in the domain of ritual liminality; Drunken Uncle, Pitiful Lean and Slippered Pantaloon in the play domain (the “bride’s grandfather” — a student played this senile type; in the middle of the service he shouted, “Battlestations! Battlestations!” reliving old wars) (Turner & Turner, 1982).

    The Turners worried that such improvisations disrupted the social drama, as they were not a part of the ritual script. Frese disagrees: 

    And why did another graduate student and friend, acting as a senile old man waving his cane, suddenly erupt with angry outbursts exchanged with invisible people during the ceremony? … They were endangering the success of the event!! But were they? Now in hindsight, these unplanned, improvisational acts actually created a more successful ritual performance than I originally planned and illustrate well what liminality can engender (Frese, 2020).

    Indeed, much more takes place at a wedding than what is officially described in the program. Without such human elements any event would feel thin and theoretical instead of lived-in and real. Since everyone is the main character of their main story at larps, we rarely have an issue with this. And clearly the same is true of enacted social dramas, too, even if the Turners at first did not recognize it.

    One can imagine how intimidating it can be for a student to run a larp at superstar faculty  members’ home and cast them in it. But once play starts, such social distinctions disappear: 

    One of the most obvious dimensions of this liminal experience was the reversal of social roles that emerged through the performance of the ritual and the embodiment of reversals as faculty and students came together as “fictive kin,” temporarily erasing hierarchical power relations within the department (Frese, 2020).

    Criticism

    The Turners’ method of performative anthropology has drawn its share of valid criticism since the 1980s. Issues such as cultural appropriation, emotional safety, ethical research, research on human subjects, elites using the power of ritual to further their own interests, and the transformational power of ritual, are all valid concerns (see e.g., Brownell & Frese, 2020). Such criticism is familiar to many larp organizers, as well. And like many larpers, the field of experiential ethnography has taken this criticism to heart and learned from it: 

    [Professor Mark Pedelty’s] answer to the potentially troubling dynamic is to incorporate the problems of cultural appropriation and ethnocentrism into the course, making them central both to inquiry and to the analysis of the performance itself (p. 250). We also advocate for the explicit discussion of these issues in preparation for a classroom performance as well as in the post-performance debriefing and written analysis by the students (Brownell & Frese, 2020).

    One now common strategy of mitigating cultural appropriation is planning re-enacted social dramas with members of the groups being studied. Or having international students play the parts of elders when performing a ritual they themselves had been a part of (Brownell & Frese, 2020).

    An interesting possibility for larp designers wary of cultural appropriation but interested in exploring real-life cultures other than their own is to, instead of avoiding those topics altogether, to deal with the question in the workshops surrounding the larp or within the larp itself. And possibly collaborate with members of those cultures when designing and running the larp, as was done at least in the Palestinian-Finnish collaboration Halat hisar (Finland, 2013). Kaisa Kangas (2014) wrote, after having played the ritual-heavy hunter-gatherer larp KoiKoi (Norway 2014): 

    For me, KoiKoi was successful as a playful attempt at experimental anthropology, and I got many new thoughts and ideas about culture. However, we should be cautious. It would be tempting to make conclusions about real-world hunter-gatherers based on the game. … That is nothing but an illusion. You don’t learn about real cultures by playing larps inspired by them. Definitely not if there are no members of these cultures in the organization teams. There is only one way to really come to understand a different culture: you learn the language, you go there, you live the life. … The ankoi culture doesn’t allow us to draw conclusions about real hunter-gatherers. However, it can become a mirror to reflect our own, industrialized 21th century Nordic culture, and that is valuable by itself. There lies the merit of experimental anthropology as a larp genre.

    It seems real-life anthropologists still walking in the Turners’ footsteps are less skeptical of the possibilities of larping ethnographies than Kangas was. On the other hand, the ankoi in KoiKoi were a fictional culture based on several stone age societies, not a serious attempt at a specific ethnography.

    Legacy

    The seismic waves caused by Victor Turner’s and Richard Schechner’s collaboration are still felt today. According to Susan Brownell and Pam Frese, their “pioneering blend of theater and anthropology gave birth to performance studies and reinvigorated other disciplines, such as folklore, communications, linguistics, and education” (Brownell & Frese, 2020).

    Many of the Turners’ former students now use these methods in teaching anthropology at universities across the United States, sometimes even using the term “role-playing” (Brownell & Frese, 2020). They may not call it edularp, but they might just as well. Similarly, a week at Østerskov Efterskole where students larp ancient Romans and read all about Rome to better get into character, sounds very much like Turnerian experiential ethnography.

    Richard Schechner’s (2002) introductory book Performance Studies – An Introduction is mandatory reading in theatre academies across the world. His theories have directly influenced many high-profile Nordic larps, such as Hamlet (Sweden 2002) and Mellan himmel och hav (Sweden 2003, Eng. Between Heaven and Sea). Their work is also central in our understanding of the precursors of larp in history and current larp-like practices in different cultures all over the globe. Martin Ericsson muses, “[h]ad Nordic-style live-action role-playing been around in New York in the sixties, it would have been the natural focus for their studies and would have been hailed as the key, the missing link, in their quest to understand humanity’s constant creation of performances” (Ericsson, 2004).

    In the end, the friendship between Victor Turner and Richard Schechner lasted for only six years. Turner died of a heart attack in 1983. There were two funerals, attended by Turner’s family, friends, students, colleagues, and of course, Schechner. The first was a requiem at a Catholic church, the other a basement ritual based on a Ndembu chief’s funeral ceremony. 

    [Edith Turner] went into the [Ndembu seclusion] hut and we collectively performed the rite for the passing of a headman. I could hear Edie weeping, wailing, suffering her enormous loss. Outside, people were telling jokes, singing, dancing, describing Vic, enticing Edie to step from her isolation and rejoin her community. To transform mourning into celebration; to combine the two; to enact the ritual process. Wife of 40 years, mother of five, anthropologist, and now widow, Edie brought herself and the Victor she both lost and incorporated from the hut back into the world (Schechner, 2020).

    Edith Turner and Richard Schechner continued their collaboration for decades, delving further into the strange liminal realm between theatre and anthropology. I end this essay with a comment from Victor Turner after his first larp-like experience: 

    The group or community does not merely “flow” in unison at these performances, but, more actively, tries to understand itself in order to change itself (Turner, 1979).

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    Túri, Bálint Márk & Mátyás Hartyándi. 2022. “Tribes and Kingdoms”. In Distance of Touch, edited by Juhana Pettersson. Helsinki: Pohjoismaisen roolipelaamisen seura.

    Turner, Victor. 1979. “Dramatic Ritual/Ritual Drama: Performative and Reflexive Anthropology.” Kenyon Review 1 (3) (Summer): 80–93.

    Turner, Victor & Edith Turner (1982): “Performing Ethnography”. In The Drama Review: TDR/The Drama Review 26 (2), Intercultural Performance. (Summer, 1982), pp. 33-50

    Turner, Victor. 1968. Schism and Continuity in An African Society: A Study of Ndembu Village Life. Manchester University Press. Manchester, United Kingdom.

    Worthen, W.B. 1995. “Disciplines of the Text/Sites of Performance.” TDR/The Drama Review 39 (1) (Spring): 13–28.

    Ludography

    Abdulkarim, Fatima,  Faris Arouri,  Kaisa Kangas,  Riad Mustafa, Juhana Pettersson, Maria  Pettersson & Mohamad Rabah. 2013. Halat hisar. Finland.

    Ericsson, Martin, Anna Ericson,  Christopher Sandberg & Martin Brodén. 2002. Hamlet. Sweden: Interaktiva Uppsättningar.

    Raaum, Margrete, Tor Kjetil Edland & Eirik Fatland. 2014. KoiKoi. Norway.

    Schechner, Richard. 1968. Dionysus in 69. Based on the play Bacchae by Euripides, translated by William Arrowsmith. United States, New York City: The Performance Group.

    Wieslander, E. & Katarina Björk. 2003. Mellan himmel och hav. Sweden.

    Unnamed re-enactment of a Virginian wedding. 1981. USA, Charlottesville: Pamela Frese. 

    This article has been reprinted with permission from the Solmukohta 2024 book. Please cite as:

    Pohjola, Mike. 2024. “Larping Anthropology in the 1970s and 1980s –  A Look Into the Birth of Performance Studies and Experiential Ethnography.” In Liminal Encounters: Evolving Discourse in Nordic and Nordic Inspired Larp, edited by Kaisa Kangas, Jonne Arjoranta, and Ruska Kevätkoski, 266-280. Helsinki, Finland: Ropecon ry.

    Cover photo: Photo of  a tabla drum by Swaroop B Deshpande on Unsplash. Image has been cropped.

  • Helicon: An Epic Larp about Love, Beauty, and Brutality

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    Helicon: An Epic Larp about Love, Beauty, and Brutality

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    This article is the second in a series on Larping Intimacy and Relationships.

    Content Advisory: Enslavement, oppression, domestic abuse, sexual abuse, addiction, dysfunctional relationships, plot spoilers

    From the Heliconian Muses let us begin to sing, who hold the great and holy mount of Helicon, and dance on soft feet about the deep-blue spring and the altar of the almighty son of Cronos…  — Hesiod’s Theogony

    Helicon is a larp by Katrine Wind and Maria Pettersson. The first run was held January 5-7, 2024 in Broholm Castle, Denmark, with a second run scheduled for February 16-18. The larp focuses upon a group of artists, leaders, and scientists in the early twentieth century with various specialties who have discovered and enacted an occult ritual in their university years together. This ritual enables them to call forth the Muses of Greek antiquity, children of Zeus and Mnemosyne, goddess of Memory. The artists ensnare the Muses into servitude such that the Muses are spiritually bound into conferring their Inspiration to the artist who summoned them (their “Inspired”) and are not allowed to Inspire others without a direct order. They are also no longer free to leave the vicinity in which their Inspired has ordered them to stay; through the course of the larp, this vicinity was Helicon Manor, a far cry from the Mount Helicon of antiquity where they normally go for replenishment. Helicon deals explicitly with themes of artistic inspiration, addiction, emotional turmoil, power, restrictions on freedom, and dysfunctional relationship dynamics.

    If you are planning to play a future run, please be mindful that this article will share spoilers about the details of the design and the ending.

    Physical and Spiritual Subjugation

    And, when they have washed their tender bodies in Permessus or in the Horse’s Spring or Olmeius, make their fair, lovely dances upon highest Helicon and move with vigorous feet…

         — Hesiod’s Theogony

    In Helicon, each Muse has a specific theme that infuses their Inspiration and guides play:  Comedy, Dance, Epic poetry, History, Love poetry, Music, Painting, Philosophy, Politics, Psychology, Sculpture, Song, Spiritual inspiration, and Tragedy. While the power dynamics within the dyads (and in one case, triad) are complex, the Muses are essentially enslaved to their Inspired. They can be drained dry of Inspiration, which the Inspired can use to fuel great deeds or waste as they wish. They can be separated from their siblings: the only beings who can truly understand their divine nature and the millennia of memories they share. They can be physically, emotionally, and spiritually abused by their captors. Even in the kindest of pairings, they must endure the renewal ritual of binding every year, witnessing all of their siblings undergo the process of losing their free will once more. Muses are required to wear only white and gold, with their clothing chosen by their Inspired.

    A person in white with a flower crown seated as a person embraces them from behind.
    Omorfia and Philip Frost, Muse and Inspired of Painting. Photo by Bjørn-Morten Gundersen.

    The Muses can also exert influence over their human captors. When their captors experience their Inspiration, whether given consensually or forcibly taken by the Inspired, the experience is akin to being high on drugs and vulnerable to the Muse emotionally such that promises can be extracted. However, whether or not the Inspired chooses to honor those promises depends entirely on their own integrity: not a common trait written within these characters. While the Inspired have different attitudes toward the binding ritual and its problematic ethics, they still willingly or grudgingly participate in subjugating the Muses each year for their own gain.

    This subjugation is particularly painful within the context of the epic setting. Because the Muses are forced to give Inspiration only to one (or two) humans, the rest of the world is starving and wasting away. For millennia, the Muses were deities that evoked worship and vulnerable surrender in order to receive their blessings. They could freely give Inspiration and leave at will as befits their nature; now, they were forced into servitude. At the center of this dynamic is the frailty of the human ego: how even the “best” in the world still struggle with needing to feel recognized and important, and how such insecurities lead people to cause brutal harm to others in order to extract their vital energy and love.

    The larp is a mixture of the mundane and the extraordinary, with the interactions taking on a significance not only within these interpersonal dynamics, but upon the world stage and even within the realm of gods. For this reason, I classify the experience as epic play, not only because of the context of Greek epic poetry from which it emerges, but also due to the heightened significance of these actions and the strong emphasis on great artistic production arising out of pain. To subjugate a person in order to extract their vital energy is tragic; to subjugate the Muse of Tragedy is tragic on an epic level. 

    Melpomene (standing), Taylor Montgomery (left), and Thomas Montgomery (right), Muse and Inspired of Tragedy. Photo by Bjørn-Morten Gundersen.

    The white and gold attire worn by the Muses gave them an ethereal, otherworldly quality that contrasted sharply with the Vintage Era clothing of the artists. The website describes the Vintage Era as encompassing “any time from the late 19th century to the middle of the 20th century” (Wind and Pettersson 2023). In contrast to this vaguely modern era, diegetically, the Muses have existed for millennia. Despite this eternal quality, however, the Muses tend to “live in the present.” This meant in practice that we may have fragments of memories from bygone eras of having inspiring historical or legendary mythic figures at will, but such memories would be less important than the present moment experience. For me, this awareness led to a strange contrast between being trapped in a mundane human experience of time and its day-to-day concerns, while also mentally leaping to other times and places, adding to the eerie and unnatural nature of the Muses’ servitude. Such elements added a sense of epicness to play.

    The concept of epic play is not intended to reduce the importance of larps focusing on oppression, intimacy, and other dynamics occurring amongst “mere” humans, but rather to describe an aesthetic quality about the larp that sets it apart from larps about the mundane world. To be captured as a Muse meant we could not Inspire others, such that our lack of involvement due to our enslavement was creating ripples in reality not only inside Helicon Manor, but outside of it. The Inspired could trade or even gamble away the Muses’ Inspiration, which can be seen as a mixture of their vital essence and their labor the Muses no longer had liberty to use as they wished.

    This epic aesthetic quality can also be ascribed to certain storylines within fantasy larps and themes in other games that feature a supernatural component. Epicness relies upon the ensemble of players committing to underscore the epic significance of the actions performed within play. I have had epic play experiences in other settings, such as at the Vampire: the Masquerade (1991) larp Convention of Thorns (2017) as well as within chamber larps and tabletop RPGs of various genres; indeed, this epic quality is likely what draws many people again and again to Dungeons & Dragons (1974-), which is still the most popular tabletop setting in the world.

    What made Helicon exemplary in this respect was the care put into the communication, design, structure, and safety surrounding the experience such that this epic quality — and the tragic  predicament within which these characters were ensnared — was emphasized. This article will focus on these design and implementation practices, providing theoretical context from my perspective as a player-researcher enacting a Muse character where appropriate.

    Circles of Trust and Betrayal

    Thence they arise and go abroad by night, veiled in thick mist, and utter their song with lovely voice, praising… 

         — Hesiod’s Theogony

    The larp designers fostered trust among the player base in a variety of ways. The website clearly communicated not only the themes of the larp, but also its structure and which sorts of experiences the players were encouraged and discouraged to enact. Players were not expected to demonstrate expertise in their respective arts or to perform during the larp, which lowered the perceived barrier to entry of performance anxiety. Despite the intimate nature of many of the relationships, the designers detailed that this larp is not intended to be an erotic larp in which public displays of sexuality are encouraged and are often a central design feature (Grasmo and Stenros 2022). While such larps can be experienced as liberating for participants (Juhana Pettersson 2021b), explicit sexuality can distract from the more subtle relationship dynamics and interactions that this larp sought to foster. Regardless of the chosen themes, expectation setting is important in creating a shared culture before signup even begins (Koljonen 2016a), provided of course that the players adhere to this established social contract. 

    Similarly, the website described the structure of scenes that would occur, which included a form of fateplay (Fatland 2000) of certain scenes framing each act. It described the pre-larp scene of the Muses attempting and failing at escape, only to be dragged back to Helicon Manor: in achingly strong contrast to the real Mount Helicon, where they would gather for connection and renewal as siblings before their enslavement. 

    Photo of a person in a black robe
    Stella Wilson, Inspired of Spiritual Inspiration, led the rituals. Photo by Bjørn-Morten Gundersen.

    The larp was framed with a beautifully epic theme song composed by Anni Tolvanen, which ushered us in and out of play. Tolvanen also curated a soundscape of dramatic music that echoed through the halls during the larp. The first Act began with a ritualized Punishment scene while standing in a circle, in which the Inspired enacted consequences on their Muses for their escape attempt, also forcing the Muses to punish each other. I have also utilized this technique of starting the larp by dropping characters directly into ritual space when co-designing Immerton (2017) and Epiphany (2018). I find it a particularly helpful practice to emphasize the core themes of the game, help players quickly get past the awkwardness of the first hour of the larp, and create intensely meaningful role-play moments from the beginning that can feed play later. (For further reading on these larps, see Jones 2017; Brown et al. 2018; Kim, Nuncio, and Wong 2018). 

    In our discussions after the larp, Wind referred to this design technique as part of a concept she calls frontloading, which she will further describe in an upcoming article. For Katrine, this term referred to the structure and pacing in terms of intensity, which puts a lot of structured and tense content earlier in the larp. This term also resonated with Maria, who described frontloading as designing  extensive and complex character relations with focus on high playability in the larp itself, a common strategy in Finnish design. Wind explained:

    This combination gives players something to immediately play on and react to that has specific relevance for their character and gives them “something to talk about immediately.” It also provides alibi to jump right into relations that might take a lot of time to ramp up and cause everything in the larp to culminate at the same time in the last few hours. . . 

    If there is one or more crescendos in the beginning of the larp itself, culminations and intensity [are] spread out over the whole playtime because you can be sure that some things will only culminate in the last hours of the larp anyway.

    In the next group scene, we were then instructed to go to the dining hall. The multi-course dinners and lunches were catered and high quality. What made these dining scenes particularly epic were the statues and bas reliefs decorating the room that portrayed scenes from Greek mythology. The metatechnique that guided play in these scenes was dinner warfare, also featured in Wind’s larp Daemon (2021-). Unlike the intensely visible brutality in the Punishment ritual, we sat in circles masterminded by assigned seating to maximize drama. We pretended to be members of polite society while delivering passive aggressive verbal barbs, whether about art, the Muses’ confinement, class, or any number of other dynamics. (Gender, sexuality, and race/ethnic discrimination was explicitly forbidden in the larp, but class was very much embedded in the character design). This juxtaposition of high boiling intensity in the beginning directly to a low simmer punctuated the themes of the larp quite sharply: the epic alongside the banal, the fragility of human egos, the need to control in order to feel important, the subtle bids for freedom within enforced servitude, etc. According to the designers, traditions such as arranged seating were diegetically upheld as necessary, both due to affiliation to the Inspired’s prestigious university and the necessity to keep the ritual intact. Wind told me, 

    Alibi for the seats being like this was provided by the diegetic fact that the Inspired needed the repetition to make sure they could renew the Binding year after year, so they didn’t dare change the seating. It was simply, and naturally, a tradition. This meant that divorced couples and former friends were awkwardly seated close to each other for hours.

    Danielle Lafontaine, Inspired of Dance, and Christian Schönburg, Inspired of Comedy, engaged in dinner warfare. Photo by Bjørn-Morten Gundersen.

    The first Act ended for Muses with a touching final circle: a purification ritual. Diegetically, the Muses would return to Mount Helicon every 15 years to reconnect through this ritual; since we were not permitted to return to Mount Helicon or see one another at will for the last 15 years, we made do in the Manor with these stolen moments. We huddled for warmth in the dark attic, gently comforting one another through touch as we did throughout the larp. We each took water from a bowl and cleansing the Muse next to us, which felt like a ritual blessing. Then, we each shared a Secret — some revealed shameful feelings or actions, such as taking someone else’s Inspired as a lover or alerting one’s Inspired of the escape plans. While we all witnessed these admissions, the purification ritual added an element of forgiveness to the circle. At least for my character, the understanding that we were taking action under complicated situations of duress made it easy to let such admissions go, although others did hold resentments. 

    People standing around a circle as a robed woman holds a glass above her head.
    The Inspired awaiting the arrival of the Muses in the first Binding, the beginning of Act 2. Photo by Bjørn-Morten Gundersen. Image has been cropped.

    The second Act began with a flashback scene in which we enacted the initial binding ritual. This ritual also occurred in a circle within the same room, imbuing the physical space with a certain repeated significance. This scene was particularly effective because we already had the experience of being subjugated by these relationships the night before. We then began play with a brief experience of freedom, worship, and a pure desire to Inspire outside of such subjugation, only to be bound and betrayed. This worship was especially desired by the Muses because of its unusualness in the modern world, where few still prayed to the old gods; thus the pain of betrayal was manifold.

    At the end of Act 2, the characters engaged in another important informal ritual called the Party, which was also upheld every year due to tradition. In the Party, the artists drained their Muses of all Inspiration in a moment of selfish gluttonous intoxication, doing absolutely nothing of worth with these gifts. The Muses were expected to participate in the Party as celebrants as well, which we interpreted in various ways. This sort of peer pressure to maintain appearances was present in all of the rituals, with Inspired and Muse characters alike having various degrees of internal and external conflict around these traditions.

    Photo of a man in a suit holding a book and a woman in a white dress with a circlet on her head, both have a statue behind them
    Henry Wilson and Clio, Inspired and Muse of History. Photo by Bjørn-Morten Gundersen.

    Close to the end  of Act 3 was the yearly renewal of the binding ritual, with a twist: the ritual was disrupted afterward by a scroll that contained a sort of counter spell, in which the Muses were offered the opportunity to make a “Choice.” The Muses could choose to stay with their captors in servitude, or leave, which would entail them to become mortal, losing their supernatural abilities, and eventually dying. The design allowed for us to spend quite a bit of in-game time focused on this Choice and its ramifications. The power dynamics were suddenly flipped: the Muses could now decide to freely go (albeit with twisted ramifications and not at all prepared for human life), or stay within the dysfunctional dynamic of enslavement, lending to the air of tragedy. 

    I was cast as Clio, the Muse of History, who had a comparatively consensual dynamic with her Inspired, historian Henry Wilson, in part due to intense Stockholm Syndrome. Though Clio’s entrapment was relatively kind, she was appalled at the indignities forced upon her siblings. During the Choice, Henry wanted Clio to stay to help him uncover lost cities like Troy, which had earned him great fame with her Inspiration as an impetus. However, he had chosen to marry another human Inspired, which reinforced to Clio this sense of indignity.

    The other dyads and triad had similarly complex interpersonal dynamics, which led to the Choice being difficult to make; certain characters, who experienced some of the worst oppression in the larp chose to remain enslaved. This choice mirrors human dysfunctional relationships, but was intensified by the epic quality of the larp; the Choice had far-reaching ramifications, not only to the characters present, but the world at large. In Henry and Clio’s case, they chose a third option, presented to them by Erato, the Muse of Love Poetry, and her Inspired: the artists would publicly release us from our binding, assert our independence to leave at will, and permit us to Inspire others. The questions then became: Would Clio return of her own free will to Inspire Henry, even though he was now engaged to a mortal woman? Could Henry retract this declaration at will, leaving her to be bound again? Thus, even this “easier” third option was still riddled with emotional complexity.

    A group of people mostly in white seated with one standing
    The Choice. Photo by Bjørn-Morten Gundersen.

    Circles of Safety and Calibration

    Come thou, let us begin with the Muses who gladden the great spirit of their father Zeus in Olympus with their songs, telling of things that are and that shall be and that were aforetime with consenting voice…

         — Hesiod’s Theogony

    The larp featured a pre-game call a month before the larp and extensive workshopping before the game in which we were briefed on aspects of the world and practiced specific play techniques. Most of us signed up in pairs (or triads), meaning that we likely already had developed a certain degree of trust with our main co-player(s) in the Inspired/Muse dynamic. We were instructed that we must calibrate with these co-players at least before the game, and ideally also the other relations mentioned in our character sheets. We were also instructed to check-in with our dyad or triad players after the larp. These instructions emphasized the need for emotional care for co-players, acknowledging the intensity of the experience and making it part of the shared culture of the game to tend to one another. On the other hand, we were also reminded that we are responsible for our own experience, meaning we should communicate if needs arrive and do what is necessary to care for ourselves.

    Two women in white with golden headdresses embrace.
    Calliope, Muse of Epic Poetry, and Thalia, Muse of Comedy. Photo by Bjørn-Morten Gundersen.

    Pre-game workshops are often quite awkward experiences, especially whenpreparing to play larps of this nature. Players often feel a certain degree of social anxiety about their own role-playing abilities and their skills at interpersonal interaction (Algayres 2019). They may feel worried about costuming, physical touch, their own attractiveness, or any other number of insecurities and uncertainties. To establish trust early on, we were instructed to sit closely with our dyad or triad and touch in some way during the briefing, such as a casual touch on the arm, cuddling, holding hands, etc. Physical touch can release oxytocin (Zak 2011) and provide an experience of trust between players, although it can also backfire for participants who feel hypervigilant or triggered when touched. The website communicated that players needed to be willing to experience casual touch: “A good baseline of what you should be okay with could be a stranger touching your arm, shouting at you, holding your hand or kissing you on the cheek” (Helicon website, n.d). We also workshopped eye gazing between Muses and Inspired, which deepened the connection and helped relieve a bit of the awkwardness. Eye gazing is a simple, yet quick and effective technique for people to see others beyond the masks each of us wear in social life, as well as to feel truly seen in a short amount of time.

    We also had times within the workshop to calibrate with many of our written relationships, which from my perspective provided a solid groundwork of a “home base” between player-characters within play. In my view, creating time for such calibration is critical to the success of such larps. Many players do not have the time or inclination to reach out before the larp and find it difficult to remember names, faces, and the specifics of written dynamics during play. Creating contact before the game and encouraging players to discuss what each person wants (and doesn’t want) from the dynamic is very helpful.

    Woman dancing around with a sash above her head, next to a man in white and gold on a chair
    Danielle Lafontaine after draining Terpsichore at the Party (Inspired and Muse of Dancing). Photo by Bjørn-Morten Gundersen.

    We also workshopped a scene involving the drawing of Inspiration. The metatechnique involved a white and gold sash with the Muse’s name written upon it, which we would use in some way to signify giving Inspiration. The sash could be used in many ways ranging from gentle and consensual to violent and non-consensual. We were instructed to hand over one of our three precious Inspiration ribbons placed on our name tags and transfer them to the Inspired’s name tag. The ribbons were a non-diegetic way to communicate how full or empty of Inspiration each character was, as well as who had drawn Inspiration from whom, as each Muse had different colored ribbons. We could decide to act upon this extra-diegetic information as a form of steering (Montola, Stenros, and Saitta 2015). The designers explained that they did not want Inspiration to turn into a statistic like in other role-playing games, but it still influenced play for some of the larpers. 

    Another workshop emphasized playing to lift (Vejdemo 2018), meaning we took turns boosting the importance of the other characters in terms of their personality or accomplishments using “Yes, And” to build upon what others were improvising. For example, a character could say, “My recent art work has received quite a lot of positive reviews…” which we would then reinforce with added comments. Since the larp also dealt with the fragility of artists’ egos, we also practiced playing each other down, which would be initiated by the person wanting that sort of play, for example, “Lately, I’ve really been struggling to get critics to care about my work…” The co-players would then “Yes, And” to make the character feel even worse about their artistic block or lack of public recognition. This metatechnique was particularly interesting as it provided an impetus for drawing Inspiration and seeking validation from others through dysfunctional means. 

    We were instructed to use “off-game” in order to quickly calibrate and negotiate consent during play or leave the space for more extensive discussion. We went off-game between acts and the default for sleeping quarters was off-game as well. Right before the larp began, we workshopped violence, including tapping out when we wanted a certain interaction to slow down or stop, as well as escalating slowly through bullet-time consent (Koljonen 2016b) to give other players a chance to opt-in or out. This practice ended up important for the first Punishment scene that we were soon to play. 

    A person embracing someone with a flower crown.
    Omorfia and Philip Frost, Muse and Inspired of Painting in the first Binding. Photo by Bjørn-Morten Gundersen.

    Calibration was also emphasized in the workshops between acts in effective ways. We were given time for one-on-one discussions, but we also circled up with each player sharing a short sentence of what they would like to experience within this Act. Then, other players could raise their hand and volunteer to deliver that sort of play, which added an element of accountability to one another. Following Juhana Pettersson’s (2021a) assertion that players are engines of desire, being able to openly express one’s wishes in a group without shame is a powerful experience. For example, I tend to prefer subtle scenes and was drawn to the larp due to the emphasis on discussions of art and the creative process; through this process, I was able to ask others to approach me with those kinds of discussions if desired. It was remarkable to me the way a briefly stated request could redirect the flow of play for individual players, and thus the ensemble: a form of group steering.

    Epic Dyadic Play as a Genre

    Unwearying flows the sweet sound from their lips, and the house of their father Zeus the loud-thunderer is glad at the lily-like voice of the goddesses as it spreads abroad, and the peaks of snowy Olympus resound, and the homes of the immortals… 

         — Hesiod’s Theogony

    At times in Helicon, I felt like I was experiencing something quite new, but I could not put my finger on why. Oppression dynamics and dysfunctional relationships are hardly new themes; indeed they are the bread and butter of many Nordic or Nordic-inspired larps. Epic storylines and supernatural abilities are hardly new either, as RPGs as a medium have featured those elements from their inception. 

    A woman in white standing behind a man playing the piano with her hand on his arm.
    Euterpe and Maximillian Stern, Muse and Inspired of Music, attempting to compose. Photo by Bjørn-Morten Gundersen.

    At one point, I looked around the room during dinner warfare, surveying the artists with their Muses, thinking, “Oh! We are in a really good Toreador larp” — the Toreador being the artistic clan in Vampire: the Masquerade. In Vampire, the undead take “retainers” who are bloodbound to them, meaning supernaturally addicted to their blood and compelled to obey. Retainers bound by Toreador are often highly talented in their own right, ensnared by the vampire’s wish to keep their retainer’s talents for themselves — an especially potent theme considering many vampires lose the potency of their own talents when turned to the undead. This larp was different in many ways, of course, especially considering the retainers were mystical eternal beings. The emphasis on artistic creation as an important theme of the larp led to a depth of discussion that I often craved as a long-time Toreador player, enhanced by the setting of the beautiful castle and its art.

    Man in glasses and a suit talking to a woman in black with a hat and sunglasses.
    The initial binding ritual was initiated by Henry Wilson, Inspired of History, and Stella Wilson, Inspired of Spiritual Inspiration. Photo by Bjørn-Morten Gundersen.

    At another point, I saw characters huddled in corners trying to solve various plots related to the occult rituals: the Inspired were trying to figure out ways to stop the Muses from being able to flee, whereas the Muses were trying to figure out a way for the Escape ritual to work. I thought to myself, “Oh, we’re in a Call of Cthulhu larp and those are the occult researcher characters.” As with Cthulhu (1981), Helicon’s setting is clearly playing to lose on some level; whether freedom is attained or the Muses continue to be bound, loss is embedded. But the sense of supernatural horror that pervades Cthulhu was not the emphasis here; instead, we focused on the interpersonal dramas inherent to these characters being locked in this non-consensual pact. Indeed, the occult components felt like an aberration, while the “natural” state would be to let the Muses free to choose who to Inspire. The occult components did not seem to be a goal to attain or a puzzle to solve. Rather, they were elements calling to mind the Spiritualism of the early twentieth century, as well as storytelling devices providing alibi to engage in intense rituals, which tend to amplify play. From my perspective, these spells were more of a conceit than a quest, although I steered away from play involving them so cannot speak for other players.

    People standing around a circle with sashes in front of them, looking at a woman reading from a book.
    The final Binding ritual. Photo by Bjørn-Morten Gundersen.

    I keep returning to this emphasis on dyadic (or triadic) play, which is also not new. The Nordic larp Delirium (2010), about oppression within a mental institution, relied on players signing up as couples and used dyadic play to explore themes of love and failed attempts at resistance (Pedersen 2010; Andreasen 2011). Personally, I have had particularly strong experiences playing Here is My Power Button (2017), an American freeform about users purchasing an android from a company as part of a scientific experiment. What made Power Button potent was a toggling back and forth between one-on-one user/android scenes in the same room and group scenes, in which all users would interact in one room and all androids in the other. Helicon had a similar structure: we had large group scenes that were also one-on-one scenes, giving a sense of collective experience along with intimacy. We also had activities such as the Muse ritual in which we were all together and able to share about our paired experience. 

    Woman in white crouched in front of a man in white.
    Phren, Muse of Psychology, and Athanasia, Muse of Sculpture. Photo by Bjørn-Morten Gundersen.

    This epic dyadic structure is also present in Linda Udby and Bjarke Pedersen’s PAN (2013-) and BAPHOMET (2015-), which feature occult storylines and supernatural content in the form of possession from godlike entities (Pedersen and Udby 2017; Nordic Larp Wiki 2019). Another dyadic larp is Wind’s Daemon (2021-), which is based upon Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials (1995-2000) series. In Daemon, characters have animal entities attached to them that represent their souls enacted by other players. I have not yet played Daemon, but have read many play accounts that have emphasized the powerful nature of this dyadic setup. In practice, the structure at Daemon meant that characters are instructed to stay physically close to one another at all times (Wind 2021): not exactly the same as our experience in Helicon, but was a clear inspiration. 

    A woman in white huddled next to a person in a suit.
    Melpomene and Taylor Montgomery, Muse and Inspired of Tragedy. Photo by Bjørn-Morten Gundersen.

    In reflecting upon the larp, I am now considering the combination of epic play and a dyadic (or triadic) structure as a particularly potent combination: perhaps an emerging genre of play as more and more larps are produced in this format. Helicon required a strong degree of trust between players in dyads (and triads), as well as a degree of commitment: we were expected to continue to role-play and check-in with our co-players and not abandon them, even if we wanted to steer the story into a new direction. Most characters had several other interesting and playable character relations, which helped interweave the larp into more of an ensemble (Tolvanen and MacDonald 2020), rather than incentivizing isolated play between groups of 2-3. While players may have differing experiences of the larp, my perception is that this dyadic epic play combined with emphasis on the ensemble led to a special magic of interconnectedness not always present at larps. 

    I finally settled on, “Oh, we’re in a Neil Gaiman larp,” at least thematically; we were epically-infused characters with all-to-human quirks engaged in interpersonally meaningful play tinged with sadness about humanity’s flaws. Gaiman’s (2018) words describe his work well:

    A world in which there are monsters, and ghosts, and things that want to steal your heart is a world in which there are angels, and dreams and a world in which there is hope.

    However, from discussions of the designers, “Calliope” was not a primary inspiration, so to speak, and the character relations were meant to be far more nuanced, which I definitely experienced. I look forward to seeing what larps are spawned as this type of design and experimentation continues to evolve.

    A man in white observes a woman in white eating grapes.
    Polyhymnia, Muse of Spiritual Inspiration, and Helica, Muse of Architecture (Wind). Photo by Bjørn-Morten Gundersen.

    Acknowledgements

    My deepest gratitude to Katrine Wind, Maria Pettersson, Elina Gouliou, Mo Holkar, and Mike Pohjola for giving feedback on this article.

    Helicon

    Designers: Katrine Wind and Maria Pettersson, Narrators, Inc.

    Participation Fee: €630

    Players: 29

    First Run: January 5-7, 2024

    Second Run: February 16-18, 2024 (upcoming)

    Location: Broholm Castle, Gudme, Denmark

    Music: Anni Tolvanen 

    Photography: Bjørn-Morten Vang Gundersen

    Safety: Anna Werge Bønnelycke (Jan. 5-7) and Klara Rotvig (Feb. 16-18)

    Website: Katrine Kavli 

    Graphics: Maria Manner

    Sparring and Ideas: Emil Greve, Elina Gouliou, and Markus Montola

    Character Writing Assistance: Søren Hjorth

    Website Proofreading: Malk Williams

    References

    Algayres, Muriel. 2019. “Not Good Enough: On Larp and Systemic Anxiety – Muriel Algayres.” Nordic Larp Talks. YouTube, February 11.

    Andreasen, Peter Schønnemann. 2011. “Fabricating Madness – Peter Schønnemann Andreasen.” Nordic Larp Talks. YouTube, March 1.

    Bowman, Sarah Lynne. 2016. “White Wolf’s Convention of Thorns – A Blockbuster Nordic Larp.” Nordiclarp.org, December 6.

    Bowman, Sarah Lynne, Russell Murdock, and Rebecca Roycroft. 2017. “Epiphany Design Document version 3.0.” Google Docs.

    Brown, Maury, Sarah Lynne Bowman, Quinn D, Kat Jones and Orli Nativ. 2018. “Immerton: A Society of Women.” In Shuffling the Deck: The Knutpunkt 2018 Color Printed Companion, edited by Annika Waern and Johannes Axner, 41-52. ETC Press. 

    Davis, G., et al., 1991. Vampire: the Masquerade. Stone Mountain, GA: White Wolf.

    Fatland, Eirik. 2000. “The Play of Fates (or: How to Make Rail-roading Legal).” Amor Fati. 

    Gaiman, Neil. 1991. “Calliope.” The Sandman: Dream Country, no. 17. DC Comics.

    Gaiman, Neil. 2018. “BRAND NEW! Second printing of Chris Riddell & Neil’s HOPE print! Limited edition.” Neverwear, September 23.

    Grasmo, Hanne, and Jaakko Stenros. 2022. “Nordic Erotic Larp: Designing for Sexual Playfulness.” International Journal of Role-Playing 12: 62-105.

    Gygax, Gary, and Dave Arneson. 1974. Dungeons & Dragons. TSR, Inc.

    Helicon website. N.d. “Practical.” Helicon.narrators.eu.

    Hesiod. 1914. “The Homeric Hymns and Homerica.” Theogony. Trans. Hugh G. Evelyn-White. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

    Jones, Kanane. 2017. “Immerton: A Fire in the Desert.” Nordiclarp.org, October 28. 

    Koljonen, Johanna. 2016a. “Basics of Opt-In, Opt-Out Design Pt 3: What They Need to Know at Signup.” Participation Safety in Larp, July 5.

    Koljonen, Johanna. 2016b. “Toolkit: The Tap-Out.” Participation Safety in Larp, September 11.

    Kim, Yeonsoo Julian, Morgan Nuncio, and Jen Wong. 2018. “Epiphany – A Collaborative Mage: the Ascension Larp.” Nordiclarp.org, February 1.

    Montola, Markus, Jaakko Stenros, and Eleanor Saitta. 2015. “The Art of Steering: Bringing the Player and the Character Back Together.” Nordiclarp.org, March 29.

    Nordic Larp Wiki. 2019. “Playing to Lose.” Nordic Larp Wiki, September 3.

    Nordic Larp Wiki. 2019. “Pan.” Nordic Larp Wiki, April 2.

    Pedersen, Bjarke. 2010. “Delirium: Insanity and Love Bleeding from Larp to Life.” In Nordic Larp, edited by Jaakko Stenros and Markus Montola, 288-297.

    Pedersen, Bjarke, and Linda Udby. 2017. “BAPHOMET – The Road to Damnation.” Nordiclarp.org, November 15.

    Petersen, Sandy. 1981. Call of Cthulhu: Fantasy Role-Playing in the World of H.P. Lovecraft. Chaosium.

    Pettersson, Juhana. 2021a. Engines of Desire: Larp as the Art of Experience. Pohjoismaisen roolipelaamisen seura ry.

    Pettersson, Juhana. 2021b. “Terror and Warmth.” In Book of Magic: Vibrant Fragments of Larp Practices, edited by Kari Kvittingen Djukastein, Marcus Irgens, Nadja Lipsyc, and Lars Kristian Løveng Sunde Oslo, Norway: Knutepunkt.

    Pullman, Philip. 2000. His Dark Materials Complete Trilogy. Ted Smart. 

    Tolvanen, Anni, and James Lórien MacDonald. 2020. “Ensemble Play.” In What Do We Do When We Play?, edited by edited by Eleanor Saitta, Johanna Koljonen, Jukka Särkijärvi, Anne Serup Grove, Pauliina Männistö, and Mia Makkonen. Helsinki: Solmukohta.

    Vejdemo, Susanne. 2018. “Play to Lift, not Just to Lose.” In Shuffling the Deck: The Knutpunkt 2018 Color Printed Companion, edited by Annika Waern and Johannes Axner, 143-146. Pittsburgh, PA: Carnegie Mellon University: ETC Press.

    Wind, Katrine. 2021. “Daemon: What We Learned from Playing Two Parts of the Same Character – Katrine Wind #knutepunkt2021.” Nordic Larp. YouTube, October 11.

    Wind, Katrine, and Maria Pettersson. 2023. “The Experience: Setting.” Helicon.narrators.eu.

    Zak, Paul. 2011. “Trust, Morality – and Oxytocin.” TED Talks. YouTube, November 1.

    Cover photo: Patrick and Phren, the Inspired and Muse of Psychology. Photo by Bjørn-Morten Gundersen. Image has been cropped.

  • Participatory Ritual Vocalization

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    How to use vocalization to create a sense of shared ritual?

    Redemption was a larp about the last days of the Romanovs before the revolution changed everything, at a retreat organized by a breakaway Orthodox sect who believed that to achieve redemption one must sin. The larp’s sound design was created by Anni Tolvanen who also came up with the larp’s signature ritual technique, participatory ritual vocalization.

    The core team for the larp consisted of Maria Pettersson, Massi Hannula, and myself. I was particularly happy with the vocalization technique Tolvanen created because it was accessible even to somebody like myself with no singing ability. As long as I was able to hum O or A, I was able to participate.

    Here, Tolvanen answers a few questions about how this technique works.

     

    Anni, what are the design reasons behind this technique? What’s the effect it’s intended to have?

    The main goal of the technique was to create an inclusive and intuitive way for all participants to join in on or run their own rituals during runtime. The technique aims to give everyone the feeling of “doing it for real,” without requiring time-consuming pre-runtime practice, or previous experience in ritualistic singing or chanting. The technique is designed to blend into the general soundscape of the larp; to become part of it and add to it in a diegetic manner.

    Each participant has equal agency to impact the ritual’s mood and content through their personal contribution to the shared soundscape. One is not merely allowed to accompany an appointed ritual leader, but to improvise their own content within the parameters of the technique.

    The technique forms an intuitively understandable frame around a ritual scene. By joining the technique you are joining the ritual.

     

    Can you explain how participatory ritual vocalization works? What do people do?

    All participants are free to start using the technique at any time. When someone starts praying or chanting, other participants taking part in the scene find a shared note to hum. This hum provides the anchor – the drone – to the ritual recital. The drone is collectively carried on throughout the ritual, and does not stop until the ritual ends.

    The drone acts as a musical base for the ritual leader or leaders. They can recite and improvise text either by sticking to the same note, or by freely chanting or speaking on top of it. In the workshop for the technique participants practiced a simple musical scale of 2-4 notes while acting as ritual leaders – but sticking to the scale is obviously not mandatory.

    Ritual leaders are not meant to be solo performers: Participants doing the drone are also invited to improvise content, for example by repeating particular words or sentences of the leaders, shouting inspired remarks, or making the drone change in intensity, volume, and tone color.

    When the ritual leader wants to end the ritual, they end their recital with an emphasized end phrase (in Redemption, “Amen”). This phrase or word is then repeated by everyone in the scene, after which the drone stops, and the ritual is over.

     

    What’s the deeper musical thinking and history behind the technique?

    Using one’s voice to contribute to a soundscape is an ancient and deeply human activity to take part of. While singing or chanting with others, we do not merely join into making music. We also sync our expression, our internal pacing, and even our breath with others around us. It is a powerful experience, which forms its own temporary magic circle: You join the circle by adding your voice to the soundscape.

    Musically speaking, the core benchmarks for the technique are the use of drone notes, improvised recital on top of the drone, and (optionally) the simplistic scale used by ritual leaders. At Redemption, the latter was modeled after the medieval theme “Dies Irae” – a particular four note scale which is nowadays used by composers all around the world to communicate tension, ardor, and fatality. (In other words, it’s a musical meme.)

     

    How does the technique work if people have wildly varying levels of musical skills? Some have none, others are great singers.

    For practical purposes, singing skill does not have a meaningful impact on the technique. It is in fact advisable to instruct more experienced singers to stick to the basic drone and recital, and avoid more complex musical improvisation.

    The power of the technique comes from its simplicity. Most people can find and stick to a drone note, and even if they can’t, doing things “correctly” is not nearly as relevant as following the collective ebb and flow of the ritual. Everyone’s voice contributes to the soundscape, and the soundscape creates the magic circle for the ritual.

     

    How does the technique interact with the broader soundscape of a larp?

    The auditory streams from the ritual (the drone and the recital) communicate to participants in different spaces that a ritual is taking place. The ritual becomes part of the larp’s soundscape and impacts the mood of the larp as a whole. At the same time, any pre-existing soundscape (for example, background music, other participants’ activities, other rituals) impacts the soundscape of the ritual.

    When implementing background music in particular, some sound design ahead of time is needed. Background noise and ambient music may lower the threshold for using the technique, as participants can lean onto other sounds to find a coherent, shared drone, and get the ritual going. On the other hand, too dominant background music may make it harder for participants to use the technique freely, as music will set boundaries to what kind of sounds make sense during the ritual.

    Cover photo: Anni Tolvanen at the larp Redemption (2021). Photo by Kai Simon Fredriksen. Photo has been cropped.

    This article is published in the Knutpunkt 2022 magazine Distance of Touch and is published here with permission. Please cite this text as:

    Pettersson, Juhana. 2022. “Participatory Ritual Vocalization.” In Distance of Touch: The Knutpunkt 2022 Magazine, edited by Juhana Pettersson, 51-54. Knutpunkt 2022 and Pohjoismaisen roolipelaamisen seura.

  • Group Improvisation of Larp Rituals

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    Group Improvisation of Larp Rituals

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    The aim of this article is to equip you with all the practical knowledge you need to run good, impactful fake rituals for larps. We present a 30-minute workshop which will teach a group of larpers to on-the-spot improvise cool magicky-feeling rituals.

    This article does not aim to discuss larp rituals from a theoretical perspective – for a more theoretical take on larp rituals, see Bowman (2015).  The suggested workshop is based on workshops run in connection with several larps, including Coven (Häggström and Falk 2015) and Ekdahl 1995 (Fallsdalen and Holgersson 2017). The authors have run the workshop many times in several countries, and other larpers have run similar workshops for many years in the Nordic countries – see for example Fatland (2015).

    Larp rituals can create not only temporary psychological effects but also bleed. The human brain and its emotions are eminently hackable, and one way this can be done is through rituals, both everyday rituals and religious rituals (for more on human rituals, see Bell (2009). Even if we know that something is fake, the act of doing it can have a true impact on your psyche and your body (see Charlesworth et al 2017; Pierre 2017).

    Rituals are experience enhancers: they can take the emotional theme of the larp and dial up the impact factor. Think of them as dramatic loudspeakers, and use them carefully.

    Overall workshop structure

    The workshop is performed in seven (7) steps:

    Step 1: The anatomy of a ritual: explain the common core.

    Step 2: The ritual toolkit

    Step 3: Practice your first ritual

    Step 4: Roles in the ritual: ritual leaders and followers

    Step 5: Try another ritual

    Step 6: Post-ritual theory

    Step 7: (If there’s more time) More practice in small groups

    Step 1: The anatomy of a ritual: explain the common core.

    In order to make it easier to improvise rituals, this workshop works with one specific, set, core structure for all rituals. Explain this structure to the workshop participants. We suggest that you make this structure – diegetic: this is how all the rituals in the larp world in question works.

    A ritual consists of three main phases (in boldface below) and two optional phases (in italics).

    Make a circle((Why circles? This workshop relies strongly on the effect of circles. Standing in a circle makes us focus on the others in the circle. It creates a small, temporal world with special rules. We feel more connected and are able to easily play off of each other’s actions and reactions.))

    • E.g. with people holding hands, or salt, or rope, or draw it, or place bones in a circle around the participants. Whatever is most appropriate for the context, as long as it is a circle.
    • The ritual leader may state “The circle is now complete” to make certain that all participants are aware of this.
    • A circle protects those within from evil outside, and also protects the outside from evil inside.

    Summon forces (optional)

    • This is optional but usually adds a cool feel.
    • Summon appropriate forces for the scenario/larp. In one larp it might be the four elements, in another it might be an ancient Egyptian god, in another it might be a fantasy creature. These will aid you and you can play on receiving power from them in the Main Act.

    Main act

    • Before creating a ritual, it is important to know that the ritual is about. This should be clear in the main phase, which should bring the group together and create a cool experience by chanting, movement, light, but also acts and proclamations that make the narrative of the larp move forward. For example, you might be filling a protective amulet with forces or maybe you are summoning the dead to talk to them. Maybe you have a possessed person who you want to exorcise. Use props like incense, fake blood, candles, tarot cards, draw symbols on the floor (make sure you can remove them afterwards).

    Thank the summoned forces (optional)

    • If you summoned forces and forgot to thank them, then that is an excellent source for cool drama. What would the consequences be?

    Break the circle

    • Break the circle by removing a part of the salt, erase the pencil drawing, remove the rope etc. etc.
    • Again, this needs to be announced clearly so that all players are aware of this.
    • It is potentially very dangerous to leave a ritual before a circle is properly broken – use this as a potential source of drama.
    • Another good drama source is if the circle is broken incorrectly or too soon! Forces might be rushing in or out. Anything might happen.

    Step 2: The Ritual Toolkit

    There is a single basic rule in creating rituals: the more magic it feels, the more magic it is in the larp.

    We want to create the illusion that there is magic afoot.

    We want to create a joint experience of this magic

    We want to create something that looks cool and feels cool.

    We want to make all participants feel like they are involved.

    In step 2, introduce the tools below to your larpers. Tell them that things will become clearer in STEP 3, where you will practice making a ritual using these tools.

    • A foundational soundscape, created by the participants. Everyone in the circle mimics the ritual leader to create the basic soundscape. This soundscape can include:
      • A sustained tone that the group starts and maintains.
      • Whispers (maybe the dead are talking?), hushes, vibrating hummings (this can turn into words very easily).
      • Song (a simple and repetitive song works best)
      • Rhythmic clapping or finger snapping
    • A basic movement of the group / position in the room
      • Its simplest form is just people standing in a circle.
      • Or they could be moving in the circle, walking around.
      • They can also be repeating the same gesture (tearing power from the object in the center maybe?) over and over.
    • Supplementary sounds that illustrate the magic (and thereby create the magic) achieved by the ritual.
      • A single person sings a higher sustained note than everyone else, or moves up and down a scale.
      • A single person starts snapping their fingers
      • A single person starts talking in tongues
      • A single person blows air (maybe because they are channeling an air elemental?) or hisses (a water elemental?)
      • Supplementary movements that illustrates the magic and thereby creates the magic.
      • A single person claps their hands, stomp their feet, presses life force into someone else.
      • Use props! Stones, incense, bones, papers with words of power, wind chimes, bells etc. Remember – if it feels magical it is magical.

    Step 3: Practice your first ritual

    1. Put an object on the floor – tell the players that you are going to bless it.
    2. Tell them that this will feel ridiculous. That’s ok! Encourage them to let it be ridiculous. (You will do a more serious thing later)
    3. Tell everyone that once you start making sounds, they should mimic you to create the basic soundscape. That soundscape should then be kept going throughout the ritual.
    4. Tell them that when you point to a single person, they should add something of their own as a supplementary sound or movement atop the basic soundscape.
    5. The others don’t need to mimic them, but they MAY do so if it feels right.
    6. Tell them that you are doing a small ritual – only the three main stages (make circle, main act, break circle).
    7. Alright – now put them in a circle, make them hold hands. Stay inside the circle. Say “the circle is now complete”.
    8. Create the basic soundscape. E.g. a single buzzing tone and then a rhythmical clapping. The others will mimic you.
    9. Vary the basic soundscape, make the group feel the power and how fun it is to make noise together.
    10. Point to a single person, who starts doing a gesture or sound. Point to some others.
    11. Raise the intensity of the basic soundscape.
    12. Start pushing power (with gestures) into the object in the middle.
    13. Raise the intensity of the basic soundscape to a crescendo. Stop it with an abrupt shout and/or movement.
    14. Say “it is done”, and break the circle of hands.
    15. Alright – you’ve done your first ritual. It had three parts – repeat them for the participants. Ask them how that felt.
    Circles are core components of rituals.
    Circles are core components of rituals.

    Step 4: Roles in the ritual: Ritual leaders and followers

    In this step, you make your participants aware of two different roles in a ritual, and how those roles can be used to aid in improvising a ritual or make it more complex.

    Leader of the ritual

    • Has an out of game responsibility to help the ritual feel cool and magicky.
    • This responsibility can be shared among two or more people, but it’s usually easiest to do it alone.
    • Since the leader will be in control of what happens during the ritual, it might be necessary to go out of game to talk to participants out of character before the ritual is run. Depending on the larp tradition you come from, more or less transparency in this will be needed.
    • To determine (via game mechanics or pre-determined choice) if the ritual will succeed or not.
    • To determine if something particular is going to happen.
    • Is responsible for being clear during the ritual about what is happening so that the players can make their characters react accordingly. For example, the leader is very clear about making and breaking the circle, and informing participants about how to understand the ritual. For instance: “now, if she falls to the floor that means that we fail and the demon wins”.
    • May be a game master.
    • Has to be prepared to change the ritual on the spot if a participant adds something unexpected to the mix (“I sacrifice my life blood to do X…”). Roll with the punches – it’s fun!
    • Has to be able to defend the ritual from TOO MANY changes brought on by improvising participants (by saying “No!”, that usually works).
    • “Repeat after me” is a very good tool to make everyone feel connected and safe.

    Followers

    • Add to the ritual by sounds and movements and cool ideas that they interject
    • It’s both your right and your obligation to help create the ritual
    • Help make the narrative go forward through the ritual
    • Respect the decisions of the leader – there might be a grand plan that you’re not aware of.
    • If you get confused during the ritual, don’t hesitate. Ask! Either in character or out of character.

    Step 5: Try another ritual

    Practice making another ritual in which you are the leader. Tell the participants to look at you and to enhance what you are doing. This will be a ritual with the goal to create some particular magic that you have decided on in advance. The participant’s task is to illustrate the magic that you indicate with the way you roleplay. Then do this set exercise:

    1. Tell them that you are doing all five parts of the ritual (repeat them) to create a magic portal to another world.
    2. Remind them that first the group will create a soundscape, then you (as the leader) will point to individuals. They should add something to the sound or the movement.
    3. Make the circle with you inside it. Start the soundscape.
    4. Get four people to help you call on the four elements.
    5. Say “I call on EARTH”, point to one of them – they’ll improvise something. Do the other elements.
    6. Channel elements into a point in the circle. Let the chanting increase to a crescendo (indicate this with your own voice and with hand movements.
    7. Start sounding uncertain (oh no! I’m losing focus! No!) – the group will now, of its on, follow you and illustrate this with frantic sounds. (You should not need to tell them this, at this point, most larpers have the hang of this and will improvise beautifully in concert).
    8. Fall out of the circle, breaking it!
    9. Go “out of character” and remark that that wasn’t too good for these characters – you broke the circle. What are possible consequences – ask them!
    10. If you have some other magic you want to focus on, feel free to replace the portal with something else.

    Step 6: Post-ritual theory

    Talk to your players about Consequences!

    • What are some ways that characters can feel after a ritual? Tired, nauseous, giddy, high?
      • Did the ritual fail? Or succeed? How do I know?
      • The ritual leader can (often should) make this very clear. State it afterwards.
      • Or the ritual leader makes it clear that it is not clear what happened. The players can spend the next few hours worrying, and game masters can plan future events around this.
      • Usually if it FELT like the ritual succeeded, it succeeded. Other things to weigh:
    • Was the ritual interrupted? That might be bad.
      • Did you thank the summoned forces?
      • Did you make and break the circle correct?
      • What would give the most amount of cool play?
      • Did it feel magical? Then it was magical.
    • Clean up after yourself
      • Blow out any candles
      • Remove salt
      • Remove fake blood quickly
      • Use a plastic sheet if you know it’s going to get messy.
    • Summary. Remind your participants about what you’ve been doing the last half hour.
      • Make a circle
      • Summon forces
      • Main act
      • Thank forces
      • Break circle
      • Everyone contributes
      • The role of the leader of the ritual
      • Did you succeed?

    There is no absolute right or wrong in creating play pretend rituals. Go with your imagination! Use the dramatic power of consequences.

    Step 7: (If there’s more time) More practice in small groups

    Divide participants into small groups (around 5 in each group)

    Give them scenarios to improvise rituals around. Some suggestions:

    • Make an amulet that carries a blessing from each of you.
    • Let a ghost possess a character to reveal its murderer.

    Tell them that it’s better to OVERACT than UNDERACT. If they get that out of their system now, they’ll feel freer during the actual larp.

    If there is time, have them redo the ritual, but this time with less overacting and more serious.

    Some Final Thoughts

    Many typical rituals seen in larps mirror religious rituals. This might make some participants uncomfortable and might lead to unintentional bleed. Make sure your participants are aware that there will be rituals, and be prepared for the possibility that some of them will choose to opt out before or during the ritual. As in all other aspects of the larp, make sure that there are safety words and procedures that will let them leave discreetly and feel empowered enough to do so.

    Finally, let us reiterate that the goal of this workshop is to create fake rituals for theatre purposes. If you are reading this for any other purpose, this is not the text for you. For the rest of you, we wish to quote Granny Weatherwax from Pratchett’s books: “It doesn’t stop being magic just because you know how it works.”

    AcknowledgementsThe authors wish to thank all the wonderful organizers and participants who have had a hand in developing this workshop through the years. A special thank you to Annika Waern for very insightful editing and feedback on the final version of this article.

    Tarot cards can be good props.
    Tarot cards can be good props.

    References

    Bell, C. 2009. Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice. Oxford University Press: NY. Available at http://web.vu.lt/rstc/a.pazeraite/files/2014/09/Catherine-Bell-Ritual-Theory-Ritual-Practice-Oxford-University-Press-USA-2009.pdf  (Accessed December 8 2017)

    Bowman, S. L. Love, Sex, Death, and Liminality: Ritual in Just a Little Lovin’. Available at https://nordiclarp.org/2015/07/13/love-sex-death-and-liminality-ritual-in-just-a-little-lovin/ (Accessed December 8 2017)

    Charlesworth JEG et al. Effects of placebos without deception compared with no treatment: A systematic review and meta-analysis. J Evid Based Med. 2017;10:97–107. https://doi.org/10.1111/jebm.12251 (Accessed December 8 2017)

    Fallsdalen, E and C. Holgersson. 2017. Ekdahl 1995. Larp. http://ekdahl1995.wixsite.com/lajv (Accessed December 8 2017)

    Fatland, E. 2015. Notes on Ritual Improv. Available at: http://larpwright.efatland.com/?p=600 (Accessed December 8 2017)

    Häggström, E and S. Falk. 2015. Coven. Larp. https://www.coven.nu/ (Accessed December 8, 2017)

    Pierre, J. 2017. The Healing Power of Placebos: Fact of Fiction. In Psychology Today. Available at: https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/psych-unseen/201705/the-healing-power-placebos-fact-or-fiction (Accessed December 8 2017)

    This article is part of Re-Shuffling the Deck, the companion journal for Knutepunkt 2018.

    All articles from the companion can be found on the Knutpunkt 2018 category.