Gender play

A group of friends and strangers are playing a game of truth or dare. The story begins with the first spin and ends with the last.

Other Bodies (FI) by Myrtti Lehtinen is a feminist larp about trans and queer bodies, cultural alianation and trying to change that on a personal level by becoming familiar with the unfamiliar.

Characters are built around documentary quotes gathered from collaborators describing their relationship to their body, gender and sexuality.

Other Bodies uses a visible and active safety system with simulation techniques, but you should be comfortable with sexual content and some touching.

Island Sounds

No Island is an Island (DK) by Nina Runa Essendrop is a larp where players create fictive islands together by making soundscapes and afterwards explore these places as members of a lost tribe.

”No Island is an Island” is an intuitive, sensuous and abstract larp. The players will practice how to use their voices in different ways and how to follow each others sounds to create coherent soundscapes. Besides sounds the larp uses touch, movement and description of inner visions as primary tools. Players will have their eyes closed during most of the larp. The larp was originally created to produce sound material for the performance installation "Ingen ø er en ø" by Francis Patrick Brady.

Art in the Cage

Conflict is similar to anger. It inevitably arises from human nature and comes out in our relationships with others. We all know very well how opposite points of view can cause social alienation, hurt people and drive them into traps of misunderstanding. Conflict turns into a cage that is difficult to break out of.

The characters in this larp find themselves in familiar life situations. Conflicts bring them together at the same time and place – at the art-therapy session. Will they be able to overcome “right-wrong” attitude, think outside the box and break the cage with the help of art?

ART in the Cage (BY) by Olga Aleinikova and Ekaterina Serdziukova is a socially-psychological larp that implies self-expression through art. Players play in pairs.

NB. You will paint using your hands in this larp. Photo by Daniel Chong and Abel Azcona

Human Experience

We are happy to welcome back Nina Runa Essendrop, a Grenselande old-timer, to run Human Experience (DK) - a physical, immersive larp about the sensations we get from movements, touch and senses.

The players play Ancient Consciousnessess who shortly get to experience life through a human body. The Ancient Conciousnessess are gentle, slow and curious. They don’t understand rational logic but experiences the world through poetic images and abstract sensations.

Having human bodies are new and overwhelming to them. In their short time as embodied creatures, they want to carefully experience the nuances in the way humans move and sense and to try to understand what it is like to be human and experience through a body.

“Human Experience” is played with an audience, who are part of the fiction of the larp. They are there to experiment with movements and senses and to follow and aid the Ancient Conciousnessess in their exploration. The audience can help the Ancient Conciousnessess by showing them movements or describe sensations, thereby teaching the Ancient Conciousnessess how humans move and feel. In return the Ancient Conciousnessess can describe how these movements and sensations feels to creatures who have a poetic approach and experience everything as new.

A home for the Old

Grenselandet is a festival that celebrates larps that raises questions. Social question, personal questions, political questions. Over the past years we have hosted larps which probes into anything from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to Monogamy. Growing old is an issue which several larps have touched upon, for example Old and Wise (NL), Dementia (SV) and Autumn of Life (NO).

This week, A Home for the Old (DK), a larp exploring this territory was found too controversial and removed from the programme at the WorldCon event in Finland. We are happy to announce that we have invited the author to Norway so you can play the scenario at Grenselandet. While social issues can be hurtful to play with, we still believe that it is important that larp as an artform do explore all facets of society, and we are committed to continute to curate such larps into our programme, even if they are controversial.

"Do you remember your first character? How she looked, how he was a continuation of yourself? Do you remember its first adventure, her first kill, his first meeting with love, her descent into madness?

They are all these small parallel lives that we all lived, like friends we never really forgot. They are a part of us forever.

A Home for the Old (DK) by Frederik Berg plays out at a home for role-players with Alzheimers who suffer from a syndrome called Past Character Regression. It is a tragicomic jeepform novella about the loss of identity and our past fictional lives."

Italian imagination

Lu and Dom see each other every single morning. On the first ride of the day, at the first stop of the line, in the first car of the train. After a five-minute journey, Dom gets off the subway. See you tomorrow.

The Italian Chamber Orchestra has recently drawn internatioanl attention to the Italian chamberlarp scene with their publication "Crescendo Giocoso". We are happy to share with you that we have invited Oscar Biffi to grenselandet to run two of the scenarios. Today we present the first one.

Till the end of the line (IT) by Oscar Biffi is a scenario specifically tailored to accommodate a variable number of players. Let’s say, 2 to 30? The challenge is to all play with a single idea and only two characters, as we multiply the number of parallel dimensions in which the action unfolds. It’s the simplest, most practical solution, and it’s also eerily similar to the gaming equivalent of a speed date.

You could set your clock to their meetings, or bet your head on them. The world could end before they changed their routine. It is more than habit, more than tradition. It’s a constant of every possible reality, a pillar of the universe as we know it. What in the world would happen if they ever lost sight of each other?

Dying for freedom

When Soviet communism started to crumble, life in Cuba took a turn for the rougher. Especially for those, who listened to music of the enemy - the punk rockers, freaks of rock, los frikis.

Socialismo y Muerte (DK) by Jorgo Kapow tells the story of a small group of Cuban punk rockers, who rebel against poverty and oppression by choosing to inject themselves with HIV-infected blood. Better to suffer the slow death in the freedom of the Sanatoriums than the empty life under Castro's regime."

"I wanna live free! They are kicking me out, they are beating me out, they don't want me to live like a rocker here. They are doing a lot of things to me. I am going to do a lot of things to them... Socialism or death? Death is a door. When you don't have any more doors to open, death is a door.""
~ Papo La Bala - from Radiolab: Los Frikis ~

Photo credit: Horses in the Sky (Under a Creative commons 3.0 licence)