Welcome to Hard Times

“I told Molly we'd be ready for the Bad Man but we can never be ready. Nothing is ever buried, the earth rolls in its tracks, it never goes anywhere, it never changes, only the hope changes like morning and night, only the expectations rise and set. Why does there have to be promise before destruction?”

Set in the XIXth century American Midwest, Welcome to Hard Times (PL, UK), by Karolina Soltys and David Owen, is a tale of human resilience and frailty.
The players will physically participate to the cycle of creation and destruction of a small settlement, building it with symbolic props.
In their doomed struggle to create a permanent home, the characters grow increasingly entwined. It is a Nordic-style black-box larp based on the novel of the same name by E.L. Doctorow (no knowledge of the novel is required). The set design is inspired by the movie Dogville by Lars Von Trier.

Monet and the Moment

An old, dying Monet, looks back on his life as a painter, as an artist, and as a family man.
His memories are now both foggy and inconsistent, but still, he relives his painful and joyous past.

Back then, the hunt for the euphoria of the Moment and the creation of art, came before everything else -  family, sanity and humanity.

Monet and the Moment (DK), by Ann Eriksen and Danny Wilson, is a larp for up to 20 players. It consists of a workshop and of two hours of uninterrupted game time.

All the participants will play their own version of Monet, as well as supporting characters in the stories of the other Monets. 18 scenes are juxtaposed with nine different paintings of Claude Monet (switched on and off by lights). The participants will move smoothly in and out of scenes and stories with each other - as old Monet, as younger Monet, as family, art critics, delusions and the fleeting Moment. We call it an impressionist larp.

Roxanne

“He wants you.” 

“She wants me.”

The thought strikes like a lightning bolt. 

The dance, the body. Intimacy. 

Hands who melt together. 

The others disappear for a moment. 

All the unspoken, comes alive now. 

In the dance.

Roxanne (DK), by Rasmus Teilmann & Nicolai Strøm Steffensen, is a game of lust and love, where the unspoken is in focus. The underplayed, the power over another and the exchange of love for money. Roxanne is set in a noir-inspired burlesque universe, where men, women and lust always have a price

The Testimony

Deep inside, we are all xenophobic, sorting people into "us" and into "them".

The Testimony (SE), by Susanne Gräslund and Anders Hultman, is a story about what happens when the thin polish of civilization bursts. It is a feel bad scenario about the course of events in a small village in eastern Poland, during the first years of WWII. In a war struck countryside, the Catholics turned against their neighbors, an almost equally large Jewish population, burned them alive or killed them in other bestial ways. 

Because almost everyone who survived were either directly involved in the killings, or benefited from them, the truth was denied for a very long time, and was not unveiled until recently. 

With the help of storytelling techniques we will revisit the events that took place in Jedwabne. 

You will be playing a witness and a perpetrator, trying to remember your part in the murders that happened so many years ago. You will be reliving your memories from the massacre, as the story of what happened in the little village unfolds, with the help of fragments from different testimonies. 

There will be brutality, horrors and death. In the end you will have to make a final choice.

Kommando Holger Meins

Kommando Holger Meins (SE), by Andreas Markehed and Eva Wei, is a larp in two acts revolving around the occupation of the West German embassy in Stockholm 1975.

We explore how conviction to a cause and close friendships push people to extreme actions, and how the victims of those actions takes a toll on both the individuals and the unity of the group.

You play a group of political friends and allies who are alienated through their commitment to the Red Army Faction, driven by their belief in a violent revolution and finally burdened by the consequences of their actions.

Winson Green Prison

Winson Green Prison (SE), by Rosalind Göthberg and Siri Sandquist, is a larp about the women who fought for the right to vote in the UK during the beginning of the 20th century. It aims to tell the story of these women and the men who stood in their shadows. The larp wants to open up for a discussion around where we come from and what sacrifices were made to get us where we are today, within the fight for gender equality. It is about when politics become private and the private becomes political. The larp revolves around themes such as political ideals and struggle, oppression, liberation, relationships, family values, fear and love.

The Naked Truth

Four men have gathered for a long-awaited sauna evening. 

Summer cottage, couple of beers, and old friends. They do not stay in touch as much as they would like, but the sauna evening is a tradition from the days of old. Back then, they shared dreams and desires, but the years have taken their toll. 

Sitting in the steaming sauna, all of them are pondering: What can I tell the others? What will they think of me? And in the end, will they be there for me?

The Naked Truth (FI), by Arttu Hanska and Joonas Katko, is a feel-good scenario is about the difficulty of talking and opening up. In Finnish culture, sauna is something that removes social boundaries. It’s a place where everybody is equal. Rank, wealth, and seniority carry no weight there. Everybody is naked, both physically and mentally. You are not in a hurry. And in this place alone you can cast away the stoic shell that the society expects of Finnish men.

Player type: You enjoy internal dialogue and weighting every word. You like to take things slow and to give space for silence. You enjoy an understated slowly building feel-good atmosphere.