Programme - 2019

Programme 
Scroll down for descriptions of the larps

2019 - Beautiful Strangers*** (DK) - By Nina Runa Essendrop
2019 - A Long Way Home*** (BY) - Zhenja Karachun, Masha Karachun, Olga Rudak, Tatsiana Smaliak and Nastassia Sinitsyna
2018 - The Fix* (DK) - By Kristoffer Thurøe
2017 - Sexcraft** (NO) - By Frida Sofie Jansen and Tor Kjetil Edland
2017 - To the Wonder* (NO) - By Karete Jacobsen Meland and Martin Nielsen
2016 - Wilt* (NO/DK) - By Karete Jacobsen Meland and Mads Jøns Frausig
2016 - Silent Night** (NO) - By Katrin Førde
2016 - Lovestories by Abba** (SV) - By Anna Westerling
2015 - Bring Your Own Bottle* (BY) - By Yauheniya Siadova, Alisa Matavila and Nastassia Sinitsyna
2015 - Beyond the Barricades** (SV) - By Eva Wei and Rosalind Göthberg
2015 - Life on a string** (NL) - By Jantine van den Bosch
2015 - Animus** (SV) - By Carolina Dahlberg
2014 - I Say a Little Prayer* (NO) - By Tor Kjetil Edland
2014 - The Boy and the Milk** (DK) - By Tina Heebøll Arbjørn and Jesper Heebøll Arbjørn
2014 - Stereo Hearts** (DK/SV) - Helene Willer Piironen and Maria Ljung
2013 - Sarabande* (DK) - By Jeppe Bergmann Hamming, Maria Bergmann Hamming. Directed by Nina Runa Essendrop.
2013 - Have You Come Here to Play Jesus** (BY) - Zhenja Karachun, Masha Karachun, Olga Rudak and Nastassia Sinitsyna
2012 - White Death* (DK) - By Nina Runa Essendrop
2012 - When our Destinies Meet** (SV) - By Morgan March and Petter Karlsson
2011 - Fallen Stars* (NO) - By Martin Nielsen, Magnar Grønvik Müller and Vilde Herning
2011 - Chase the Wolf Away (SK) - By Dominika Kovacova
2010 - Screwing the Crew* (NO) - By Trine Lise Lindahl and Elin Nilsen

* Popular choice - this larp got the most votes for this year in our survey
** Curated - this larp entered the programme based on a curatorial decision
*** Selected through Grenselandet Challenge. This larp is played in a public or semi-public place.

The 2018 programme can be found here


Beautilful Strangers

In a black and white, two-dimensional world lives a group of curious, playful creatures. Their world is simple and poetic and easy for them to understand, but sometimes they long for more.

Through a ritual, they travel to the fantastic, three-dimentional world, where they get amazing, three-dimentional bodies. Here, they immerse into the chaos of our complex reality and they observe The Beautiful Strangers and record their experiences through abstract, two-dimentional, balck and white drawings, in order to bring the beauty home and enrich their world.

Beautiful Strangers is a playful, poetic larp about re-discovering our world and the beauty of the people within it. Players get to make abstract drawings, move as a wondering group through a public space and observe (and possibly interact with), beautiful, unknowing strangers.

This larp was selected as a pitch for the Grenselandet Challenge. It will be played in a semi-public space in Deichmanske Library at Grünerløkka. The event is not advertised for an audience, but the larp will be visible to the public and this setup might be used as a part of the larp design.

A Long Way Home

You live in the world where emotions do not exist anymore. You have no recollection of any feelings that you might have had once. Nor do you remember any relationships you were in. Your life is mechanical and mundane, wrapped around a constant routine. You are always busy. Always in a hurry. Always surrounded by people. Yet you never connect with them. You are always alone deeply in your thoughts.

Today you are sitting in the cafe by the train station waiting for the next train. The waiter comes and offers you a menu. Yet, instead of usual food you are being offered various emotions to choose from. By picking one, you are able to feel again and to connect with other people in the cafe. The emotions bring memories of your previous experiences, of your first love, first betrayal, first lost… Memories totally overcome you: some of them bring you joy, others make you feel miserable.

This larp was selected as a pitch for the Grenselandet Challenge. It will be played in a semi-public space in Deichmanske Library at Grünerløkka. The event is not advertised for an audience, but the larp will be visible to the public and this setup might be used as a part of the larp design.

Lovestories by Abba

We follow a band during their last summer tour in the late 70ies. It’s love, drama, music & party. We’ll play five party nights – once for each month of the tour – and tell the story of the band’s love and lives. It’s new meetings, endings and longing for something more. The music of ABBA is used to express the characters inner feelings. We’ll sing and dance out our emotions for maximum drama.

Screwing the crew

A is together with B and is making out with C who is in love with D who has an affair with E who rejected F who’s hitting on everybody. A lot of people live like that. Sometimes everybody’s happy, and other times it doesn’t really work out that well. Screwing the Crew is a larp where you can explore questions about monogamy, open relationships and sexual relations in a tight-knit group of friends. You can explore their history and how it has affected the relations they have today. The larp’s setting is a dinner party held by the most established couple in the group, in a city close to you.

Fallen stars

Falne stjerner (Fallen Stars) is a black box chamber larp about a flea market. Each player plays the role of an item for sale. Characters for the items are created before the larp begins, and each player has the physical item they are playing in front of them during the larp. The players don't puppeteer their item, but are asked to gestalt the emotional expression of the item they play.

White Death

A poetic, non-verbal larp that emphasizes physical expression. The players are guided through feelings like anger, frustration, sorrow, and fear – and the feelings of peace and closeness which follow the characters’ gentle deaths. Music by Tom Waits, Nick Cave and Johnny Cash sets the tone.

A group of pioneers once set out for the mountains with the aim of creating a new society, bringing only the absolute necessities, as well as their hope and dreams. While having the best intentions, the pioneers couldn’t succeed. Life in the mountains turned out to be hard and demanding. They had traveled too far, and couldn’t find their way back. One by one, the snow embraced them, giving them silence, peace and rest. Tranquility and light.

The genre is not realistic but rather using an abstract poetic approach. White Death is a scenario without words. This means all communication is done physically. The larp is completely transparent and the focus is on the atmosphere rather than the outcome.

Sarabande

Twelve people in a café on Montmartre at the end of the 19th century – all entangled in issues of love, beauty, freedom and truth. Day after day they live out these issues through their art, trying desperately to break free or to find that one true love. Day after day goes past, and for each day another passed chance.

But tomorrow… tomorrow will be different…

Together we will create these 12 fates and live them out through the use of body, emotion, music and art rather than talking about it. We play with our bodies rather than our heads.

I say a little prayer

Just a little lovin' was a larp about homosexuality, friendship, HIV and death that blew many of the participants' minds. It has been run several times in several countries and even sparked debate in the mass media. Didn't you get to play it? Or did you play it but want more? Now one of the creators, Tor Kjetil Edland, has made small freeform scenario over the same theme. Five gay men are sharing an apartment in a Nordic capital in the early 80s. By end of every act the lottery of death will make the group lose its members.

Bring your own bottle

A group of childhood friends, really fond of drinking, have recently decided to quit drinking. But before that, there will be one last party. Bring your own bottle (BY) by Nastassia Sinitsyna, Yauheniya Siadova and Alisa Matavilava is a larp about friendship, memories and moving on.

Tonight is their last chance to have a proper party the old way and look back on all the crazy things they've done, before leaving the bottles behind forever.

Wilt

Wilt (DK/NO) by Karete Jacobsen Meland and Mads Jøns Frausig is about the different phases after ending a romantic relationship. You will interacting mainly with the person playing your partner, starting with the actual breakup and ending with the characters moving towards hope in the life to come. Wilt aims at creating an abstract, somewhat introspective atmosphere, in which the players individually create their own meaning.

Wilt is played out non-verbally, and every scene is introduced and instructed through a guided meditation, and includes different physical restrictions in which the two characters of the relationship in one way or another have to renegotiate the relation they have to each other.

To the wonder

If you can find the end of the rainbow, legend has it that you can make a wish. This legend was the reason a group of children set out to find the rainbow. They were all facing something dreadful in their life, and they hope to find the rainbow's end to overcome the difficulties. But the road to the rainbow is long and full of challenges.

To the Wonder (NO) by Karete Jacobsen Meland and Martin Nielsen is a larp about internal and external monsters and a journey to overcome them.

The fix

The therapist looks around in the circle. “All of you have a struggle inside. Your addiction and your humanity is raging a war in your body. I want you to close your eyes and visualize the two. Now split yourself in half. Which one is pulling the hardest today?”

The Fix (DK) by Kristoffer Thurøe, is a physical, partner based larp where you together will tell the story of a patient at a rehab center. How much are you willing to sacrifice either for the next fix or to be clean?

Sexcraft

The room was a little too warm. Any second now. He could hear how her moaning changed, softer now, and then, his turn; With a bellow he dropped into the most thunderous laugh he had ever mustered, just at the same second she turned into a high pitch scream. “That’s a wrap, excellent guys!” I really believed in that orgasm scream!”

He finally dared to take his eyes of the screen, letting his eyes wander over to the other microphone. She was smiling at him. In a voice miles away from the one she had used just a minute ago she suddenly said: “Impressive laugh! I’m Snow, nice to meet you!”

In this scenario the characters are all voice actors who meet for the first time as they arrive for a day of work dubbing a hentai movie soon to be released in their country. Throughout the larp the story will switch between the dubbing scenes of the present, and flash forward scenes telling the story of the characters’ intertwined futures. This is a feel-good humorous scenario combining voice acting to a hentai move with the story of 4 strangers becoming friends and lovers. Many stories are about how people fail to communicate and connect with each other. This is the opposite.

In this larp the characters will drink a shot of alcohol. It can be replaced with water if you as a player prefers so.

The boy and the milk

Do you remember how is was the very first time you as a child where out alone in the world? How scary and exciting everything suddenly was? The Boy and the Milk focuses on just that, the first adventure out into the world. How reality and imagination melt together to create a marvelous adventure about courage and friendship. About superheroes and inner strength.

It is a feel-good action-packed adventure with both storytelling and silent embodiment. Where the players have limitless world creation abilities and only their imagination sets the boundaries. A playful yet serious story physically comes to life through the players in this scene-based scenario. A collaborate story about finding your inner child and letting it shine.

Beyond the Barricades

It is 1832 and the time for change is now. The riot is all around you. The people of Paris are rising up to fight by your side. You and your friends have finally made it. Onwards to the barricades. Long live the revolution!

Beyond the barricades is a theatrical and flamboyant three-act scenario about ten friends on a barricade in revolutionary Paris. We explore how idealism and friendship bring them together. How doubt and unfairness tear them apart. When everything comes to a head, each and every one have to consider whether their ideals are worth dying for, or if they choose to betray their beliefs as well as their friends to save themselves or someone they love.

Beyond the barricades is a cinematic scenario based on the actual historical events of the June Rebellion in Paris 1832. For the complete theatrical experience, the scenario provides some props and costumes as well music to set the mode.

Silent Night Silent Night is a freeform scenario about being alone on Christmas Eve.

The larpmaker, Katrin Førde, says she made this scenario to make people contemplate how fucked-up Christmas can make you feel. As players you will explore different people’s reasons for being alone at “the most wonderful time of the year”. You will explore friendship, loss and love, all tied up to that single day a year where the most people feel alone.

Stereo Hearts

Music is your way of communicating. You try to express yourself with it. Sometimes it goes as intended and sometimes… it just… whatever. That was not what you meant. You still try to fill in the gaps, the only way you know how.

You will be playing five unfinished characters trapped in fragments of fiction. Now you have to tell your stories through music and monologues.

A larp for players who wants to experiment with a different way of expressing characters.

Life on a string

Life on a String (NL) by Jantine van den Bosch is a larp about a group of friends, where one of them are going to die. How does this affect their relations? In this larp, thin, fragile strings to symbolize the relations between the characters. In this non-verbal LARP, you will experience the warm and tight connection of a group of friends, moving along in a web of self created relation strings. This bound will be tested when one of the friends is soon to die. A larp about friendship and grieve, set in an abstract, theatrical black box.

Have you come here to play Jesus

The action takes place in the Netherlands in the present day time. You all are the members of the family or close friends of a person who had been in the accident 10 years ago and now is almost totally paralyzed. He only can move his eyes, though he is still mentally active. He cannot speak or nod, and is in constant pain. You are here to decide whether to continue the treatment or to give permission for euthanasia.

Chase the wolf away

An emotional larp about family relations and the impact of authoritarian rule. The larp is about a mother and her two sons in cold-war-era Czechoslovakia. One of the sons fled to the US a few years ago, and the family has not had any contact since. The larp takes place a few days before Christmas, when the lost son is returning home, seeing his family for the first time in years.

When our destinies meet

When Our Destinies Meet requires 2 hours of preparation and 2 hours of black box larping, which uses theatre techniques and shifting perspective as the player, director, narrator, and audience. Using a model where larps are created by the participants in workshop before play, you should be ready to hash out some relationships and plots. The only story components and preparation we have as we enter the larp are as follows: a party, social roles and, one or more destined meetings. We decide these three factors together during the workshop. First, we spend approximately 2 hours to create the drama, the intrigues, and the relationships; then, we play for approximately 2 hours with a 30 min debrief. That is the total structure of the larp and its preparations. A larp to go. Out of the box larping

Animus

Animus (SV) is a larp inspired by the Assassins Creed video games. The story takes place in Sweden, Denmark and Norway, telling the story about known and unknown individuals playing significant parts in some historical turning points.

This larp by Carolina Dahlberg and Karl Ytterberg is a rare example of a larp that combines state-of-the-art application of lights, sounds and projections in the black box format with one of the oldest mechanics in larp - boffer swords. If you enjoy transparent/collaborative play and epic storylines, Animus is the larp for you.