Bjarke Pedersen & Johanna Koljonen

Nordic Larp is a progressive variant of live role-playing practice that originated in the Nordic countries but today influences game design and performance across the globe. Nordic larpers build detailed, alternative worlds and simulate fictional societies in a wide range of genres, often for multi-day spans of time, with a high level of narrative, aesthetic and political ambition. Nordic larps have authors, but they are a fundamentally co-creative art form, whose performance strategies and production methodologies are generating enormous interest within the contemporary art community.

Larp theorist and critic Johanna Koljonen will give an introduction to the form through brief case studies of larps set in New York in the early years of the AIDS crisis, on a spaceship in the Battlestar Galactica universe, and in Hamlet’s Elsinore.

In the second part of the talk, game designer Bjarke Pedersen will speak of his ongoing collaboration with American artist Brody Condon, who has worked with Nordic Larp designers since 2008. He will show documentation and footage from works employing larp elements.

RSVP here. Free and open to the public.