HEAD OVER TO YETEE GALLERY!
Just a few days left to pick up limited edition prints from the 72 Pins Art Show!
(via 72pins)
They call it “bleed”: the way that whatever you learn or feel during the game can bleed into your life outside of the game. You’re just playing a role, of course, but that doesn’t mean that the experience ends when you’ve taken off the mask, or returned your foam weapon to the armory, or stopped simulating the rape of your prisoner.
This is larp, Live Action Role Playing, which on the surface may look like a glorified Comic-Con dress-up session. In the U.S., larp remains largely confined to hack-n-slash, where adults take a field on the weekend and bash each other with foam boffer weapons while quoting Lord of the Rings, or, more recently, Game of Thrones.
In Denmark, however, and throughout Scandinavia, it is darker, more evolved and far more popular than we in the U.S. could ever imagine. More than 100,000 Danes have participated, a huge number for a country with fewer people than Indiana. Larp is the kingdom’s third-most popular organized activity, behind soccer and handball, ahead of basketball and everything else. And while the vast majority of larpers are weekend warriors or school groups letting off steam, there’s a deep vein of Danish larp that builds elaborate scenarios for exploring the darker nuances of human nature. So when I went to Denmark, an otherwise perfectly quaint little kingdom, the happiest country on earth, I went looking for bleed. And, in a dewy meadow north of Copenhagen, defeated by an army of adolescents from a Danish church group, I found it.
Nathan Thornburgh infiltrates the dark, heroic world of Scandinavian Live Action Role Playing. A new longread on Roads & Kingdoms
Gordon Parks was the first African American photographer for LIFE magazine. A visual artist who captured the trials and joys of African Americans…He was the FIRST major African American director and is responsible for the ‘Learning Tree’ & the blaxploitation film ‘Shaft’…
