We are looking for test participants for our black box larp Seaside Prison in Helsinki on Sat Dec 7th, 13:00-17:00 and Sun Dec 8th, 11:30-15:30.
Larp Design: Kaisa Kangas, Martin Nielsen, Mohamad Rabah, Light Design: Essi Santala, Sound Design: Hannu Niemi, Projection Design: Joona Pettersson
Seaside Prison is a black box larp about life in a fictional place with parallels to real world Gaza. It is a Finnish-Norwegian-Palestinian collaboration, designed by Kaisa Kangas, Martin Nielsen, and Mohamad Rabah. Kaisa’s and Mohamad’s previous work includes the Palestinian-Finnish larp Halat hisar (State of Siege) set in Finland under military occupation.
Larp is a co-creative, participatory artform. Most fundamentally, it is the art of experience: you are a person who lives under siege in a city that is sporadically bombed, and this frames your everyday life and personal relations. No previous experience of larp is necessary, and there is no need for preparations; we will have a workshop before the larp that will get you ready to play. The larp is aimed at a wide audience, and we especially encourage people with no previous larp experience to take part.
Larp is not acting, and Seaside Prison is more about immersing into the experience than performing for others. There is no audience, just people you interact with. We will give you a character that you embody during the larp, and the idea is to experience the events through the character. The larp will be run in an environment that resembles a theatre black box, with lights, sounds and video projection.
In Seaside Prison, the participants will not portray Palestinians, but instead play people of their own cultural background in a fictional situation that has some connection points to Gaza. For example, if you are Finnish in real life, your larp character will be Finnish. The larp deals with heavy themes such as fear of death and loss of loved ones.
Seaside Prison will premiere in March 2020 in Tampere, and will be rerun in Helsinki in June 2020. At the moment we are looking for participants for two test runs to see how our design works. This is your chance to experience the larp free of cost and give us valuable feedback on your experience.
The larp (including workshop and debrief) lasts four hours. Each test run will have 8-16 participants. The test runs take place in the rehearsal space of the Department of Light and Sound at Uniarts Helsinki’s Theatre Academy in Kallio, Helsinki.
The larp Seaside Prison is an environment free of harassment and discrimination. We do not tolerate racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, or any other kind of discrimination based on gender, age, physical appearance, or other such personal characteristics.
To participate, please fill in this form on Friday, Nov 8, 2019 at the latest. We will let you know by Monday November 11 which run you will be in. If there are more interested people than we have space for, we will choose people mainly on the basis of “first come, first served”, but we also aim to get a diverse group of participants with respect to previous larp experience. If you have any questions, please email Kaisa Kangas, kaisa.kangas@helsinki.fi.
Seaside Prison is financially supported by Finnish Cultural Foundation.
