Development 05 - Immersive Theater? (Patreon)

Apologies for the late post - between wrapping up the first playtest of Solomon, working on the second playtest of Solomon, and the quickly-growing amount of schoolwork I need to accomplish, I've been doing my best to remember things like this. There won't be any Workbench Saturday this week - if there was, it would be more Solomon stuff (and I'll be posting that whenever I have something new and shiny to show off). 

I had a meeting a couple of days ago with a very interesting member of my school faculty. I went to her regarding a playwriting course of her's called "The Magical Object", and I discussed with her the idea of writing LARPs for this class, as my plays. We ultimately decided against it, but what she did essentially say is that playwriting is a wide-open field, and that I can get as weird and immersive in my playwriting as I'd like. 

This connects to another class I'm in about artist-led curatorial spaces and how damn similar they are to LARPs (in my opinion). Happenings are about inviting the audience to become a conduit of the art, having their interaction with the world around them become the work itself. Sounds very similar to an immersive approach to LARP design, doesn't it? 

Reading about things like Meat Joy, immediately before meeting about the viability of LARPs as a playwriting medium, made me really appreciate both the unique history of RPGs and how we've always skirted high art. Something like the Battle of Orgreave (2001) is LARP, branded as political performance art. This led my down a conceptual rabbit hole where I really struggled with the differences between these forms of art, and what makes LARP communities stand out so much from artistic communities.

What I eventually realized (and am mostly satisfied with) is the idea that "true" art, high art, is art for art's sake - the goal is a particular art aesthetic that is being cultivated. As much as a lot of curators would like to deny it, what makes something high art is closely entangled with how artsy it appears. When LARP is Happenings, it rocks the gallery aesthetic and lives in a different space than when LARP is performed in a convention space. 

On the flip side, I think the differences between Immersive Theater and LARP lie in a different matter - the relationship to how the script is written. A script for a piece of Immersive Theater might begin:

The audience is located in a series of concentric circles, with four lines running through them that is wide enough for the actors to move through the space. The smallest of these concentric circles is composed of four people, positioned around a platform upon which someone can sit. 

As we begin, the audience will be handed white dish rags and ablute their hands with them, cleansing themselves...

Meanwhile, a LARP might be worded...

You are all citizens of the Kingdom. It is the coronation of the new King, and the ritual duel to determine the fate of the country. Arrange yourselves in a series of concentric circles, the smallest of which contains four players. Some number of players will serve as Kings and Bishops, who will follow the rules at the end of the document. 

To begin, each player takes a white dish rag and ritually washes their own hands, at the instruction of the Archbishop...

The individuals who are addressed in the piece are different, and the expectations for play are different - in a play, you are guiding the audience through an experience, whereas in a LARP, the audience creates their own experience, with a curatorial hand from the organizers. Sometimes. Sorta. 

Like a lot of these Development articles, this is really me spitballing stuff I've noticed, and not really a set of coherent thoughts. LARP is such a unique and complicated art form, and I'm constantly noticing it appear in my other, more academic studies.