Editorial note: This article was originally published in the Knutepunkt 2025 book Anatomy of Larp Thoughts, a breathing corpus. It has been reprinted from there with the editors’ and authors’ permission. It has not been edited by Nordiclarp.org.
This article describes our artistic practice and design principles focusing on the bodily experience. First, we theorize what we are doing and then give a practical overview of some of our pieces.
We have worked mainly in the Finnish art field as an artistic duo. As artists, we look at larp from a slightly different angle, and there is no perfect word for our approach. Our interdisciplinary artistic works are not quite like larps are usually understood. We call them instruction-based performances, built around short directed scenes emphasizing a particular theme or experience. Embodily design often plays a big role in our pieces, both in creation and the final piece.
Vili and Nina on one of the actual sites where a coven did rituals working on a larp about them. Photo: Vili Myrsky Nissinen 2024
What we mean by embodied art
Larp is the art of experience, but not all larps are embodied art. For us, embodied art is art created by researching bodily experiences and trying to find ways to replicate them for the participants. Embodied art designs the bodily experience directly.
Larp designers often focus on fiction, information, and physical objects to create an immersive setting, skipping thinking about the participants’ bodies beyond keeping them safe and accommodating basic physical needs like food and sleep. Larp designers expect emotions and experiences to emerge from the information and setting they have created, and many times they do. But, larp is first and foremost experienced through the participants’ bodies, and what happens in the participants’ bodies creates the piece. In larp, participants strive for certain emotions, narratives, and human experiences. All things humans start from our body and senses. The bodily experience can be designed; bodies guided and prompted towards the emotions we aim to create to support our narrative. We as creators believe that body-focused design is a very direct and reliable way to achieve the experience larp designers want to create and that it significantly accommodates participants in achieving it.
The body as a design tool
Our pieces in the art scene are mostly based on the history of queers and other oppressed. For us, a crucial part of doing background research on certain groups or events is recreating their footsteps and actions using our bodies to understand what they were doing. We aim to understand how the events felt in the bodies of the people whose stories we are telling. This is crucial for us to tell their tale respectfully and in the right tone.
For example as preparations for Fenezar! (2024), a larp about a working-class witch coven that radicalized and did horrific acts in 1930s Helsinki, we visited two of the coven’s actual ritual sites and did spells there based on their rituals. The other ritual site is not easy to reach, as it is far away from the center of Helsinki and in the middle of an overgrown grove. But it was important for us to follow down the witches’ road to the sacred wellspring and sink an offering there, just as the coven did. We got a glimpse of what they might have felt during the exhausting trip and while practising their magic and this bodily experience we tried to transfer directly into the piece we created.
After bodily experimenting and researching, we verbalize what our bodies experienced and figure out how to translate those experiences into exercises and meta techniques so that our participants can safely get the right feeling. In test runs, we try out these exercises and evolve them when needed. If test runners express that they felt the feelings we aimed for, it is a sign that our body-based exercises are working and that the design is reaching its final form.
Experiencing the right bodily reactions and emotions is a powerful tool for the participants to understand the tale we are telling. We, as creators, don’t find larp an unpredictable and uncontrollable medium like many larp designers do, and we think this is because of our focus on bodily experience. Embodied design can do miracles in finding the core of the piece and giving the players the tools to reach it.
Easy things to design from the body perspective
We think the bare minimum of bodily design all larp creators should do is to check that your participants’ bodily experience is not against aimed content. For example, being cold or hungry makes it hard to feel like you’re in a comedy, or being on a tight schedule and in a hurry makes it hard to drop into the feeling of being in a slow-paced slice of life experience, or uncomfortable and complicated costumes may make it impossible to engage in a free form dance improvisation larp. Make sure your participants can easily engage in the emotions you want them to feel and that their bodies will not be against it by design.
Examples of bodily design from our pieces
In Inner Domain players draw together on the floor. Photo: Nina Mutik 2024
In this section, we will give several practical examples of how we have used our bodies as design tools, and how this has been transformed into exercises or meta techniques and the experience replicated in the actual piece.
Finding Tom (2020) tells the story of Tom of Finland’s (1920-91) art’s effect and meaning on the freedom fight of Finnish gay men of his time. We researched a lot on how it was being a gay man between 1940 and 70s in Helsinki. In Finland, homosexual acts were a crime until 1971 and homosexuality was classified as a disease until 1981. Homosexuality was a shame and not a lifestyle choice or an identity, but rather a heavy burden. Gay men mostly met at parks, finding contacts for sex in secret. After reading history and documentation from those times and interviewing researchers and gay men, we went to the actual cruising sites and followed Tom of Finland’s routes. We re-enacted finding company in the shadows of the parks and tried to embody the fear of getting caught, the shame of being ill this way, the strong sexual urge, and the short relief of relieving the symptoms. We immersed ourselves in the stories we found and tried to feel how being torn between sexual need and shame under heavy oppression felt.
To embody the shame of being gay and the pressing feeling of hiding your true self we created a prop that we call the oppression jacket, a relative to a straitjacket. It is a trench coat with straps sewn into them over the chest and stomach. The straps can be pulled tight so that it is a bit hard to breathe. The oppression jacket does not restrain the participants’ movement but gives a pressing feeling around the chest and stomach. Each participant wears one during the larp. The jacket represents the feeling of shame, fear and being oppressed and at the start of the piece the participants have the jackets closed, the collars pulled up to hide their faces and the straps pulled as tight as they are still comfortable with. As the piece progresses and the characters start slowly finding community and identity, the jacket’s straps gradually loosen and open, until the jackets are dropped off and left behind completely as the characters go into Finland’s first Pride parade. The oppression jacket has gotten a lot of thanks from participants as they help get into the right emotions. They are both great metaphors and cause parts of the right emotions directly in the participants’ bodies.
Inner Domain (2024) tells the story of an all-female esoteric group gathered around the Swedish artist Hilma af Klint at the start of the 20th century. These women used theosophy and spirituality to create a safe space for women to break gender norms and to explore same-sex romance and sexuality in a time when women’s roles and possibilities in society were extremely narrow. We picked one method from their rituals, automatic drawing, to be the center of our piece. Drawing together, close to each other on the floor, guided by the spirits allows exploring things that can not be voiced in another way. Communication through touching creates a wordless way to experience the sensual and fragile erotic tension and emotional relationships we were looking for. The touches while drawing could be gentle, shy, brave, flirty, or even violent. All the character communication in the piece happens only through touching and drawing, there is no talking. During the workshops, participants go through a series of touching exercises, so that it is easy and safe to touch and communicate wordlessly during the larp. This piece has also received a lot of thanks and has surprised its participants on how safe it felt to engage and how intense narratives they lived through in such a short time.
Part of Fenezar!’s design aims to imagine how it was to be poor, suffering from illness, pain, and hunger and existing with no hope of finding anything better, all added to the shame of being poor as it was considered to be your fault by authorities. Endless meaningless physical labor that leads to nothing permanent became the core of this experience. In the larp, we give players some carpet rag to crochet with their fingers as they sit around a table over empty plates and talk. After each act, we unravel the crocheting, and they have to start the same roll of rag from the start again. The constant crocheting also physically narrowed down what they could do, so the meaningless work was restricting them in play. Our participants felt the frustration and the repetitiveness of manual labor well through this tool. In Fenezar! we also discuss radicalization. As the coven does rituals and magic to improve their situation in life and nothing happens, the magical acts become more and more severe to keep up the hope that things will improve, and these people have agency in their lives. To embody this we created props based on actual sacrifices the coven sank into the well-spring, and they become physically heavier and larger as the story progresses. Carrying your more and more extreme deeds was concretely heavier and harder. This had a direct emotional impact on participants they found easy to engage with.
These are some examples of how to affect player bodies directly as a medium for the larp to create the emotions and narrative you are aiming for. These tools can not be invented without experiencing the emotions or events you’re trying to tell with your own body or without testing and iterating with test participants.
This article is republished from the Knutepunkt 2025 book. Please cite it as:
Mutik, Nina & Vili Myrsky Nissinen. 2025. “Larp As Embodied Art.” In Anatomy of Larp Thoughts, a breathing corpus: Knutepunkt Conference 2025. Oslo. Fantasiforbundet.
Cover image: Doing rituals at the actual wellspring the coven used to create Fenezar! Photo: Nina Mutik 2024
