Luminescence

Luminescence

Techniques	Pre-larp workshop Soundtrack Pre-written characters Must touch when speaking Rule of normality Symbolic scenography Flour
Information
Date	2004 (2004)
Duration	4 hours
Location	Helsinki, Finland
Participants	15
Credits
Designed by	Juhana Pettersson Mike Pohjola
Produced by	Mikko Pervilä.

Luminescence, also known as "The Flour Larp", was a four-hour long larp in 2004, in A Week in Finland before Solmukohta 2004. Luminescence is a game about cancer patients in music therapy. They all all going to die and attempt to come to terms with this fact. The players are semi-naked in a roomful of flour, which has been defined as ”normal” within the game.

[The players] really went to town with the flour, having flour fights, burrowing into it, pouring it onto each other, stuffing it into their mouths and underwear. The players reported that the flour was very versatile as a medium for nonverbal communication and as a tool for all kinds of symbolism. The people stuffing it into their underpants had prostrate cancer. Perhaps the most poetic thing we heard was from a guy who had been lying down in the flour for a long time. When he got up, the shape of his body was still visible in the flour. He touched it and could feel the body heat dissipating the same time as his touch destroyed the fragile image itself.

— Juhana Pettersson, The Kingdom of Flour

Techniques

• Pre-larp Workshop
• Soundtrack
• Pre-written characters
• Must touch when speaking
• Rule of Normality
• Symbolic scenography
• Flour

Documentation

Texts

Luminescense has been written on extensively by Juhana Pettersson and Mike Pohjola, often including player comments.

• Juhana Pettersson: Roolipelimanifesti, a non-fiction book about roleplaying (Like, 2005).
• Juhana Pettersson: The Age of Indulgence, an article in [Playground Worlds], 2008.
• An article on the larp in [Nordic Larp (Book)] by Juhana Pettersson.

Video Documentation

Video footage from the larp:

External Links

• No Good #18: The Kingdom of Flour by Juhana Pettersson
• School of Flour by Mike Pohjola, from [[[Dissecting Larp]]]
• Juhana Pettersson's artistic statement