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→Arts for Loving and Building Hierarchy
== Arts for Loving and Building Hierarchy ==
Totem was preceded by a half a year of collaborative preparatory work of players and organizers. Three weekend workshops were staged. The first working with and the central aspects of the larp (bodylanguage, loving, hierarchy), the second with relations in the two groups and the third one was mostly used for small-talk about the game and making costumes. The methods used were inspired partly by experiences as participants in other larps (especially [[Mellan himmel och hav]]), partly built on the game organizer crew’s previous work in [[System Danmarc ]] and partly inspired by [[Forum Theatre]].
A central part of the workshops was creating a safe environment for the participants to work and play in, in order to prepare the players for the demanding larp. Work was carried out on creating positive group dynamics and empowering and including the participants in the creative process. Both body language and spoken language were worked on, as the idea was to hamper the use of speech without reverting to “caveman language”. Thus, it was decided that only the present could be addressed in speech, as the ability to think hypothetically was lost. Body language was practiced by creating still pictures (drawing on impro exercises) of potential in-game situations. The participants worked with correcting postures, and with the expressions of the physical image they wanted to project and thus created a collective understanding of how they wanted body language to work in the larp.
The workshops also worked very well in introducing and playing around with the diegetic tools of the larp. We borrowed the [[Ars Amandi ]] method for amorous simulation from [[Mellan himmel och hav]], and created [[Ars Ordo ]] for resolving conflicts without using violence by using eye-contact.
''The cultures were developed from A4 presentations to something that the players had an intuitive sense of, rather that a set of rules and norms. The workshops and the big effort made to work with cultures and matching of expectations had a central role in making the larp as succesfull as it was.''
(male player, post larp)
== Sacred Grounds ==
