Sarah Jury & Hamish MacPherson: Alien Phenomenology

This is a new larp by Hamish MacPherson with Sarah Jury and Nina Runa Essendrop. Within it, a silent encounter offers a brief window into the relationship between two or three beings, objects or sites. It might be about a healer and their patient, or two friends, perhaps one of those friends is not a human but a dog, or an ancient tree, or even an entire landscape.

This work exists on the intersection between somatic practice and larp. It is lightly structured and involves each player building internal narratives based on their physical interactions with an emphasis on playing out passivity and activity in these relationships.

Alien Phenomenology will use touch and other physical contact to explore care, consent, responsibility and vulnerability. There will be a three hour workshop to explore ways of touching and receiving touch, building trust and understanding and negotiating ranges and limits of such interaction. The workshop will be designed to build confidence with physical contact and players will remain in control of their levels of contact at all times. Writing will be used to help develop individual narratives, but any text produced will not need to be shared publicly. The larp will be played for about an hour and a half followed by a half hour debrief to discuss experiences and to help develop the larp.

No experience of larp is necessary (and indeed this is not a typical larp). Familiarity with movement, somatic or other physical practices is welcomed, but also not necessary. The larp is designed to be adaptable to all levels of fitness but if you have any particular requirements or questions please get in touch. Please wear clothes you are comfortable moving in.

Key words: non verbal, partly abstract, physical, slow, somatic

Possible sensitivities: Lying down, passivity, negotiating consent, negotiating touch, silence

Bio

Hamish MacPherson is a London-based artist who uses ideas and methods from choreography and dance to think about politics; a kind of embedded philosophical enquiry. Hamish makes workshops, games, performances, writings, images and other elements in artistic, academic and community contexts. Current projects include THIS MOVEMENT, looking at how we use our bodies to make politics and Hard Care looking at care as an aesthetic, choreographic and political practice. Sarah Jury’s work includes that of a curator, critical writer, nordic larp workshop designer and educator. She is curator and co-director of Res., Deptford; a mutable project with a focus on making research based practice public. She is part of Keep it Complex; a collective who work with artists and politicians to develop events and open-source tools for unintimidating and approachable political discussion.