AmerikA
A larp about consumerism, American cultural imperialism and social pornography, created within the frame of the larp designer network Weltscherz. A lottery ticket of 1 million dollars was lost in the garbage, and a lot of people was searching for it, disturbing the people living on the dung, called AmerikA (with an anarcist A at the end). The larp project was part of Oslo 2000 year anniversiary.
The larp was produced in one of the main squares of Oslo in 2000, and the site was build like an interactive artwork with 50 tonns of garbage with the help of art student and artists. Main designers was Atle Evang Reinton (production), Erlend Eidsem Hansen (scenography) and Hanne Grasmo (larp design and actors). The 12 people living in this combined garbage dung/art work for 3 days had worked with Grytowsky acting methods for several months ahead, with instructor and artist Astrid Solgaard. The larps experimented with how to include audience in larp, on different levels: 1. Watch down on it from the streets above or via web cam. 2. Buying tickets as "tourists" who was a part of diegesis and walked around with a (crazy) guide to visit the strange people living there for 30 minutes. 3. Both larpers and audience could sit at Real Life Companie's (the "enemy" of the people at the dung) cafe, build to look down on the garbage dung. 4. Sign up for the larp in more short time characters - but also then be an audience for the different groups that was more tightly weaved into the daily life of AmerikA. There was also two prologs made for AmerikA (in Bergen and Oslo) to prepare to get into characters and ficitons.
The reasons the Weltschmerz network wanted to do this larp was firstly to make interactive art (fuck passive art!) that had the possibility to change society. Secondly to show the general audience that larp can be contemporary art, not just a fantasy hobby played in the woods. The larp made it to NRK, the state television channel, in a popular show with host Anne-Kat Herland. She even played a character for a while (with a camera team following her) and Hanne Grasmo was interviewed in the show.
Eirik Fatland wrote a review of the larp in one of the Knutepunkt books. Hanne Grasmo held a talk about the use of Real Life Money as larp design at Knutpunkt in Denmark 2019. The one(s) who found the lottery ticket would win 10.000 Norwegian kroner. The twist was that Red Cross Project for children in Brasil living on garbage dungs was present, and the guy who found it could choose whether to keep it, or give away the money to the project. After massive normative pressure from the larpers in the audience (this was right after the larp had ended), he decided to donate the money.
