Paper short abstract:

This paper investigates improvised theatre without audience (live action role-playing) and a Danish roleplay where 30 young Europeans during 48 hours enacted a fictional 1960s USSR. Are these games a place for vacation, a “safe” way of creating/visiting uneasy places and reach historical Others?

Paper long abstract:

This paper empirically investigates Live Action Role-Playing (LARP) by the example of a play that was articulated as a military camp in USSR. The participants enacted soldiers in a contra-factive Europe where Hitler never lost WW2. Soviet as place was created in a hangar in Denmark with the help of Soviet flags, songs and other "Soviet props".

LARP can be seen as a vacation, a creation of a place where boundaries of time, space and belonging are re/defined. It can also be seen as a place for temporary belonging, where participants creates a place for belonging to "a kind of Soviet" - shaped as an uneasy place in its harsh military life - but still desired as a place for experience.

This paper is part of an ongoing PhD project in Ethnology called 'Embodied Fiction -performing bodies in fictionalized worlds'. This project investigates LARP with analyses drawn from in depth interviews and field studies in mainly Latvia, Sweden and Denmark. It discusses how bodies are performed, transformed and understood in the seemingly double matrixes of what is emically labeled as "fiction" and "reality".

Questions raised in the paper are: Can these games be seen as a "safe" way of creating/visiting uneasy places? Can this be analyzed as melancholic acts of reaching out for a disappeared/historical Other? The questions are connected to issues of power as the paper discuss by whom and where these vacations are possible to make. How are these temporally belongings created, upheld and understood?