Under the wings of imagination II

     At last it was time for the second big LARP in our timetable - “Monte Rosa”. As I was involved in its preparation I was nervous and worried for whole day.  I was asking myself all kind of questions – “Are we going to give the characters sheets on time, is everything written without any mistakes, did the players have good tasks and etc.”

The morning session was a bit different as a part of the group went to Lublin for a meeting. For the rest of us, the day started with two kinds of activities: theatre workshop run by Marcin, and literature workshop led by Dorota and Łukasz.

    In the former, after a short integrational game the group played various scenes. The participants presented short stories the main theme of which was ‘winning and losing’. Then, the workshops passed on to acting in accordance to the different pieces of music that Marcin played.

     They came to shoot us. Shoot with a killing camera a deathly film about how cockeyed are we in all this crazy costumes, freaky make-ups, with our outlandish stories. They came and took us to the forest and asked us to fight. -Catfight!!!-kffffffrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr-huffed Gosia and Tony in an extraordinary way to show how just women can fight (like pussy pussy angry cats).

     You’ll be the evil queen-she whispered in my ear. The ear’ll be an important bodypart later…So my task was to grow corns and a tail, and turn my eyes into red in one day (I should ask Michael who has a pretty red eye, how to do it professionally…). This was my very first LARP, a drama without written paroles in advance, a neverending improvisation with surprising situations (par exemple I was killed by my husband, the king who was cursed by a birdy daemonish lady).

     The morning began with some kind of rush and everyone was nervous,  but somehow during the day we, the mobbers, prepared one great and really fantastic flash mob. To prepare the event, we needed to find a true celebrity - a real superstar. Luckily, we had a huge group from Hungary who happened to contain a celebrity - Anna Maria. That was the half of the problem. Next was the bodyguard for who we were looking for almost half a day. Suddenly, with a train of thought we found a guy from the Latvian group as an ideal bodyguard, so everything we were missing was a pair of sunglasses.

     Search for glasses and ponytail!-he said. But I had no time to think about or search him, ‘cause I found myself in a car next to the proprietary of the glasses and the ponytail, mostly I was picked up from the bus and kidnapped. I had no clue where we were heading from Lublin, in small and even smaller, muddy roads, fast and even faster…He laught at me, while the car’s speed reached 120 km/h, I smiled too, but not in the same way…Finally, we arrived to the middle of nothing, between goats, dogs and a cute little cat, so it’ll be probably a zookeeper training.

In a few minutes we are going to Lublin. This is our first trip. Everyone is excited, watch the streets in the center, maybe you will see some strange international groups ;-)

     Today the weather is like in April. Sun and rain is changing hour by hour. We learned about the method  Open Space and were creating several ideas for the next days, like preparing the Flash Mob for today’s evening in Lublin as well as thinking about the Live Chess Game and LARPs.

     On 1^st September 2010 every group taking part in “Under The Wings Of Imagination II” arrived after long journeys in the Youth Meeting Centre in Motycz Leśny near Lublin. After a night of rest we got to know each other better while taking part in funny and active integration games which was the best possibility to remember other people’s names. This action took its time – or can you immediately remember a name like Tautvydas or Małgorzata?? We also learned some Polish, Lithuanian, Latvian and Bulgarian words during the Language Animation Workshop.

On the evening of 24th July, leaders of European organizations taking part in the project “Under the wings of imagination” under action 1.1 of the Youth in Action Programme arrived to Motycz Lesny. The meeting was an APV and its goal was to discuss the state of preparations for the second part of our project which promotes fantastics and role play games in Europe as an active leisure activity for young people.