The Larpocracy team will join The Smoke in the United Kingdom this year to run three larps designed in the project: The Assembly, Sandleford, and the world premiere of Midsummer in Walden. Here is the information:
Midsummer in Walden: A Larp about Democracy and Renewal
Sarah Lynne Bowman, Antonio Casado Da Rocha, & Brent A. Ferguson
Sunday, Jan. 10, 16:00
“I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for that one.” ― Henry David Thoreau
Midsummer in Walden is a historically inspired live-action role-playing game set at Walden Pond, Massachusetts, during the summer of 1847. The writer and activist Henry David Thoreau has lived there in his cabin for almost two years. He senses that his experiment may have fulfilled its purpose and invites friends from Concord to a midsummer gathering before deciding whether to leave. The larp images a midsummer celebration in which luminaries of the Transcendentalist movement come together to discuss spirituality, politics, ecology, social responsibility, and the purpose of life.
The scenario includes scene vignettes that take place over the course of several days, in which central figures in this literary community engage in various activities, including guided meditations and deliberations over social responsibility during antebellum America.These scenes explore non-traditional relationships, class struggles, oppression based on race/ethnicity, and gender roles, while probing deeper questions about consciousness and humankindʼs relationship to the natural world.
Play will include discussion, but also more embodied practices such as flashbacks in which participants embody experiences within the environment, while accompanied by live improvisational music inspired by the Romantic period. These characters represent distinct generations, social positions, and ways of understanding the relationship between individual conscience and collective responsibility, embodying the spirit of inquiry and choice about what lives we choose to live, and which ones we leave behind.
While the events take place in an idyllic setting, the stakes of this exchange hint towards broader tensions relevant to the past, present, and future of American democracy. Characters include Ralph Waldo and Lydian Jackson Emerson, Bronson and the young Louisa May Alcott, Elizabeth Peabody, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Walt Whitman. Inspired in part by Deranged (Bergmann Hamming and Bergmann Hamming 2015), Byromania (Gräslund and Hultman 2025), Gothic (Avalon Larp Studio 2023), and Metropolis (Torner 2012).
Where: Theatre Deli, Building 3, Moretown, London E1W 1YW, London