What Lowers the Barriers to Cultural Participation? Five Insights from Larpocracy's WP4 Report
How do you design a cultural event that people feel able to take part in, especially people who don't usually see themselves in art spaces, civic processes, or democratic life?
That question sits at the heart of Larpocracy's Work Package 4, and our first major report now offers some answers.
Lowering Barriers to Cultural Participation through Larp and Larp-adjacent Practices was published in March 2026 and is freely available on Zenodo. It documents what we learned from DRIFT, a ten-day artistic residency held in Belém, in the Brazilian Amazon, in the lead-up to and during the COP30 climate conference in November 2025. Fifteen Brazilian artists developed fifteen participatory performance works, each tested and refined through a process of rapid iteration, and shared with public audiences across the city.
Rather than reporting on finished artworks, the report looks closely at how participation works, what makes someone feel able to step in, and what holds them back. Five insights stand out.
First, clear but flexible instructions lower barriers better than either total freedom or rigid scripts. Audiences who were "abandoned to improvisation" felt exposed; audiences who were tightly controlled felt boxed in. The works that invited the widest participation gave people a simple, clear frame, and then left room inside it for their own interpretation.
Second, relational encounter matters more than performance. The most powerful moments came not when audiences watched a performer, but when they were guided into genuine contact with each other: negotiating trust, proximity, and care in real time. We came to describe performance-makers in this mode not as performers but as "framework providers and instructional authors."
Third, difficulty is not the enemy of participation. Moments of awkwardness, hesitation, or relational tension often produced the richest engagement, prompting people to attend more carefully to one another. We argue these micro-negotiations (listening, compromising, adjusting) can be understood as embodied democratic practices.
Fourth, sensory and embodied engagement opens doors that words alone do not. Several works foregrounded touch, sound, movement, and shared physical experience, offering routes into participation for people who might not engage through discussion-based formats.
Fifth, moments of heightened civic attention - like COP30 - both enable and complicate participation. The global spotlight created curiosity and urgency, but also strained local infrastructure and raised questions about who benefits. Working through trusted local partners was essential: the programme reached audiences across the Federal University of Pará, the British Council, UNLIMITED, the Museu das Amazônias, and the Gasômetro cultural complex.
We are careful, in the report, to frame these as provisional insights. We do not claim to have proven that barriers were lowered for marginalised audiences, as that lies beyond the scope of this stage of the work. What we offer instead is a set of artistic strategies, grounded in real practice, that can be developed and tested further as Larpocracy continues. Notably, the programme also left lasting traces: partner institutions reported developments including a new sensory, neurodivergent-friendly space at the Museu das Amazônias and ongoing dialogue around inclusive cultural policy.
You can read the full report on Zenodo:
https://zenodo.org/records/18823127 (DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.18823127)