I’m just recovering now from a larp over the weekend in the Netherlands, and I’m about to fly off to England to do another one. I’ve done games back-to-back before, so it’s a bit exhausting but not horrible. And I’ll be spending a lot of time in the United Kingdom afterwards, so it’s mostly about getting through the next weekend and then collapsing in a small, safe, quiet space.

After the rather hellish trip trying to get from Weeze to Tilburg, I crashed at the hotel. I was kind of regretting not staying in Düsseldorf or Eindhoven after that trip — it would have allowed me to stay someplace much closer after my flight and take time the next day getting to Tilburg — but I met up with friends in the early afternoon and ended up having a great day just wandering around the city, grabbing some lunch, hanging out at a bar later,¹ and in between visiting the De Pont Museum of Contemporary Art.

I wasn’t expecting much — Tilburg is pretty small, with only 200,000 people — but I was genuinely surprised. It had a quite decent and eclectic collection of art, and what it had was very well curated. There were a number of recognizable names in contemporary art,² but the decisions about what to display seemed to be based more on what worked together; most of it was interesting, some of it was great, and a few pieces were literally breathtaking. There’s an installation by James Turrell called Wedgework III where you go down a narrow, pitch black corridor only to find yourself in a small chamber. There’s a bench you can sit on, facing a space cut into the wall illuminated by a faint, hidden, violet fluorescent light. It’s quite simple, but sitting there, looking at what starts to feel like a physical sculpture, is amazing.

The larp I played was Cirque Noir, set in the late 1920s in a traveling circus ending its season just outside Chicago. The mood was somewhere between The Grapes of Wrath, Freaks, and The Prestige. The circus wasn’t doing so well and most of the characters are haunted by a dark secret — murders, thefts, unpunished betrayals.

It was probably the best organized larp I’ve ever been to. Everything run exactly as they said it would, at the time they said it would. This is something of a monumental feat. I’ve stayed in better accommodations at larps, and I’ve eaten better food, but I’ve never been as certain as to the availability of both.

In play, the game mostly tried to balance between external plots (threats from the Mob, offers to buy out the circus with strings attached) and internal ones (those secrets I mentioned earlier). I think it worked pretty well. And since I’m on the record of disliking both external plot and secrets in larps, I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about why that is.

I think, first off, the plots were all introduced and ramped up very slowly. The Mob didn’t show up and threaten to kill everyone unless they got paid off immediately. Instead, a group would show up, sit down, have a few drinks, and remind the people in charge that they would be very unhappy unless they got their money in the next 24 hours. The next day they’d show up, be unhappy because the circus couldn’t pay, accept a little money, give an extension of 24 hours. That night one of them would slip in and let people know how serious the situation was. Then on the final day, they presented a list of demands, with failure to comply being (presumably) fatal.

This slow ramping up, tightening the screws by degrees, means those plots never become so large they force you to drop everything else. You have time to argue with friends over broken promises, or spend an hour watching someone practise their act. You have time to see the problem accelerate towards you, to make plans and abandon them, to find others and discuss or sabotage or give up and let it come. The plots become toys to play with, not roadblocks to overcome so you can get back to the game.

The secrets were similar. They weren’t these grand, sweeping reveals that changed the fundamental understanding of the world from the player’s point-of-view. They felt more like the reveal of the murderer in a whodunit. In retrospect, the clues were there all along. Once those secrets were revealed, they allowed things that had seemed odd or peculiar to click into place; you end up feeling a little sadder, a little wiser. And isn’t that what larps are for?

I spent the last few days in Amsterdam crashing with a friend. I suppose I should have seen more of the city, but I was grateful just to have a quiet place to relax for a couple days.³ I’m now on a train in England, heading to stay with yet another friend, preparing for yet another larp. And then a few days in England, a hop up for a few weeks in Scotland, and then down south again for a larp, and on, and on, and on.

One of the special exhibitions at the De Pont Museum was a collection of works by Richard Long. Richard Long is known for land art — art that draws on and is composed of the world at large. Much of his work involves walking across places, typically remote, for days or weeks at a time; in this the art is simultaneously the act of walking, the documentation of the walk, and the work formed along the way or from materials gathered during it.

And, looking at all his works, it’s hard for me not to feel some small twinge of recognition. I’m not walking, of course; my trips are flights and trains and ferries and buses. But there is a kinship there. I’m throwing myself around the world into places I’d never go otherwise. And I’ll admit I don’t really know why.

I’ve explained to people this isn’t some kind of endless party, or a lark, or just checking out of my life to go on An Adventure™. I’m trying to live, here. I still have to book doctor’s appointments and file taxes and hide under the covers on the days when I’m feeling too depressed to get up, the same way I did living in New York City. But if I wanted an easier life, I could easily just stop traveling and find someplace to stay for a month or a season or a year.

So there’s something more I’m looking for, out here, hopping from country to country. It’s nice to imagine there’s at least an element of performance art to that — here’s the Sword-Swallower, over there the Fire-Breather, and down that alley you’ll find the Man Who Can’t Stand Still. There’s a part of me that’s afraid I’ll never find a place to stop, some place I could see myself living rather than passing through. With politics being what they are, I’m worried they’ve all been taken away from me. And if that’s a tragedy, well, what better way to live than to turn that into art?

Next: London (LGW) to Edinburgh (EDI)
Prev: Lviv (LWO) to Düsseldorf (NRN)

Footnotes

¹ Eetbar De Wagon, which is right across from the train station and in a couple of decommissioned rail cars. I know, it’s been done before, but it’s still super cute.

² They have a lot of works by Anish Kapoor and Richard Serra, for example

³ I spent about three days a couple years ago in Amsterdam doing the using tourist things, and didn’t really care for the city. So it was great to spend time seeing the calm, residential side, since it really helped me clarify a lot of what I felt the first time around. I’ll have an opportunity to think about things some more, soon, since I’ll be spending a few days in Delft later this summer.