Valley of Shadow

Before you start reading this article or looking at the photographs, I would recommend you to play some appropriate music – which goes on through all of this larp.

A long awaited experimental larp about dance has finally arrived. No, this time it isn’t about tango argentino, it’s about blues – they went in a different direction and used the dance in a different way.
The game is divided into scenes, almost like in a “jeep” (the so called Czech jeep should be probably called “yeti”). There are two types of scenes – the first group are dreams from a dance club and the latter are in the reality, in a jail. I don’t want to give you any spoilers from the game itself, so this is all I’m telling you. Well, I think I can add one more thing – the dancing pairs (not necessarily man and woman, but leader and follower) are just one character in the story – similar to what we’ve seen before in Cien Años de Soledad.
The larp itself lasts for about four hours, but the workshops before took one and a half day. It might sound surprising, but those workshops are both about building your character and learning to dance. About the same time ratio was used in Dance Macabre and we’ve all seen it’s working.

Dance photography is a discipline of its own and it’s been so long since I took any pictures of a dance that I actually don’t remember when exactly the last time was. But when I got a message from the organizers of this larp that the wait has finally ended I couldn’t say no. I’ve been waiting for this game for years.
First you can see some pictures that have gone through no postprocessing – from random dancing on Friday evening and some from Saturday morning workshops. And as you can see there wasn’t much light, and when we had some it was brightly colored.
Then you can see stylized photographs from the game itself. Aside from the visual styling I was also trying to capture some emotions and feelings in general in the dance hall. And I daresay I was successful at that.

And yes, it’s been a very long time since I published any photographs here. I wasn’t in the mood, and had no time – I’ve changed jobs, twice, been on a three-month vacation, got promoted… but mainly I was focusing on pretty different things than pictures, I was working on my self-improvement, and I’ve found a new hobby – woodcarving – it seems that I need to do something creative all the time.
I can’t say whether I have the same amount of time and energy to invest in photography as before, but I won’t be rejecting offers for photographing larps – I already have some new larps in my calendar for next year and I’m really looking forward to them.