Odraz 2.11

Odraz is an annual conference with four years’ tradition which took place in Horní Bradlo from the 15th to the 17th of April. The space for the conference was granted by a sport facility in a lost area with almost no cell phone signal and public transport – the bus goes there about three times a day except weekends.

Lectures, friends, pleasant moments and some alcohol, that is what this year’s Odraz, organized by the Madfairy association, was about. There were foreign participants from Hungary, Poland, Slovakia and Norway.

The Norwegians left probably the strongest impression, thanks to their lecture about twenty years of larping in Norway, an almost two kilos weighing book Nordic LARP and maybe also the Playground magazine.

I’m not sure how much different this year’s Odraz was from the 2008 Odraz organized by Court of Moravia, or the 2009 made by Prague by Night, or the last one in 2010 held by Tempus Ludi. To be honest I don’t know much about the past of the Odraz conference, except that it was inspired by the Nordic Knutepunkt.

I can’t speak about the quality of lectures – of course they were great – since I was moving between lectures taking picturesin any case I think that everyone could find his topic. Well, there were three lines of lectures, and only one lecture was dropped during the whole event.

For me personally, the best was “Krátce!” and I hope it gets more place next year. There was a number of speakers and everyone of them had only fifteen minutes to intruduce his project, idea or talk about anything. For example, one of them spoke about the unacceptability of sex and nudity in the larp advertisement.

Aside of the photographies from Odraz I also brought home some invitations from the larp organizers, who want me to photograph their larps. I hope that I will be able to meet the demands of most of them and to establish some long term relationship.