Its not just larpers who suffer bleed

From the Guardian:‘When you cry, you really cry’: the emotional toll of stage acting

“If you spend your evenings going to these horrible places, it’s part of your life.” Take it from an actor who knows. Kate Fleetwood has played both Lady Macbeth and Medea. Her last stage outing, in Tracy Letts’ Bug, was as a delusional heroin addict, hiding from a violent ex-husband, traumatised by the loss of her son. She has gone to some pretty horrible places.

Actors have to – that’s the job. But that’s not to say it doesn’t take a toll. As audiences, we look on, invest and exhale a cathartic sigh as we head home to bed, safe in the knowledge that it was all just make-believe and pretence. Only, of course, it’s not. Not entirely.

To act is to be bound up in a fiction. It is to use one’s own life, one’s own emotions and experiences, to stand in for someone else. At some level, it’s real: a real act in real time with real consequences. “You don’t not feel it,” Fleetwood stresses. “You’re not just technically producing it. When you cry, you really cry – physically, emotionally, everything. It’s in you. It’s part of your life.”

While it talks about actors clearly suffering what we know as bleed, it doesn’t talk about any strategies they have for handling it. Which is odd, given that this is a 2,000 year-old profession with a modern professional culture going back a good couple of hundred years (at least).

From my experiences in theatre, a lot of actors I know distance themselves from the experience. Unlike a lot of LARP, their costumes are not their own, so the very act of putting those clothes on becomes something of a transformation, into a person who it is impossible for the actor to be outside of that costume. Removing that costume and returning to civilian identity is a ritual in itself, a concerted decision to put that identity away. Some campaign games take a similar approach with the ‘out-of-character circle’, where the return to real life is ritualised. You put the costume in the circle and you are back to being you again. In smaller games with a lot of potential for bleed, this could also be useful.

While I don’t have any clear suggestions beyond this, I don’t think it’s entirely sufficient, however. I think the one of the difficulties we face as LARPers, especially when it comes to campaign games, is that our experience of being the character extends outside the time we spend at the site, in the costume. For some games, we may be encouraged or expected to roleplay online, or to make decisions that affect our own or other characters, as is the case with many downtime mechanics in campaign games. When this happens, the character invades our everyday identity - I am Paulus when I sit at my computer, or when I make a cup of tea. This is a behaviour that is reasonably uncommon in theatre, as those characters typically exist within the constrains of the play itself. It’s meaningless, or even unhelpful, to think about what Hamlet eats for breakfast, as the play never demands it.
I wouldn’t go so far as to say that these approaches should be removed from campaign LARP - they provide a different focus to the game, and many people actively enjoy them. I think, for those that do suffer bleed, and know they do, there’s benefit in turning your interactions with the game into rituals, making sure those rituals are unlike other things you do in your life (so you never use those rituals for anything else, and other things in your life don’t remind you of those rituals), and making sure you stick to those rituals religiously (it’s easy to forget to do it ‘just this once’ and then bam, you’re back to bleed again).

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