LevelFive: Brody Condon — Call for Participation :: September 3-5, 2010 @ Hammer Museum of Art in Los Angeles on (50 spots) :: September 16-18, 2010 @ San Jose Convention Center during the Zero1 Biennial (75 spots).

LevelFive is a live role-playing event focused on critically exploring self actualization seminars from the 1970’s. The LevelFive performance will loosely follow the structure of early Large Group Awareness Training sessions like Erhard Seminars Training, but it is not a re-enactment. The open-ended live role-playing environment provides a space in which players are free to explore self actualization issues with varying degrees of personal intensity, but via an alibi or fabricated character.

During the 1970’s hundreds of thousands of ordinary Americans came for weekend seminar sessions, to be taught how to free themselves from the restraints of contemporary society. Intended as a kind of self transformation for the masses, the seminars utilized a combination of various philosophic and spiritual teachings focused on “allowing participants to achieve, in a very brief time, a sense of personal transformation and enhanced power.” Quickly copied, successors included not only similar self actualization seminars, but also grew into the mass of success and corporate training seminars that we are familiar with today.

Players will arrive as their characters, and are expected to emote, and experience as their characters, with minimal interruptions for the 2-3 day duration of the game. LevelFive is a live game based on the Nordic style of progressive live role-play that explicitly works with “bleed”. In role-playing games, bleed happens when the thoughts and feelings of the character starts affecting its player, or vice-versa. Rather than forgetting the existence of an original self, the character becomes a tool for projection, self-exploration and experimentation.

LevelFive Inspiration:

Clip from “Century of the Self” by Adam Curtis

Inspiration #2 CEDU

From a series of CEDU documentary clips by Liam Scheff

Inspiration #3: The Book of est

This performance is created and organized by the artist Brody Condon. The live game mechanics and management are being developed by the Scandinavian based progressive live game designer Bjarke Pedersen, along with character and workshop development by Tobius Wrigstad and Monica Traxl. The event has been commissioned by the San Jose Zero1 Biennial, and Machine Project in conjunction with the Hammer Museum residency program in Los Angeles, along with special thanks to Southern Exposure in San Francisco.