Fool’s Window

Fool’s Window exists as an immersive game and series of psychomagical theatrical rituals staged specifically for individuals invited to play. It is a private collaborative ruleset formed around setting a context, intention, and timeframe of engagement with the pantheon of props at the core of the work. The pantheon of props is carefully constructed based on how I interpret the energetic desires, needs, and relationally of all conversations and experiences with the participant, player, and collaborator leading up to the act of play. Once on site, a theatrical tableaux is staged with these objects—a cosmology of interactive performance sculptures that have been in creation for over a decade.

After an invitation to play, Patrick and individual collaborators/participants have multiple sessions for choosing a time, place, rules, and intentions for exploration and discovery. An immense about of time and planning go into opening and holding the space to create meaning out of this solo-player vision quest. In exchange, I ask each participant to create some document for an ongoing archive, the nature of which could range across a variety of media. I just ask that whatever is contributed, be it a symbolic stand-in, a work made during the course of play, or some other interpretation of “document”, that it be highly intentional and that the story of how that intention emerged be shared with me via a post-play meeting to integrate what we found together. So far the archive consists of photographs, video works, documents of interaction, a small sculpture, a secret which can not be revealed, and a toenail. The work was first staged at Automata Theater in Chinatown, Los Angeles during a residency in October 2020, and continues to elaborate itself over iterative engagements by the initial players as well as through new invitations. During its initial time at Automata, five invited artists worked in close yet remote collaboration with me leading up to an isolated “window”of time where they arrived in the space alone to their curated theatrical tableaux with objects arranged just for them. Based on the conversations with me leading up to their window, intention and approach was set in terms of how they would interact and record that interaction with the objects. Each artist approached their time completely differently, some choosing to have stream recorded free-improvisation time with the objects, and others composing and enacting cinematic rituals or musical evocations with the objects. Regardless of approach, each artist was asked to have something to offer the archive of the work in the form of video or other materials which were decided upon ahead of time, but given space to evolve once each artist made first contact with the unique environment staged for them. Patrick organized methodologies for viewing and interacting with the performers in the space remotely while they worked, employing autopoetic texts in relation to the bits which collaborators sent him, sending telepathic messages to performers as an experiment to see if it changed their approach during improvisation, and the continued production of objects. What resulted was a multifaceted collection of videos and ongoing collaborations that continues to seek both space and people to investigate the work further. The documents provided here are only small samples of the content generated during each individual play session.

Listed below are all collaborators who have participated in Fool’s Window thus far and a short write-up to evoke the nature of their participation. with excerpts from the archive:
Paul Outlaw - https://www.outlawplay.com
Stephanie Mei-Huang - https://stephaniemei.com
Melissa Achten - https://www.melissaachten.com
Brian Getnick - https://briangetnick.com
Tim Tsang - https://timtsangtimtsang.com
Ian Byers-Gamber - https://www.ianbyersgamber.com
Eli Klausner

Paul Outlaw

Paul Outlaw enacting a breathing tableaux, utilizing Automata’s double storefront window as a binocular theater architecture, moving between sets that he arranged while improvising with the objects. He asked to be sealed in the space with all of the objects, bringing them to the window threshold for presentation, performance, and documentation. His approach allowed the storefront windows to ebb and flow, objects coming and going as he emerged and then disappeared behind the curtains again.

Stephanie Mei-Huang

Here, Stephanie Mei-Huang utilizing her tool of choice, roller skates, to enact one of many object oriented actions within the tableaux staged for her. Stephanie spent many hours executing choreographies which she created once in the space, each one revealing subtleties of meaning and concrete features of the objects. She brought three cameras with her, each one capturing a very different kind of footage, opening up the complexity with which she thinks about how media and point-of-view radically alter the way we project ourself into space as a viewer.

Melissa AcHten

During harpist Melissa Achten’s time in Fool’s Window, she utilized the props as tools and augmentation devices within the strings of her harp, playing the harp with objects to accomplish theatrically accented extended techniques (as seen above), to literally pushing them through the strings of her harp to prepare it and mute strings. Throughout all of her evocations with the objects she constructed a series of video works intersecting the narrative dimensions of the scene objects with the infrastructure of the harp’s theatrical potential. Over many hours she fluidly enacted a series of vignettes that wove the capacity of objects to tell stories together with their concrete properties in order to create a kaleidoscopic musical theater where the nature of instrument, set-piece, prop, character, performer, and stage all could be set in the flow of transformation and multiplicity.

Brian Getnick

Brian entered the work with a very clear vision of focusing on being present to the objects through employing different forms of improvisation, movement, and mindfulness. Brian also offered a request for a face piece or mask of some kind. As his time approached, Patrick requested a drawing, and then interpreted and extrapolated from that rendering the mask that Brian wears; now permanently apart of the pantheon of props within Fool’s Window. In approaching documentation of Brian’s time within the work, Automata’s webcams were set up purely for documentation of choreographic ideas: how affect, object, and atmosphere all reciprocally unfold through the locus of the body. Brian spoke about the objects as “symbolic resonators”, and said that he wanted to take time with each object to reveal the myriad possibilities, and thus, the time would focus more about his experience and ability to conjugate the objects in the live act of performance rather than the deliberate construction or framing them as vignettes for video. Finally, conversations leading up to his exploration in the space involved choreographing Patrick as an unseen viewer. The conversation was spurred by a curiosity around the theater’s capacity to act as symbolic receiver of intentions, and thus, Patrick would attempt transmissions of telepathic messages, attempting to indirectly communicate during a silent viewing. After the initial session of improvisation, there was a meeting, and together Patrick and Brian worked out the most intriguing approaches and gestures that emerged. Direction was given, and a second session ensued, informed by the push and pull of the first session against memory, and the the flow of ideas. The first iteration of Brian’s time in Fool’s Window stood as the first meeting of what has unfolded into a longer collaborative process.

Tim Tsang

Tim Tsang’s collaboration in Fool’s Window thus far includes a livestream event wherein Tim facilitated dialog about the nature of the piece itself, pointing to its structure and Patrick’s presence as a facilitator within it. What resulted was a rambunctious series of fragmented stories and narratives about the work and the other collaborations that happened to date, interceded with prerecorded media, rectangles of darkness with self-aware monologues, and mis-en-abym structures folding in on themselves in the ether of the digital wilderness. Utilizing his interest in structures of conversation, indeterminacy, and free-improvisation that point to the frameworks we utilize to structure our experience, Tim and Patrick opened up an ongoing dialogue through Fool’s Window that will manifest further as the work continues to emerge.

IAN BYERS-GAMBER

Above are a selection of digital proofs taken by photographer Ian Byers-Gamber, who is collaborating within the context of Fool’s Window by constructing his own leaky archive of the objects in both digital as well as 9mm film. Each image is directed and staged by Ian to catalogue the objects which make up the pantheon of Fool’s Window, drawing out their relational and poetic potential within different contexts of his choosing. The above images were taken on location at FOREVERHOUSE, the name given to Patrick’s home and the genesis point of both Return to FOREVERHOUSE as well as Fool’s Window. It is a stone cabin on the edge of the Angeles National Forest where Patrick resides in a 19th century Ranger’s Station which was converted into a home in the 20th century.

Eli Klausner

Eli’s contribution to Fool’s thus far includes a multi-hour session in which he brought a drum as his tool of choice for navigating the tableaux created for him. In his investigations of the acoustics of the space he began to also think about the constructs of montage and post production as a secondary site for producing work. From the space of post-production he created this stand-alone video work that utilizes shadow play and slow tension to insinuate the orchestrations of rhythm and structure we often take for granted when watching documents of props, objects, and instruments. Here the objects are cast into a situation where they instrumentalize a greater attention to these complex relationships among sound and image as well as the sites and objects of their production. Eli also assisted Melissa Achten in the production of scenes for her contributions,

Patrick Michael Ballard

In addition to creating space for other artists, with each iteration of Fool’s Window, I integrate what I learns from other artists into self-guided improvisations with the objects, yielding new compositions for performance, as well as new video works in post production. Above is a small test carried out after watching Brian Getnick interacting with both the pliability and the vibrational extension connected to the mask. Below is a video work that I produced while on set, looking for new possibilities for the objects and how I would stage them for the artists.