RAGDALE RING: Roll Play 

Project Team: Vincent Calabro, Katie Stranix, JohnTaylor Bachman, Lane Rick, and Can Vu Bui

Roll Play is a flexible and non-prescriptive means of navigating our collective and personal relationships with spectacle, participation, and the environment.

Through an ensemble of rolling ‘Wobblers’, the Ragdale Ring is transformed into a space of exploration, play, and imagination. The design of the Wobblers accentuates their mobility while preserving their flexibility of use and deployment. These themes of mobility and flexibility are key to the project goals.

Through Roll Play, we encourage visitors, performers, participants—remote and in-person—to physically engage with their environment, and to relish the play and discovery that emerges. Each Wobbler, therefore, presents itself as an inviting object of indeterminate use. Only through interaction can you truly explore its function. Perhaps you sit on it and rock back and forth, or crawl under it, and peer out from its rounded leaves. Or you might want to push it, to watch the object tumble across the grass. By rolling a few Wobblers together, it is possible to create an impromptu landscape or enclosure of colors and planes. Perhaps you lay back on one of the resting Wobblers and watch the wind blow through the leaves above. Whatever you come up with, there is no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ way to play with the Wobblers. They operate at a variety of scales, and fit into any number of spaces across Ragdale. The possibilities are open-ended and varied, both with regards to siting and function.

Roll Play establishes the space of experimentation. The installation itself is not the end goal, but the means through which we collectively meet our goal—an extended state of play and exploration.