Magic Circle is Kate Barbaria and Brendan Albano, artists, game designers, and architects based in Portland, OR. Our practice is rooted in performance, storytelling and space-making. We invite our audiences to join us in ritual and play, to be transported to other worlds, and to discover delight in the everyday magic of this one.
PDFs of our game projects can be found at brendanalbano.itch.io.
Projects
FOLK, 2024
FOLK is a love letter to character generation, fan fiction, and storytelling prompts. It began because I love to start telling stories, and I detest finishing them.
In this zine, you’ll find 20 characters that can be used as seeds for RPG character creation, NPC inspiration, or for the pleasure of taking your imagination for a stroll.
Each character has a portrait and an appellation. Most have a series of descriptive words in italics that might be considered character attributes, as well as a very short story.
Find us under “Magic Circle” at the Big Bad Con Small Press Showcase, or check back soon for more info about where to find FOLK!
Clown Furniture, 2025
A forthcoming series of performances and furniture.
Word Wizards, 2024
Word Wizards is a role-playing game (RPG) about a group of wizards who have just discovered wizarding and are rapidly and chaotically expanding their understanding of true words of magic. These stories can play out in a variety of settings and genres. Think stories about children going to wizard school, ill-advised deals with devils and faeries, government experiments with psychedelics, or anything else that sparks your imagination!
Being Present Is Hard To Do, 2023, 2012
Performers prepare extensively for their performances, yet audience members rarely do. Being Present Is Hard To Do explores how an audience might prepare for a show with the same intensity that a performer does. The piece is reimagined for each audience. Performed at Something Weird in Portland in 2023 and the New Blood VI Performance Festival in Chicago in 2012.
Tell Me Something You’ve Been Thinking About, 2023
Tell Me Something You’ve Been Thinking About is an interactive performance where we collect conversations with participants about things they have been thinking about. The potentially wide-ranging topics form a portrait of a group of people at a particular time and place. We’ve performed Tell Me Something You’ve Been Thinking About at Form.a at Oregon Contemporary on July 1st, 2023 and at the 2023 Oregon Country Fair.
Mr. Boat-head’s Electrical Dreamship / Casual Stories Project, 2011
“In this groovy, unpretentious little show, Brendan Albano and Kate Barbaria invite tiny audiences—the max is eight people—to sit around a warmly glowing lamp underneath a tarp and drink tea or cocoa. They also give audience members 30 seconds to think of four kinds of material to share: a story, a dream, a lie, and a poem. Our lives and subconscious minds are all treasure troves… Intimate and elemental. I totally dug it.” - Collin Thomas, The Georgia Straight