ELLEN
A Tale of Five Cities
2010
Once you have your headphones on, the show will begin.
With 3-dimensional amplification of sound, space and voice, ELLEN will take you on a discovery of five Danish cities.
Silkeborg, Svendborg, København, Helsingør and Aarhus are five very different cities. Five cities each one with its own history, character and atmosphere. Each city is looking for its identity, energy, light. It is ELLEN´s assignment to put light on them. The name Ellen means light.
ELLEN is about feeling at home, which is not necessarily where you live. Five cities’ individual stories and inhabitants are brought into the performance, presented by three actors: the highly-acclaimed Danish actor Ellen Hillingsø, performance artist Ellen Friis, and rising star Özlem Saglanmak. With them they have a text by the award-winning poet Morten Søndergaard. Other texts are made by the actors and the local guests.
Hotel Pro Forma and the three actors as visitors meet the five cities. Via research made beforehand and one week intense stay in each city, they learn about what defines the place.
The visiting ELLEN actors bring light, sound, movement, text. What they bring is changed during the meeting with the city and the inhabitants. The meeting is a performance, shaped by investigation, action, exchange. It includes the architecture of the place and the scenic possibilities of the surroundings. It finds new Ellen persons. Local women named Ellen participate in the performance.
ELLEN is s a meeting between the unknown and the foreign. What is personal, what is universal. The local and the common.
Duration: 90 min. no intermission