Ellington Park: The Performance

Discovering and developing the movement language for the first Resting Place event has been a long journey. Ellington Park was Clarices’ ancestral home, and although it was already a public park in her lifetime, Clarice and her sister retained a sense of belonging and ownership to this space throughout their lives, talking about it as ‘our park’.

To find the movement for this event we tried to get to the heart of Clarices’ connection to this space. What were her favourite trees? What shapes of the landscape would she remember when she was far from home? How might she have experienced the push and pull between the adventure of going to help the war effort, and the familiarity and roots of home and heritage?

Neither of our performers are attempting to literally impersonate Clarice. Rather, we are allowing the words of the diary to exist alongside a dance of leaving home in the space that was home to Clarice.

Roanna Mitchell, PhD.