Ellen Peterson is an artist in residence at the Deep Bay Cabin for the 2019 Riding Mountain Artists Residency.
Join Ellen on Saturday, September 28th, for a reading of her work and discussion of her unique creative process.
Ellen is an actor, playwright, and dramaturge. She is a member of Prairie Theatre Exchange’s Playwright Unit and her adaptation of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility was staged at the Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre in 2018.
During her residency in Riding Mountain National Park, Ellen will be working on a new play (working title, Down Cant River) set at a campground, in at least two different time periods. This makes Riding Mountain the ideal place for her retreat.
“I’ve always made things. I draw and paint some, I do origami, I sew and I like to make miniatures, build toy stages, etc. The last few years, I’ve started to be more deliberate in the making of things that support my writing work. To me, theatre should be as much about image as it is about the stuff people say, so I build models to help me visualize. It makes the theatrical world concrete.
I did this during the writing of Sense and Sensibility. I had never written for a cast or a stage of that size, so I got the dimensions of the stage from the theatre and made paper characters and moved them around to help me get a sense of scale, and to remind me that very intimate scenes can get lost in a place like that.
This time, with this new play, I am going to build as I write and write as I build and hopefully by the time I do “show and tell” on Riding Mountain, I will have a rough first draft, and a mock-up of the play’s physical world.”
Artist Presentation
Join Ellen on Saturday, September 28th, for a reading of her work and discussion of her unique creative process.