Ellie Dubois

  • Photo by Ruari Lambert

My name is Ellie and I am a performance maker and director based in the highlands in Scotland. I create my own work and also as 1/3 of SUPERFAN with Kim Donohoe and Pete Lannon.

I make work that would probably be considered either theatre or circus. I trained as a circus performer and love circus as an artform and the potential of it. Some questions that are key to most of my work are: How can I transcend the trick? How can circus be political? How can circus create thoughtful work?

I am interested in the simplicity of circus. That when one human jumps on another’s shoulders that means something without needing to put lots of other things on top of that.  I also love how it pushes the limits of human capacity. I am interested in the risk (and controlled risk). That a performer could genuinely really hurt themselves (or die) on stage and all for an audience entertainment.  

I like challenging it as a discipline and aim to use it in new ways and often in collaboration with artists who don’t have a circus vocabulary.

Key to my practice at the moment is where we make work and who for. I live rurally and living in places that don’t have access to high level art makes me miss it and want to create work specifically for rural places. The phrase ‘you can only be truly international if you are truly local’ feels like an important part of my upcoming work.