BIOGRAPHY Ellen Duckenfield grew up in a left-wing hippy extended family, where travelling and going on demos was more important than school and her dad juggled and played his trumpet for a living. She studied Theatre and Visual Performance at Dartington. Whilst there she made contact with other performers and toured a devised show to Edinburgh Festival in which she played the part of a depressed duck. A year after graduating Ellen moved to Amsterdam where she joined a contemporary dance / physical theatre group, No Sudden Movement for a show called Public Apology devised for the Melkweg in Amsterdam. Ellen then wrote and performed her first solo work, Kryptonite, inspired by her fear of death in which she wrote a list of 350 ways to die, danced with peace-lilies, interviewed her friends about the people they knew who had died and attempted to learn how to fly in order to become a superhero and cheat the inevitability of death. After this project, Ellen continued her obsession with death and collaborated with several other artists on a ritual night of cooking, eating and performance based on the Mexican celebration, The Night of The Dead. During this festival evening, Ellen danced a tango with Death and produced the one-thousand piece 'death confetti' each piece printed with a different way to die in 3 different languages. After feeling that she had at last faced her fears, Ellen turned away from the dead and started looking at how she had come to be alive, collaborating on a new experimental theatre show in which her and her collaborator investigated the coincidental meetings that subsequently became the families and sub-families that they were part of. In this show, Tits and Train Tickets, Ellen spent most of her time dressing and re-dressing in all the hideous clothes that her mother had ever given her. After a break from art in which Ellen had to earn a living for a while, she has come back to the performance world, studied for an MA in Contemporary Performance and made a new solo show, The Ideal Recipe, performed in June 2006 at the BAC in London. The show, which is a humorous account of her obsession with feeding people and being the 'hostess with the mostest', is part cookery demonstration, part storytelling. It focuses on the divide between personal ambition and her hippy family roots, ending in a feast of (middle-class vegetarian) food for all to share.