NUTS IN MAY

“All art is a synthesis of improvisation and order” (Mike Leigh)

 

Ever since Say Hi From Me my work had looked toward processes of the theatre to provide an architecture for the situations I construct. I realised that if I wanted to create situations that people could believe in and perform sincerely in, then I needed to give them parts they could connect to and empathise with. Giving people characters to play is a simplistic version of this and was explored in Paid Opportunity. Moving forward I wanted to give participants more responsibility in the formative process and involve them in what could be seen as
pre-performance. This pre-performance would then in turn become a supplementary performance in itself.

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“Each actor creates a character. I put those characters together in situations, in worlds, and relationships develop, conflicts develop and out of the total of what develops I distill a play or a film” (Arena: Mike Leigh - Making Plays ).

 

I started to research improvisation techniques, specifically those of Mike Leigh, in forming characters and in turn forming plays. The Arena profile of Mike Leigh would prove to be very inspiring. Leigh would take his individual actors and get them to draw up lists of people they knew and then pull out specific people from this list to build characters on. The idea was that because everything was drawn from actual relationships and behaviours the actor could connect to it far more easily as it was real to them and a working living memory.

 

“You and I are going to collaborate to make a character from scratch”
(Clements, P. The Improvised Play: The Work of Mike Leigh, 1983)

 

These techniques would form the basis for Think of Someone You Know.