Devising 12

Mike Leigh process

Looking back on the process that took us to the fully formed characters and groups of people that we eventually played in the performance it's interesting to remember the steps we took. the Mike Leigh process of starting with a person we know and studying them and then slowly taking away from that person and into our own character who we created was brilliant. I think that it made our characters so much more real. When you create a completely new character from scratch then there's always the possibility of that character becoming stereotypical and turning into a "Stock character". All of the characters we created were well rounded, multi dimensional characters who had a real depth of emotions. Obviously in the Mike Leigh process there's still the possibility of our characters becoming shallow and stereotypical, however there's less of a risk. 

I also enjoyed the Mike Leigh concept of all the drama to be character based. Obviously there is actual physical drama, however the idea of being somewhere simple like a boat or a living room means that the drama is more "subtle". Personally I enjoy this, it's more to my taste to have less action and to have emotional drama instead. I think it allows you to show more dimensional characters with depth and a range of emotions.

To create these dynamic and characters we used a lot of improvisation, in keeping with the Mike Leigh concept, with every idea being explored with at least 20 minutes of improvisation. Every idea was tried out, even the really bad ones, and I think this meant that we could really go into and explore the ideas. Instead of thinking of something, discussing it and then deciding on that one idea we could try every possible version of that idea and develop it properly into the best end product we could. The improvisation helped us developed a rich tapestry for our characters, not only exploring the people we would see on stage but also every inch of their character. We created entire lives for them through improvisation and by the time we performed our scene it felt like I knew Xanthe as well as I knew myself. She was another part of me, a separate life that i had also lived.