‘Dear Me…’, a semi-autobiographical performance that explored mine and my co-creators alter egos when preparing for a date! This 20-minute show was the culmination of a semesters discovery on how to create auto/biographical material. My practice has grown a lot since this performance however I still hold this as the performance that made me begin to think like a theatre maker. This was the first time that I had gone from an initial idea to the finished show.
A show that reflected on us trying to find our place in the world as young women. All the while thinking about how our mothers and grandmothers would have found their place too, but in a very different world. We developed a very familiar setting for the audience to recognise and used specific styles of comedy to bring the audience into our world. Taking influence throughout the process we took influence from artists such as Victoria Wood and Phoebe Waller-Bridge who use this style of comedy. The audience reacted extremely well to this style of comedy, familiar setting, and characters that we created.
Learning the effect that comedy has on audiences has influenced my practice. Since then I have used comedy as a technique to bring audiences into the world I am creating. This is an area of my practice that I am still refining and developing but one that has continuing success.
Two opposing alter-ego style characters 
In rehearsals photo of character development practice
I have found through my practice that audiences identify with performances more when they see aspects of their own life mirrored within it. This led me and Hannah, co-creator of Dear Me…, to think about our ‘alter ego’ characters and how different they were from each other. These were naturally occurring differences, however we realised that because of this a higher percentage of the audience would be able to identify with personality traits, of at least one of us. We can all identify friendships where the people are so opposite that you wonder how does that friendship work…but it does. That was the desired effect for the characters in ‘Dear Me…’ this evoked a high degree of comedy due to their differences, but the audience members recognised themselves more within this set up.
The way that we created these characters, which were key elements of our own personalities, has been influential on future projects that I have carried out. With in my Independent Practice as Research performance Make do and Mend, we created the characters in a similar way. By working through characterisation questions the actors were able to choose their own attributes such as ‘relationship status’, ‘favourite colour’ and ‘life motto’. I have found that when actors put aspects of themselves into a character that they create their engagement and sub-textual development is significantly stronger.
I would love to return to the world of ‘Dear Me…’ with Hannah in the future. However, unlike other projects this would not be to develop the work by reworking. I would be interested to see if we were to put ourselves back into this world two years after making it, what it would be like. Our characters have grown with us and so too would the show… so watch this space!