Oldal 10 [10]
FOREWORD
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BY PROF DAVID Davis
I am very pleased to be able to introduce this extremely useful account of
Ädäm Bethlenfalvy’s research. It breaks new ground in the field of drama
in education. To the best of my knowledge it is only the second example of
research to investigate a relationship between school drama and the theatre
forms of the playwright Edward Bond. Both this and the earlier research
focus on the emphasis Bond places on the way the audience’s imagination
needs to be evoked by the content of the drama and the way the drama is
performed and the resulting impetus to new ways of seeing resulting from
this. The first research was by Kostas Amoiropoulos' who looked at how
the UK theatre in education company, Big Brum, used Bond’s theatre form
in Theatre in Education and how what they were discovering might be used
in classroom drama. Both this research and Ädäm Bethlenfalvy’s focus on
the role and uses of imagination by the pupils in drama education but his is
the first to look specifically at how the drama teacher might structure the
drama lesson to enable the imagination to work in the way explored in Bond’s
plays. In his research Ädäm Bethlenfalvy works through several examples
of drama lessons which try different approaches with different age ranges
of pupils and in the final examples he is reaching out to break entirely new
ground in the field of drama teaching.
My intention here is not to pre-empt what is to come in the thesis but
simply to indicate some of the areas that Ädäm Bethlenfalvy covers. My aim
will be to ‘whet the appetite’ of the reader as it were.
LIVING THROUGH DRAMA AND LIVING THROUGH DRAMA WITH
HEATHCOTE AND BOLTON
From its early days in the 1950s and 1960s much of the drama in education
in UK schools was improvised drama rather than simply studying classic play
' Konstantinos Amoiropoulos: BALANCING GAPS: An Investigation of Edward Bond’s
Theory and Practice for Drama (Unpublished PhD Thesis), Birmingham, Birmingham City
University, 2013.