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CHAPTER ONE: LIVING THROUGH DRAMA I am describing this context because it strongly connects with the professional dissatisfaction that led me to pursue this PhD research and the choice of territories to explore in it. As someone working mostly in theatre in education I really missed the creative excitement of making theatre in the lessons I did with children, but because the forms, the conventions were at the centre of attention I felt I did not have appropriate tools at hand. The logic of the conventions also dictated some rational learning coming out of the drama lessons through the reflective conventions that aid the articulation of the understanding created through engaging with the story. I recognised some of my problems as a drama teacher in David Davis’s analysis when he states that the conventions are not used “as part of the overall complex structure of the drama work. Instead they lend themselves to becoming the total method of work employed in a drama lesson. They are relatively easy to teach and can bring some ‘success’ relatively quickly. What is missing is the deep theoretical embedding which a teacher would need to have to make use of them”.** I also recognised Davis’s® claim about the misrepresentations of Living Through Drama (referred to as LTD from here on) in a minor, but extremely significant mistranslation. Heathcote’s emblematic starting questions connected to her LTD phase of “what should we make a play about?”, is known in Hungary as “what should we play about?”.*4 The translation refers to ‘playing’, as in children’s dramatic play, while the original ‘making a play’ refers much more strongly to creating a piece of theatre together. The contradiction that the form of drama labelled ‘Living Through’ suggesting a naturalist, experiential form starts with the offer to make theatre was intriguing. Davis® proposed a possible avenue for developing the field of drama in education by combining LTD with Edward Bond’s drama theory and practice. I took up his call to research the possibilities of connecting the two in practice because of the reasons above. Bond’s theory and practice offers possibilities of novel ways of engaging with dominant social narratives from within the story that work against a Brechtian distancing. These are discussed in detail in chapter two. In this chapter I examine the concept of LTD with a novice’s eye, trying to understand what aiming for a living through engagement means practically. After a short survey of how the term appears in literature on drama education 32 Davis: Edward Bond and Drama in Education, 163. 38 Ibid. The published translation of the text of seminal BBC documentary about Heathcote, Three Looms Waiting offers several examples of this. Heathcote, D. (1994) Három szövőszék vár räm..., Drämapedagögiai Magazin, 4(k), 11-14. The BBC documentary can be seen at this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=owKiUO99qrw&t=25s, (accessed 25 May 2017). Davis: Edward Bond and Drama in Education; Davis: Imagining the Real. + 20 +
