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CHAPTER ONE: LIVING THROUGH DRAMA
These happened at life pace, had unknown outcomes and the meaning was
negotiated during the process. Such experiences, when they worked well, provided
an extraordinary degree of emotional engagement and excitement through their
immediacy. However, because there was less explicit emphasis on making drama,
the implicit message was to deny drama as an artificial, fictional ‘construct”.”
Emotional engagement and negotiation during the process are also highlighted
as features of living through improvisations, and the much-debated question
of this approach’s relationship to drama as an art form is raised. It is worth
noting that the quote above is from Fleming’s book, The Art of Drama
Teaching which offers possibilities of strengthening ties between the art form
and drama education. Here he reflects on work that relied exclusively on
living through improvisations. Interestingly, elsewhere Fleming points out
about one of the most well-known examples of LTD, a sequence discussed
later from the Heathcote film Three Looms Waiting, that “it counts as a very
effective piece of rehearsed performance”.“* The contradiction between
Fleming’s two statements can be relaxed if we differentiate between living
through improvisation and LTD as an approach, and see the former as
one component of the latter. As we will see from the examples further on
improvisations are important parts of the approach, but rarely do we find
lessons that rely exclusively on them.
As drama lessons based on a variety of approaches to drama in education
can include living through improvisations it is useful to differentiate between
living through drama and Living Through Drama with capital letters.
The latter focuses on creating improvisation where participants are in role
and experiencing and dealing with some sort of crisis within the fictional
situation. I will investigate some lessons in this chapter that can be considered
examples of the ‘Living Through Drama’ as a genre or approach to drama
education to locate those specific aspects of this genre that differentiate it
from other approaches. The term ‘process drama’ is also used by some of
the authors discussed here to define their work, but this does not mean that
process drama is a synonym of LTD as it is used to describe a variety of work,
some of which are examples of LTD. When used without capital letters living
through drama refers to simple experiential improvisations that can be part
of many different genres of drama with a variety of aims.
The connection between LTD and dramatic playing offers possibility for
confusion in some cases. Bolton compares dramatic playing to children’s
make-believe play claiming that the main difference is that the former
#3 Michael Fleming: The Art of Drama Teaching, London, David Fulton Publishers, 1997, 4.
* Michael Fleming: Teaching Drama in Primary and Secondary Schools; An Integrated
Approach, Oxon, David Fulton Publishers, 2001, 120.
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