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CHAPTER ONE: LIVING THROUGH DRAMA
Eriksson sees “living through’ akin to a demonstrative, representational
acting tradition, reminiscent of Brecht”® in his research of Heathcote’s work.
I will return to this important debate later in this chapter.
When writing that participants behave as if they were living through
Neelands acknowledges their awareness of creating a fictional construct.
Fleming offers a detailed analysis of a four-year-old playing doctors with an
adult, highlighting a number of elements of theatre in the play and reaching
the conclusion that “it would not be possible to provide a precise way of
demarcating ‘drama’ from ‘dramatic play”.*®° This implies that the existential
mode of playing also has an element of conscious fiction making.
Bolton in his seminal work analysing various forms of classroom drama
argues for considering “‘fiction-making’ as the defining nucleus for all acting
behaviour”.’’ In this book he differentiates between three types of classroom
acting behaviour: presenting, performing and making.® He defines both child
play and LTD as examples of ‘making’ and lists ten features of it®? to underline
his claim. Participants of LTD would be primarily offered a dominantly
making mode of acting behaviour, while the lesson could include forms of
presenting as well. Bolton describes making as “any dramatic exercise in which
participants are free to explore without any sense of preparing for showing to
someone else. It is not rehearsable nor directly repeatable”. Davis defines his
approach to LTD as well in relation to making.
I tend to use ‘making’ to describe the tripartite process of working for those
moments of ‘living through’ that form the key moments of the experience: I am
making it happen (the role building in the drama event); it is happening to me
(the living through experience); 1 am conscious of it happening to me (producing
the metaxis effect).
The metaxis effect — being in the fictional world and reality at the same time
— referred to by Davis is a central aspect of both his and Bolton’s drama.
Metaxis differs from what Heathcote calls self-spectatorship’ which she sees
as an outcome of her drama work. I will discuss the differences later after
Eriksson: Distancing, 151.
56 Michael Fleming: Starting drama teaching, London, David Fulton Publishers, 1994, 81.
Gavin Bolton: Acting in classroom drama, American edn., Portland, Calendar Island
Publishers, 1999, 278.
58 Ibid., 274.
59 Ibid., 271.
60 Ibid., 274.
Davis: Imagining the Real, 53.
Bethlenfalvy Ádám: A legtöbb gyerek nem tudja, hogy mire képes. Interjú Dorothy
Heathcote-tal, Drámapedagógiai Magazin, 31, 2006/2, 12.
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