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LIVING THROUGH OR LIVING THROUGH
looking at some examples. Evidently, living through is more than being in
a fictional world. Bolton writes about this in relation to Heathcote’s early
drama.
One of the confusions is that although the words ‘living through’ imply that
important sense of ‘being there in the present and presence’, Heathcote’s
methodology also builds in its opposite of ‘being outside it’. There is a mercurial
inside-outside dialectic that heightens awareness. Thus ‘Living through’ implies
continually arresting the process of living to take a look at it, and it is the ‘spectator’
as much as the ‘participant’ that re-engages with that ‘living’.
The way the drama teacher structures the relationship between the fiction
of the drama and the reality of the participants influences the educational
impact of the drama, what understanding is created and how.
When working in a living through mode Heathcote’s offered a possibility
of the “re-examination and/or development by the students of fundamentally
held values by which they lived" claims Davis." According to Eriksson
Heathcote’s LTD’s “main concern is to deal with essentially human matters
significant to the people involved in it”. Heathcote states that the students
participating in her drama lessons “have the same privilege as other artists
in ordering and reordering their worlds, as they gain new information and
experiences”.° Wagner declares that true gut-level drama is about “what it is
to be human”.
In his seminal book Davis argues that “Bolton and Heathcote were
both developing drama that was concerned with students re-cognizing
their world and their relationship to it"." In an interview for this research
O’Neill says that similarly to good theatre drama is successful if it moves the
participant “either emotionally or intellectually to a new place, where they
see things anew”. Davis states his aim in developing LTD is “to provoke
the opportunity to find one’s relationship to those social forces [operating in
that particular situation], thus providing an opening for us each to create our
own humanness”.”
6% Bolton: Acting in Classroom Drama, 232.
64 Davis: Edward Bond and Drama in Education, 167.
6 Eriksson: Distancing, 151.
Dorothy Heathcote: Drama and learning, in Cecily O’Neill — Liz Johnson (eds.): Collected
Writings on Education and Drama, Evanston, Northwestern University Press, 1984, 90.
Betty Jane Wagner: Dorothy Heathcote, Drama as a Learning Medium, Cheltenham, Stanley
Thornes, 1990, 76.
Davis: Imagining the Real, 30.
° Cecily O’Neill: Interview with Cecily O’Neill by Ädäm Bethlenfalvy at Marczibäny Téri
Művelődési Központ Budapest, 27 August, 2011, Appendix E.
Davis: Imagining the Real, 1.
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