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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. 66 67 68
