Oldal 27 [27]
CHAPTER ONE: LIVING THROUGH DRAMA
This survey of literature on LTD clearly shows the difference between living
through improvisations, and the LTD approach as a whole. This difference is
often ignored by critics. However, to create a concise understanding of LTD
and find space for creating Drama Events in it a number of questions need
to be explored further: what is the relationship of the fiction and the reality?
Does the fiction reflect the participants’ world? How is the engagement of
participants in the fiction enhanced? How is the improvisation facilitated
from outside or within?
Bolton explains that many people assume that LTD was defined by
the question What shall we make a play about?, a common starting point of
Heathcote’s drama lesson in her earlier period. He carries on to point out that
“this is far from the case”.”!
I continue by examining three specific aspects in some examples of drama
lessons of four important figures of LTD. The three aspects investigated are
those that provide the most useful reference points in incorporating Bond’s
theory and practice into LTD: the problem or the event participants deal
with in the fiction; how being in the fiction is facilitated; and the nature of
reflection, or the learning about oneself that is enhanced by the drama.
THE ROOTS OF LIVING THROUGH DRAMA
— HEATHCOTE AND MAN IN A MESS
The term LTD is associated most often with the work of Dorothy Heathcote,
and especially her early period also referred to as Man in a Mess. An article
Heathcote published originally in 1969, in which she states that “drama
means living through"? is probably the source of the name of the approach.
In her later years Heathcote defined her work as the Mantle of the Expert
(MoE) approach to drama, which was different from her earlier work in many
ways. Particularly the framing of the participants as experts dealing with the
problems engaged in, rather than being objects of the troubles. The changes
are reflected in an interview done in 1985 by David Davis in which Heathcote
says “I still must insist that you must not say that the work I did before was
‘living through’ On the old films you only see those points that look like that”.”
One of the films Heathcote is referring to is the Three Looms Waiting BBC
documentary” about her work from 1971, which shows long drama sessions
condensed into few minutes. Fleming says the following about this video:
Bolton: Acting in Classroom Drama, 178.
” Dorothy Heathcote: Dramatic activity, in Cecily O’Neill - Liz Johnson (eds.): Collected
Writings on Education and Drama, Evanston, Northwestern University Press, 1984, 55.
73 David Davis: Dorothy Heathcote Interviewed by David Davis, 2D, 4, 1985/3, 79.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=owKiUO99qrw, (accessed 3 April 2020).
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