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CHAPTER ONE: LIVING THROUGH DRAMA
small, which cause people to reflect and take note”.*° In another article titled
Improvisation from 1967, Heathcote explains that “drama is human beings
confronted by situations which change them because of what they must face
in dealing with those challenges”;*' the emphasis being not on understanding
the circumstances that create the crisis, but on the transformation it creates
within the people encountering it. Looking at it from a dramatic point of view
this means that an event becomes a crisis when it forces people into situations
which change them. Heathcote explains that these situations can be used in an
educational setting, because by “putting yourself into other people’s shoes and,
by using personal experience to help you to understand their point of view, you
may discover more than you knew when you started”. This reference to using
personal experience to understand others suggests that the participants need
to have some point of connection in reality to the fictional problem engaged
in. Davis refers to this as the “angle of connection”.** The kind of crisis that
participants engage in seems crucial in realising the aims of the early period of
Heathcote’s work as the re-examination of values, as explained by Davis."
In her seminal work on Heathcote Betty Jane Wagner describes a drama
lesson that is titled The Dreamer*® after the seventeenth century ship that
the participants became the crew of. The drama started from the question
‘what should we make a play about?’, and the story was developed together
with the participants. The drama starts out as a narrative about the Captain’s
dream, but the Captain goes missing and finally it turns out, that he has been
murdered. The crew members face the murderer, who killed the Captain
because he betrayed his dreams, but this meeting with the assassin creates
the possibility of reaching new understanding in relation to dreams, betrayal
and crime for the participants of the drama. The change in the situation offers
the opportunity for participants to reflect on their actions in role and their
relation to the fictional situation. Wagner states that “dramatic living through
has done its work to crystallize an area of experience that is too unsettling or
overwhelming to grasp”.®°
Inthe Stool Pigeon drama in the documentary referred to previously the boys
staying in an approved school create a play about prisoners of war. They were
in a ‘state of desperation’ as captured soldiers, and their plan to escape is
obstructed by a stool pigeon planted by their German captors, also played
by one of the boys. The participants of the drama face and deal with betrayal
Heathcote: Dramatic activity, 54.
Dorothy Heathcote: Improvisation, in Cecily O’Neill — Liz Johnson (eds.): Collected Writings
on Education and Drama, Evanston, Northwestern University Press, 1984, 48.
# Ibid, 44.
Davis: Imagining the Real, 78.
84 Davis: Edward Bond and Drama in Education, 167.
§5 Wagner: Dorothy Heathcote.
86 Wagner: Dorothy Heathcote, 16.
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