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THE Roots OF LIVING THROUGH DRAMA — HEATHCOTE AND MAN IN A MESS
the participants to make a shift in their own language, saying “you are going
to have a ship, you can’t have hotel names”! and helping them with nautical
terms. The second lesson starts with the group deciding to sail and see what
happens rather than starting with a crisis. In this phase Heathcote builds
belief in the fictional world by concentrating on two objects and an action
connecting them: the wet ropes, the slippery deck of the ship and hoisting the
sail. Language has a central role here too, they decide on what to chant as they
pull up the sail and Heathcote talks about the rope — “rope has temperature;
rope has texture; rope has thickness. Take hold of that temperature, that
texture, that thickness”. A new phase begins when Heathcote moves into
role as the first mate, egging on and abusing the sailors to get them to pull
more weight. She stops when the participants seem puzzled and explains who
she is, encouraging them to respond to her when they continue, moving them
into role too.
Heathcote breaks down the process into different elements, using Jerome
Bruner’s levels of representation, the symbolic (talking), the iconic (drawing),
and the enactive (doing). Bruner explains that these are “three ways in
which humans represent the world or, better, three ways of capturing those
invariances in experience and action that we call ‘reality’”.’” “I always select
the register depending on which level offers coherent boundaries and seems
best to sustain interest and lure the work forward”! explains Heathcote.
These levels also allow participants to commit themselves in steps to believing
the ‘reality’ of the fictional world. First, they talk about it, then imagine
it visually, then step onto the deck of the imagined ship and finally move
into role. There is a shift in how tactile the object of their imagination is,
from imagining the ship the participants move in to imagining the slippery
deck beneath their feet. Heathcote also narrows the focus of fiction making,
starting from general open questions, moving on to details of the ship, shifting
to tasks on the ship and stepping on to the specific action of hoisting the sail.
She also makes the fiction real by appealing to different senses, the shift from
imagining it from the outside into imagining it from the inside is assisted
through a change in language — both terms and the tense used. Heathcote
stepping into role is the final element of this process, where imagining the
situation is moved into being in the situation, her role making the participants’
roles real too as they react to her.
In her summary of the process described above Wagner says that “belief
has been built by focus on the particular, on a few specific tasks aboard ship
and a few physical objects on the ship’s deck. There is nothing vague about
100 Tbid., 26.
101 Ibid., 27.
102 Jerome Bruner: The Culture of Education, Harvard, Harvard University Press, 1996, 155.
Bethlenfalvy Ádám: A legtöbb gyerek nem tudja, 11.
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