Page 35 [35]
CHAPTER ONE: LIVING THROUGH DRAMA
another component of participating in LTD: that of the participants"
awareness of being makers of the drama. He discusses a moment when a boy
plays a soldier, but points out that he is presenting his version of a soldier,
he is playing at what it would be like to be a soldier in this situation, rather
than actually being one. Bolton goes on to explain that “there are at least
three levels of spectatorship involved here: an awareness of what is happening
to himself, an awareness of what is being ‘made’, in this case, a presentation
of ‘soldiers’, and an awareness of what could happen or needs to happen to
further the drama". Bolton sees the potential of this approach in the multiple
awareness it offers of making fiction as a spectatorship of oneself. I will
discuss the differences between self-spectatorship and metaxis after looking
at examples from other practitioners’ work.
Heathcote’s Living Through — A Short Summary
I have looked at some examples of Heathcote’s Man in a Mess period to
highlight some important elements of her LTD. A useful summary of her living
through approach is given in one of her early articles, in which Heathcote
explains that drama teaches in the following way: “Taking a moment in time,
it uses the experiences of the participants, forcing them to confront their own
actions and decisions and to go forward to a believable outcome in which they
can gain satisfaction”.
I started out by looking at examples of what sort of events force
the participants to confront their own actions, seeing that a ‘living through’
crisis would have an immediacy that demands reaction, so that the
participants become makers of unfolding events and re-examine their own
previous actions within the fiction. The crisis would also need to relate in
some way to the reality the participants are coming from, so that there is
a motivation and interest in working on the problem presented.
I went on to look at an example of how Heathcote builds belief in the fiction,
so that the participants can experience the crisis from within the world of the
drama. I discussed the different segments Heathcote breaks the process in
to in order to facilitate imagining a fictional world and then stepping into it.
The step by step shift from imagining into doing, from thinking into feeling
and gradually taking responsibility for the fiction are central elements of
occupying the dramatic world.
Finally, I offered examples of Heathcote creating self-spectatorship
in different ways, arresting the flow of action and offering forms for
the participants to become conscious of their situation in the drama.
44 Ibid., 199.
115 Heathcote: Drama and Learning, 99.
+ 34 +