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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 +
