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CHAPTER ONE: LIVING THROUGH DRAMA
world with the reality of the participants and emphasises using signs to
indicate meaning. In the Crucible drama roles can be built while making
the family depiction, but this is done within a family community, in relation
to social constraints. The awareness of being in and also ‘making’ the fictional
world is explicit in this lesson. In the final scene it is enough for some of
the participants to point a finger at someone to change the narrative, and
this change has an impact on all. Bolton highlights the similarity between
fictional and real social events, and explains this element of experiencing and
forming the events:
Only when you ‘give yourself’ to an event can you be said to be experiencing it. You
‘let it happen’ to you so that you can then continue to ‘make it happen’. It is an act
both active and passive — like a swimmer, both submitting to and yet in control of
the water. You live spontaneously in the ‘here and now’ of the social event. There is
an existential quality to the experiencing, where you are engaging with a social event
from inside it. This concept is also critical to an understanding of classroom drama.'”°
Inthese lessons Bolton connects the fiction with the participants’ lives, facilitates
their belief in the fiction, and raises their awareness of fiction-making in various
forms. Bolton breaks down social events into elements (eg. superstitions, social
pressure, pretence) and structures the lessons through tasks and games to help
participants enter living through improvisations and play in them; because,
as he explains “play is not only being. It uses the form of being in order to
explore being”! I will now look at the nature of this exploration.
Experiencing Being in Two Worlds — Metaxis
Bolton claims that the dramatic experience “can be more than direct
experience because of ‘metaxis’ (seeing from two worlds at the same time)
giving a reflective edge to the role-play which direct experience often lacks”.’”
Though Bolton refers to Augusto Boal as a source of the term, Davis points
out that there are fundamental differences between what the two mean by
it.#3 I will only be exploring Bolton’s use of it now, as that is directly related
to LTD. Davis claims that Bolton’s work was built around creating metaxis,
“being in the world of the role and being oneself at the same time. Thus the two
states of being could collide and fundamental values, opinions, viewpoints
and concepts, could come to be challenged and ideally re-worked”.’**
130 Bolton: New Perspectives, 4.
Bolton: Towards a theory, 22.
Bolton: New Perspectives, 32.
Davis: Imagining the Real, 52.
134 Davis: Edward Bond and Drama in Education, 174.
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