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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. 131 132 133 + 40 +
