Oldal 60 [60]
THE CONTEMPORARY CONTEXT AND A CRITIQUE OF LIVING THROUGH DRAMA
with issues related to school curriculum, teacher training, and educational
and artistic objectives; this research is clearly not focussed on these issues.
However, I believe that none of those quoted above argue against using complex
theoretical grounding and a subtle practice in the teaching of drama.
LTD: Lost Contact with Theatre — Naturalistic and Life-Rate
Hornbrook’s main criticism towards drama in education is that it has lost
contact with theatre and that making and performing theatre should be at
the centre of the work in schools.’ It is the first part of this statement that
is of interest to us. Fleming warns of something similar when he says that
in “reducing drama in education to one particular set of limited practices in
this way there is a danger of conceding too much ground”,’” he is referring
to the practice of O’Neill, O’Toole, Bolton and Taylor that rely “heavily on
different kinds of improvised work”. The important question he raises is the
relation of form and content in the drama work. Fleming states that “in much
of the improvised drama of the 1970s content was given a high profile”!** and
that the balance and the questions related to the connection between form
and content need to be engaged in. Fleming also points out that some moment
of Heathcote’s Stool Pigeon drama could be seen as “a very effective piece of
theatre”;’*? recognising the role of theatre in her work. His main argument is
for an integrated approach to drama, which allows students to meet a variety
of forms and ways of working with the art form of theatre.
Neelands presents LTD as part of the “naturalistic fallacy” arguing that it
is a “mythologised dilution of the working practices of Stanisalvski, Michael
Chekov and their followers”.?° He claims that his own conventions approach is
based on Brechtian practice. Neelands suggests that practitioners using a LTD
approach believe that the participants are fully emerged in the context of
the fiction and they are living through real-life experiences as people in the real
world would. He continues by arguing that this isn’t possible, “we cannot in
actuality walk in shoes other than our own”.”” Heathcote had already responded
to Neelands’ question in 1985 in an interview. She is questioned by Davis about
the change in her drama and she talks about the term ’life-rate’. Heathcote
says “that’s the one phrase I’ve written I’m ashamed of. [...] ’Life-rate’ reads
wrong because it suggests time sequence. [...] “Ihe Dreamer’ was not lived at
life-rate. It was all episodic”.*°* Heathcote contends that her drama was not
186 Hornbrook: Education, 109.
177 Fleming: Tecahing drama in primary and secondary, 9.
#8 Ibid., 18.
1% Fleming: Starting drama teaching, 16.
Neelands: Mirror, Dynamo or Lens, 146.
201 Ibid., 146.
202
200
David: Dorothy Heathcote interviewed, 77.
s 59 +