Oldal 60 [60]
OCR
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 +
