Page 66 [66]
OCR
LIVING THROUGH DRAMA AND BONDIAN DRAMA Connections Between Being in the Situation in LTD and Drama Events The other strong connection between LTD and Bond’s work is the nature of being in the fiction. While the structures of enhancing it are different, all four examined drama practitioners are making it possible for the participants to enter fictional situations and ‘be’ in them. Bond states that actors need to be present in the fictional situation and talks about enactment instead of acting, because he sees human presence as a core element of drama. He says?" that "when actors cant bring the human presence on stage, but instead produce a manufactured style that apes it, then drama is impossible”.””’ Awareness of beingina fictional worldisimportantin bothcases. Wesawthat this was achieved in different ways by different practitioners in the examples of LTDs. Bond believes that drama offers possibilities to understand ourselves and society because “the audience do this under the protection of fiction, in ‘the suspension of belief”.*”? There is also a very conscious play between reality and fiction in Bond’s plays that aims at questioning how real is what we consider to be reality. Davis compares Bond with other European playwrights and also the work of Bolton and Heathcote in the following way: In dealing with the problem of re-cognising society, Bolton and Heathcote are dealing with the same problems faced by European playwrights from Ibsen to Brecht and Bond. However, the immediate engagement, the ‘being’ in role of Bolton, I suggest, is qualitatively different to the distancing of Heathcote. This Brechtian distancing influence, or flavour, I argue, has largely come to dominate much of drama education, particularly in the UK, not necessarily in a political sense but in the way the role is framed in relation to the event. This qualitative difference is also to be found in the way Bond places the audience compared with Brecht.?” As can be seen from this quote the investigation of how ‘being’ in the fiction is created in Bond’s plays will be also useful for developing Living Through Drama. 220 Bond does not use regular punctuation in his writing. I have quoted him keeping the original punctuation, Iam marking this here as a footnote rather than including [sic] at all such points. Edward Bond: The First Word, Unpublished Essay, BOND@50 Conference, Warwick University, 2012, 2. Edward Bond: A Short and Troubled Essay on Being Human, Unpublished essay, Personal communication, 22 August, 2012, 9. Davis: Imagining the Real, 30. 22 22 19 22: œ
