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To MAKE OR TO EXCAVATE — THE ROLE OF THE ACTOR/PARTICIPANT stretching it. Would it be possible for participants in the final situation of the Child Abuse drama to dig deeper in the situation for themselves and also for those watching in role? A question for further investigation is what sort of support can participants in the drama lesson get to engage and create meaning on different levels about extreme situations they are ‘living through’. After looking at one specific example integrating the two fields I continue by discussing issues of more general concern in the next sections of this chapter. To MAKE OR TO EXCAVATE — THE ROLE OF THE ACTOR/PARTICIPANT Every drama workshop or theatre lesson offers activities and tasks to participants, but for a teacher to be able to structure one task after another there needs to be an underlying assumption about the role of the students in the lesson. This role is also linked with what participants can get out of engaging with the specific activity. Bolton’s formative book titled Acting in classroom drama looks at the work of the pioneers of drama education from the perspective of the participants, arguing that there are important differences between the acting behaviour of students in classroom drama and actors on stage. Bolton’s analysis provides a useful framework for comparing the role of the participants in LTD and Bondian drama, as the latter offers a somewhat different role to actors than many traditional theatre approaches. Bolton claims that the concept of audience is “a feature common to all acting behaviour” that the age-old dichotomy of performing versus experiencing has not been a useful one. He states that those reasoning against performance in classroom drama, for example Harriet Finlay-Johnson, wanted to move the audiences’ attention from the skill involved in acting to the content students are presenting.’ This is why Bolton proposes the category of presenting as one of the modes of acting behaviour in which “showing is the principal purpose”, with a subcategory of performing, in which “acting is highly relevant in itself”.””' The difference between the two acting behaviours does not depend on the presence of an audience Bolton argues.*” He breaks down the dichotomies appearing in the history of drama education and comes to the conclusion that the spectatorship does not depend on having an actual including classroom drama. He argues however, 46° Bolton: Acting in Classroom Drama, 259. #70 Ibid., 262. #1 Ibid., 263. 72 Ibid., 259.
