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CHAPTER THREE: BRINGING TOGETHER THE ÁRTISTIC AND THE EDUCATIONAL PRAXIS As I rely heavily on structures and concepts from the two fields I compare them in the following section. A common point of LTD and Bondian drama is to enhance an experiential relation of participants to the problems within the fictional world. A crucial element that needs to be examined is the nature of the participants’ presence in the dramatic world as this is not a style of acting but a specific mode of engagement that is central to both LTD and creating a DE. Story - the Framework of Fiction Ihe basic framework for engaging with a fictional world is provided by the use of story in both cases. Both Bondian drama and LTD rely heavily on the unfolding story providing the overall structure for the specific situations that the participants or an audience engage in. Stories, and I do not mean only fairy tales here, offer a frequently used cultural form to suspend disbelief and engage in events happening to ‘the other’. As Bruner points out the models and procedural tool kits learnt from narratives are crucial in dealing with the conflicts and contradictions that ‘real’ social life generates, and also points out that our sense of the normative and the breach of it is also nourished through narratives.*#” Stories are established cultural forms of making meaning, either by offering events that need to be made sense of or by providing interpretations of such incidents. The ‘making’ element of LTD relies partly on participants being aware of their role in creating the unfolding story. Even in cases where there is a central scene that the participants engage in, like in Bolton’s Crucible, story is present in many forms. There is a whole historical narrative that participants are led into step by step; and there are family stories also being built through the depiction task; and then a joint story-making takes place in the whole group improvisation. O’Neill’s pre-text is usually a powerful story element, like the return of a feared person, that kickstarts the story-making that the group and the facilitator are engaged in. In his Child Abuse drama Davis gets participants to create their personal roles in relation to the central story and they become part of the unfolding event through these. And Heathcote’s Man in a Mess drama might ask for a starting point from the participants giving them great choice and responsibility at the same time. The story provides the context for the situations engaged in and the focus of the exploration can be directed by the facilitator through the givens that can be set as part of the narrative. The relation of reflection on the story is an issue in which differences between drama education practices can be highlighted. The distinction often made is whether the reflection is from within the story 48° Bruner: Acts of Meaning, 97. + 132 +
