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FACILITATING ‘BEING’ IN THE SITUATION — STRUCTURES USED IN LTD AND BONDIAN DRAMA
or from outside the story, whether the story’s own narrative framework is
used for interpreting it or the students’ real cultural narrative framework is
applied in making meaning of the fictional events. If the participants reflect
from within the story they can either remain and reflect in role, or they reflect
through other out-of-role tasks but within the fiction. Most examples of LTD
I analysed here kept reflection within the story or even part of the action.
Bond also sees his plays as stories, and in the previous chapter we saw that
he structures the plays so that they explore the Centre of the story repeatedly
through specific situations. In his case too the stories provide a framework for
interpreting actions and also the givens that contextualise specific situations.
Bond first sets up a ‘normality’ that can be later exposed or uncovered.*”°
He also describes the role of DEs in his plays in relation to story. Bond
states that when creating a DE “we select incidents in the story and open
these incidents out in such a way that they can’t be captured by the story but
must be examined for themselves in relation to the story”.”! What Cooper
describes as rupturing the story*” is a crucial element that Bond’s theory
offers, it keeps the action within the story but it tries to move the meaning
making out of the explanations that the narrative could provide. The need
for moving the framework of interpretation out of the grasp of the narrative’s
own explanations is emphasised by Bond because he see culturally set
narrative structures as stories that encode ideological values, and by creating
an opening he aims for creating a space for independent meaning making.
I will be discussing the importance of the problem that a story engages
in from a different perspective further on. The other crucial question is how
it is structured, what the dramaturgy of the story is. This question can be
connected to sequencing in drama lessons. I will be looking at dramaturgy
and sequencing further on in this chapter. However, I believe that opening
the story up through incidents that cannot be ‘captured’ by the narrative
is a crucial element in Bond’s work that offers new possibilities in LTD.
This element can be achieved through the inclusion and use of other concepts
and devices among the tools traditionally used in the LTD praxis. I now look
at the devices used in Bondian drama and in a LTD that stand out as central
tools in creating DEs in drama lessons. The first such concept is Site.
Site - the Framework of Connecting Different Spheres
While story provides a narrative framework for the sequence of events,
the concept of Site offers the framework for working on stories in a dramatic
form. Cooper explains that “sites are used in Bond’s drama primarily to
#0 Bond: Letter to Susana Roman.
491 Bond: Letters 1, 43.
#2 Cooper: The performer in TIE, 138
* 133