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CHAPTER THREE: BRINGING TOGETHER THE ÁRTISTIC AND THE EDUCATIONAL PRAXIS
establish the dramatic logic of the situation in order to illuminate our social
reality and forge the direct connection between the play and the experience
of the audience”.
Through his concept of Site Bond connects the material and social reality
that is outside the theatre building with what is happening on stage and also
with what happens in the audience’s imagination.
Drama has many ‘sites’: the stage, the capital or provincial city where the theatre is,
the era, language and culture. How does drama occupy these sites?
A. It conforms to the social sites (city, era, culture, etc), which are self-evident to
the audience.
B. It conveys to the audience the play’s specific sites. These are equivalents to A but
of course may be different.
C. It conveys the play to the audience — the audience as site. The audience is social,
able to receive only in certain (if sometimes innovative) ways. C must convey A and
B to the audience.
D. The audience as site of imagination. A, B and C must be conveyed to this site.
D is drama’s specific site because — through the play - it contains all the other sites
and their interrelations. What is D? What is the need for drama? Drama’s identity
comes from meeting the needs of D.**
Bond states that the socio-cultural context (Site A) that the play is being
produced in needs to be present in the set, props and narrative (Site B) of
the play being performed. This needs to be enacted (Site C) in a way that it
opens up the content for the audience to engage with using their imagination
(Site D). The sites are contained in each other and connected dialectically.
This framework can be used in a very practical way when working on a play
or when planning a drama lesson as it provides a series of questions that
can be addressed during the process. Cooper in recent workshops*” analysed
the framework by placing story and the Centre it investigates as Site B. This
proposition is logical because a story is realised through a series of specific
situations in a play and in a Bond drama the Centre of the play provides
the thematic logic among these situations.
If we place the story and its situations at the centre of our questioning we
can ask: In what form is our current era, the problems of our socio-cultural
reality present in the specific situations of the story?
With this question we are assessing if Site B contains Site A. Even if
the drama engages in a historical or a fictional world the elements of our
193 Ibid., 132.
494 Bond: Modern Drama, 10.
#5 Facing the Gap Seminar led by Chris Cooper, hosted by The GAP Arts Project, 5 - 84
February, 2015, Birmingham, UK.
+ 134 +