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FACILITATING ‘BEING’ IN THE SITUATION — STRUCTURES USED IN LTD AND BONDIAN DRAMA While Liz is standing on the chair preparing herself to jump and commit suicide she starts talking about the world outside. She says “The city’s a stone sandwich’. Amoiropoulos explains that Liz is seeing life as it is, mortal and cruel, without ideology hiding its essence. She is in fact entering the gap that ideology sought to conceal with shops, tanks, famine and slaughterhouses, seeing that the truth is that we are still mortal and we need to face our mortality by acting and making our cities, the ‘stone sandwich’, more just and more human. In a sense Liz has entered the gap of meaning imaginatively and knowingly, and faced reality without ideology being in the way.*”* He proposes that Liz is producing the Invisible Object of her situation through this original metaphor. It is not reality per se, but it reflects the situation without its ideologised narratives. The text offers this moment, but it needs to be created in performance by the actor. As Bond states “drama creates the situations of humanness but they have to be shown in the invisible object. And the invisible object cant [sic] be brought on stage without the actor. Together they turn acting into enactment”.°” The example above is a reference to the text of the play, but Bond asserts that the actor needs to create the Invisible Object by using action, image, space and language together and also by keeping the logic of the fictional situation. Cooper argues that the use of objects can play a central role in this process, that “through cathecting the object, the meaning or the reality of the situation has precedence over the object, rather than what ideology tells us is the situation. Depending on how the moment is enacted, this holds the potential to reveal what Bond calls the Invisible Object”.°?° I have referred to the concept of Cathexis before, but it is useful to revisit it here. Bond often uses everyday objects in his plays that are familiar to the audience, but when an object is cathected “it is as if we see it for the first time. This enables us to make connections we would not normally make”.5! Cooper explains that “this process charges/imbues the object with meaning (and energy) and value that extend beyond the thing itself and penetrate ideologically-given meanings in order to reveal to us what was previously concealed — the objective situation”. The Cathexis of objects is a possible way of working on the Invisible Object within the framework of Site. For example, in the situation of the Man cradling the brick, analysed in the second half of chapter two, if the actor finds a way of creating a sense of the brick demanding 528 Amoiropoulos: Balancing Gaps, 314. Edward Bond: Email to Harry Derbyshire, Personal communication, 25 November, 2012, 1. Cooper: Revisiting the process drama, 159. 531 Katafiasz: Alienation, 43. 532 Cooper: Revisiting the process drama, 44. 529 530
