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CHAPTER FIVE: DATA ANALYSIS
that could have triggered the students’ imagination. This is a useful practical
learning about opening the drama towards current problems in that they
need to be placed in the drama through specific images, actions, situations.
I will continue now by looking at what the specific situations and the story,
the fiction needs to carry to bring elements of Bondian drama into LTD.
Site B — The Story and All That It Holds
This section looks at the narratives that were used in the drama lessons and
the Bondian concepts used to open possibilities of active engagement in
the story. I have offered an account of the three narratives used in this cycle
previously, I will not revisit them, but analyse why they worked in the way
they did. I will examine different elements of the story rather than reflect on
the narratives per se, as in these cases the narratives provide the framework
to hold together different elements and educational and artistic aspects of
the work.
EXTREME - One of the connecting points between Bond’s theory and
LTD is that they are centred around some sort of crisis which is experienced
without distancing the participants. “A dramatist must be an extremophile”°”?
claims Bond, and Heathcote says that “dramatic activity is concerned with
the crises, the turning points of life"."99 I] will analyse what makes something
extreme and what the effects of the extreme are in the drama lessons.
I chose a Bond play as the base of one series to investigation the elements
of the narrative he uses. The first lesson was centred around Joe telling his
friends that his mother asked him to burn a house down and then the group
finding him in the abandoned station after he had done it. The discussion about
the drama in the focus group two days after the lesson started like this:
P1: Now I understand why it’s called drama.
T: What do you mean?
P1: Well, they burnt a house down. It is draaaama.
P2: My mom was surprised that the story is about a house being burnt.
T: Can you tell me what this story was about for you?
P3: About why he burned the house down, and what he said to his mum afterwards.
And what his Mum says to him later
T: Is this what the story is about for you?
P3: This is the question that interests me the most.
P2: I also want to know what will happen with Joe and his family.
P1: And what will his mum say.
59 Bond: Freedom and Drama, 213.
600 Heathcote: Dramatic Activity, 54.