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CHAPTER SIX: CONTEXT AND FURTHER USE OF THE FINDINGS OF MY ACTION RESEARCH
to create our own humanness”./# As pointed out before, my research built
strongly on Davis’s exploration of connecting LTD and Bond’s theory. I used
many of the process drama concepts and devices described by him in his book
Imagining the Real. One major difference in how I aimed to achieve similar
goals was by offering participants Bondian concepts and tools explicitly
in the drama lessons. This development in my work built on ideas already
present in different LTD lessons examined as part of this research, but also
represented a new approach.
Some level of awareness of participants of theatre components is
a phenomenon I found in all examples of drama lessons studied in the first
chapter, and this is also reflected upon by various authors writing about
LTD.”* As I developed this aspect of the living through approach I found
that participants were not hindered in ‘being’ in the unfolding crisis and were
also capable of using some theatre structures to explore the crisis within
the improvisation. In one example from his work, about a father leaving his
daughter at a clinic for women who are morally insane, discussed in chapter
one, Davis offers the participants of the lesson the structure of ‘five layers
of meaning’ to rework their scenes and become aware of using sign and
making meaning in drama, before they work in improvisation.” He then also
brings back questions referring to the five layers as a preparation for the pair
improvisation structured into the drama lesson. This use of a drama device
offered a model that I developed further. By offering three components of
Bond’s drama theory and practice this research offered a major innovation
in creating a Bondian LTD practice and also addressed the issue raised by
Cooper in his critique of Davis’s lesson” of participants not having enough
tools to investigate the situations in the drama.
The last lessons of the action research development process of my work
contained two new elements compared to other LTD lessons examined.
One was that the three components of the Bondian approach I offered
participants explicitly: the aim of creating gaps in meaning, the use of
the Centre of the narrative and the dramaturgical structures, provided
a complex net of reference points that make conscious creation of art possible.
The second element was that of framing participants as co-researchers and
developers of dramatic form.
These are significant developments within the LTD approach as they
redefine the role of the participants in the drama lesson and also offer a new
relationship between LTD and theatre. The findings show that participants
75 Davis: Imagining the Real, 1.
Bolton: Acting in Classroom Drama; Davis: Imagining the Real; Fleming: Starting Drama
Teaching; O’Neill: Drama Worlds.
Davis: Imagining the Real, 71.
Cooper: Revisiting the process drama.
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