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APPENDICES AB: It often takes away all the tension and everything becomes explicit. MF: Yes, all the subtlety disappears. I am not saying it is a technique that shouldn’t be used. I took a visitor to talk to Dorothy a year before she died. She was in great form, very funny, reminiscing. And at one point she said “I hate hot seating, it is not at all the subtle thing it should be”. I think she was commenting on the conventions approach when it is used too mechanically. AB: And of course she breaks down hot-seating into 20 different forms in her conventions list, there it has the subtlety. Do you think the form defines the quality of the learning? MF: I think the answer must be yes. I don’t think there has been much detailed work done on this, but my sense tells me that must be true. Going back to the integrated approach, the whole basis of that is that form and content become indivisible when we talk about meaning. I think form is a complicated word, it has got at least five different meaning when people write about it in drama, but if we just take it as a choice of convention; for all the strengths the tableaux has, and it has a lot of strengths, the potential for learning, must be limited to some degree. But it is something that has not been addressed enough in the research literature [...] I think certain forms predominate pragmatically, because they are more accessible. I think the key to using tableaux successfully is immediately thinking about content, and levels. What is the level below what they are looking at? Are we conveying ambiguity and at what level? But it has got to be limited, the potential for learning using this form. [...] When I was teaching drama in school we taught from week to week a kind of living through and it was a big success one week and then a disaster the next week. This illustrates how challenging it is to employ successfully I was a younger teacher. That is how I learnt. AB: How would you define living through drama? MF: If you had asked me a month ago to comment on the value of living through my answer would probably have been a bit different, I have been influenced by David’s book. But as regards definition, I think living through is participating in the drama in a way that whatever is happening it is unfolding in real time. So it is the difference between starting to improvise the situation now and planning it. And I think that is the key difference for me. I always thought the emphasis on living through partly came about through Dorothy Heathcote’s Three looms waiting. I was introduced to living through drama through that, it was shown as a best example of living through. And it was only later that I realised that it wasn’t exactly living through drama in the sense that we believed it to be. It was actually more a piece of theatre where they knew what was going to happen. But living through has that immediacy and that quality of things unfolding in real time. It is unbelievably engaging and exciting and vibrant. + 260 +
