Gavin Bolton

(Gavin Bolton's theory and practice of drama in education)

 By Asterios Tsiaras

The relationship between theatre and drama is a complex one the subtle­ties of which have been virtually ignored in the UK because of the historical situation which drove drama teachers into two opposite camps - those who saw school drama as the acquisition of theatre skills, train­ing students as performers and those who believed in child-centred education, the 'progressiveness' of which was measured by the degree to which the students were not trained as performers. The latter claimed that the educational reward came from the dramatic process, not its product.

Bolton wishes to see as essential differences and similari­ties between drama and theatre in respect of mode and structure (other aspects, for instance, that theatre is normally linked with a place and that for many people theatre is a job). By mode he is referring to the quality of the behaviour of any partici­pant who is consciously engaged in some form of make-believe activity. If we were to watch a child in a garden being a policeman, we would say he is 'playing'; if we watched an actor on stage being a policeman, we would say he is 'performing'. We might agree that although both are 'pretending' there is a difference in quality or mode of action. It will be useful to attempt to determine at least some of the character­istics of these two behaviours.

He uses the term “acting” as all-embracing, applying it to both the child's and the man's behaviour. This allows him to think in terms of continuum of acting behaviour (Dramatic playing – Performing) rather than two separate categories. Child drama, creative drama, creative dramatics, educational drama, whatever we care to call non-performance drama in schools seems logi­cally to be placed towards the left rather than the right of the con­tinuum for the ultimate responsibility, intention and skills of the actor must lie in his ability to give someone else an experience. In other words the fundamental difference in the mode required lies not just in the skills employed but is a matter of mental set. He proposes we argue that there are enough occasions in children's play, student's creative drama and theatrical performance when the acting mode in terms of the participant's intention of mental set is ambiguous and not purely one thing or another to justify the image of a continuum rather than separate categories. Bolton finally notes that which­ever of these dimensions is selected the potential pivotal relationship between 'experiencing' and 'showing' which we have tended to ignore can occasionally sharpen the work at the dramatic playing end of the continuum and always enrich any move towards the other end.

At first, Gavin Bolton usefully coined the phrase 'acting-out' as an umbrella term to cover seemingly countless varieties of dramatic behaviour to be found in schools. A popular way of categorizing acting-out is to use the criterion of outer form: movement, mime; dance-drama; role-play; improvisation; scripted-work; perform­ance etc., in the second place he finds it more useful to classify the activity according to its orientation, that is to say experiencing, performing and practicing.

He was more concerned with the child's involvement in a symbolization process in the art form. The essential feature of the teaching relates to the nature of the experience the learner has in the drama. He has been away from direct experiencing to a shifting dialectic between experiencing and demonstrating. In other words the dialectical unity of the experience is made up of a submission to the experience and a reflection upon it. Reflection was a process separate from this significant experience although this did not necessarily mean it came after the drama was finished, it may have come within the drama or at a later period.

In the beginning he believed that apparently the child had his own kind of drama, if only teachers would give him a chance. This was a revelation and pretty unpalatable. This child-centred philosophy approximates drama in terms of developmental growth, or natural rhythms and of spontaneous expression, and of the teacher as an observer, as a follower.

Later, he says that the em­phasis hasn’t been on the script, the emphasis hasn’t been on speech, on mime, on the child and on movement but it is on the thing that is created (we must aim at using the heart of drama, which is the dramatic situation).

“Our aims are helping children to understand, so that  they are helped to face facts and to interpret them without prejudice; so that they develop a range and degree of identi­fication with other people; so that they develop a set of principles, a set of consistent principles, by which they are going to live”.

This greater concern with shifting the experience of the participant up and down a sliding continuum from direct experiencing to representing has led Gavin Bolton to move away from make-believe play and living-through drama as his fundamental model and building block in educational drama. Rather Gavin Bolton takes the game element and relates it to the structure of the drama. This fosters a conscious self-projection into the rule-governed interaction, and, as with game, it allows for maximum self-release without ever losing sight of the need for strategy and tactics. Moreover, it demands of the participant a constant analyzing of the state of play.

He suspects that the knowledge that is developed in a drama lesson is brought about by subjective engagement with the object which more importantly results in an inter-subjective negotiation of meanings to reach a common understanding.

Modes of acting behaviour

There are three basic modes of 'as if behaviours which in their purest forms contrast fundamentally with each other in psychological terms. In less pure forms they overlap with each other, but it is easier to ident­ify them for the lime being as opposite poles of experience.

The clearest distinction can be made between dramatic playing and performance. When dramatic playing becomes Drama as an art form it is characterized by three significant features; a special sense of time; a special quality of meaning, a special quality of feeling.

These three contrasted psychological behaviours - practicing, com­municating and experiencing - have different kinds of learning po­tential. Performing may clarify to the participant what is already known and exercise may reinforce what is already known, dramatic playing may modify what is already known. In other words playing is likely to have the greater potential for understanding new experience. Now we would like to note that when children play they do not usually 'perform' their playing. Whether they are in role as a goal-keeper, a cowboy or a 17th-century Puritan, they express themselves experientially. They do not describe or demonstrate these roles; they experience the passion of them.

Each of these modes in educational terms has both strengths and weaknesses. (For instance, while dramatic playing may have a potential for learning new things because of its spontaneous, existential qualities, it may be less effective because it lacks the strong sense of purpose and tightness of structure of an exercise form). One of the features of our modern approach to drama in education is that we either find a dramatic form that combines at least two of these three modes (for instance, the existential quality of dramatic playing with the structure of an exercise) or employ within the same drama work a flexible sequence of perform­ing - exercise - dramatic playing (in any order) so that all kinds of learning potential are harnessed.

The relationship of creative drama to theatre

The controversy over whether we should train children as performers has in the past given a disproportionate attention to that aspect of the­atre to do with acting, to the neglect of the more fundamental elements of dramatic form. Examination of the internal structure of dramatic playing, exercise and theatre reveals that at this deeper level the three modes share the same core components: focus; tension; contrast and symbolization. These are the very tools with which the playwright and director manipulate their craft, tools which the youngest child entering an “as if” form of behavior unconsciously deploys in creating a fictitious con­text, In other words, in this sense the child is operating in dramatic form. Recognition of this view fundamentally affects how the teacher sees his craft.

Our modern approach therefore includes acknowledgement by the teacher that although a theatrical presentation may no longer be a pri­ority he has a parallel responsibility to the playwright or director. Actor-training is concerned with developing skill in representation, a process of de­scribing a character's emotional state, a director's responsibility lies beyond that to the overall meaning of the thing created, the play itself. The play must effectively express its own meaning. Just as they are concerned with focusing meaning, increasing and resolving tension and selecting symbols that resonate for the audience, the teacher must use these basic elements for the participants in the creative drama situation. As the playwright builds tension for the audience; the teacher builds tension for the children; as the playwright and the director and the actors highlight meaning for the audience by the use of contrast in sound, tight and movement, so does the teacher - for the children; as the playwright chooses with great care the symbolic actions and objects that will operate at many levels of meaning for the audience, so will the teacher help the children find symbols in their work. One of the principal functions of a drama teacher is to use theatrical form in order to enhance the meaning of the participants' experience by using the theatrical elements of tension, focus, contrast and symbolization, actions and objects in the drama become significant.

However, there is an obvious examples of a different orientation on those times in rehearsal when an actor is drawing on his own re­sources to find meaning are very close to what a child goes through in a drama experience. Also in those performances where spontaneity of interaction among the per­formers themselves is deliberately kept alive so that fresh meanings can emerge for the actors. In other words the actors are operating at a double level of both communicating pre-conceived meanings and at the same lime generating (actually experiencing as in drama) new meanings.

If we move into theatre, the actors are in a very different order of experiencing, a difference that is crucial. The degree to which the actors can say “it is happening to me now”; and “I am making it happen” is significantly reduced or overshadowed by an orientation towards interpretation, repeatability, projection and sharing with an audience. The reinforcement or clarification or modification not to mention the entertainment must ultimately be enjoyed by the audience. We would like to put the point that performance for an audience requires description, while accepting that to varying degrees, varying in inten­sity, varying from actor to actor, from performance to performance, from style of play, from style of production, etc., etc., the actor may be expressing actual feelings. We would also like to claim that in drama work with children, whereas the nature of the work requires real feel­ings, it may also to varying degrees be descriptive. (Indeed because drama is social, a certain amount of describing must be going on - to each other.

Drama for understanding

The notion of levels of meaning in drama needs to be expanded upon here. Drama is the most concrete of the art forms. The meaning is cre­ated from the juxtaposition of two concrete events: the actual use of time and space by the participants; and the simulated use of time and space in a fictitious context. Whereas the actor walks across the stage four times, in the fictitious context the prisoner is pacing his cell. Whereas the child is bestraddling a slick, in the fiction he is riding a horse.

The relationship between these two concrete events can be described in two significantly different ways. One way is to say that the relation­ship is representational i.e. the actor 'stands for' the prisoner; the be­straddling child 'stands for' riding a horse. An implication of such a description is that there is some prior knowledge of prisoners or horses that becomes objectified by the use of the actor or the stick. I call this the contextual view of dramatic activity. Much leaching of mime in schools emphasizes this view of dramatic action as accurate imitation of a physical reality. A more subtle, less extreme example is of the use of role-play that requires the child to imitate a stereotype attitude: an angry parent, a stern headmaster or a wicked step-mother.

A very different way of describing the relationship is to see it as a dialectic set up between the two concrete events, between the actor and prisoner, between the child and horse-riding. The meaning that emerges is the actor-in-the-prisoner experience or the child-in-the-riding experience. The meaning is unique to the interaction. It is the emotional engagement with something outside oneself, filtered through the make-believe that has such a powerful learning potential.

The personification is the last paragraph of drama as an active chal­lenger to the pupil as passive victim inverts the usual metaphor of the pupil as active creator. There are three senses in which the participant is both active and passive. He is making something happen so that it can happen to him. Just as all art is a process of selecting constraints and submitting to them, so drama is a process of defining the rules of make-believe so that there might be a release into experiencing the make-believe. The second sense in which the participant is both active and passive has already been referred to. He is not merely a participant; he is a percipient, a spectator of his own actions and other participants' actions.

It is the third sense which requires our more detailed attention, for it is here that the educational purpose of the created product apparently limits the extent to which the participants can experience freedom. Be­cause creative drama, as it is sometimes called, is a group activity, in­dividual expression is necessarily curtailed by the need for group consensus, but a further form of constraint comes from the teacher whose objectives in respect of a particular created work may differ from and even be in opposition to the intentions of his pupils.

Drama in education is a process of negotiation between pupils and between pupil and teacher, each putting constraints upon the free­dom of the other. But it is not intolerant of freedom of expression, for paradoxically creativity is liberated as the boundaries narrow. The teacher's responsibility is to deepen the level of meaning which the pupils might imaginatively explore.

Through dramatic experience, five year olds, fifteen year olds, twenty-five year olds and sixty-five year olds may have their understanding of themselves in relation to the world they live in reinforced, clarified or modified and secondly they may gain skills in social interaction which include the ability to communicate their understanding and feelings

The concept of  “showing” in children dramatic activity

When a child hangs a painting on a classroom wall, he is not only sharing it with others, but sharing it with himself. What was originally an experience of a process from the inside has become an experience of a product from the outside, a psychological shift and a shift in time. The extent of the psychological shift is dependent on the degree to which he anticipated the change of perspective. It seems reasonable to assume that a child totally absorbed in gaining moment-to-moment satis­faction from the process will have an experience different in quality from the child who intermittently or concurrently perceives what he is creating as a product in the making. This movement from process to product is a complex change in perspective which appears to be even more complicated when applied to dramatic activity, because of the elusiveness of the product.

Even the child totally absorbed in the process is ambivalently in both an active and a passive mode. Dramatic activity and child play (indeed, it could be argued, every­thing we choose to do in life) have this dual characteristic of controlling in order to be controlled. But a significant feature of drama is that this active/passive mode may be shared unevenly among the participants. In other words, dramatic action is a form of language and, like language. its structure changes as it moves from a personal to a collective mode. Drama is a metaphorical form that is created by the juxtaposition of two concrete contexts: actuality and fic­tion. The actuality is that the child is a three year old boy sitting on a chair holding his arms in front of him and moving them in a circular fashion, the fiction is that he is daddy driving a car. The meaning of the experience is dependent on a dialectic between these two contexts.