Hello, it’s Aedan here again. Back at it again in PLP Humanities. This was our final project in Humanities this year and I really enjoyed it. It was fun to present at the end with all my classmates and I also enjoyed learning about Shakespeare’s play The Tempest. Without further to do, here is what we did during our final Humanities unit of the year.

Project overview/outline thingy:

Our end goal of the project was to create a tableau performance of Shakespeare’s play The Tempest, but all based in New France. A tableau is a performance that has numerous freeze frames of different parts of the play. Normally there would be no talking, but we got to have a narrator for in between the different slides. In The Tempest there are 5 acts, so we got split into 5 different groups and were assigned 1 act per group.

The Tempest:

I got put in a group for act 5 with Gabby, Paisley, and Sam. Shortly after getting put into our groups we started to learn all about old English and more importantly Shakespeare’s plays. More specifically The Tempest. We watched a movie version of The Tempest, a play version, and read the lines. After all of this we knew the story off by heart and could probably recreate the play without any practice. We knew all the characters and their traits. We also knew about the atmosphere André what all the old English meant. After learning all about The Tempest, it was time to learn about the colonization and New France part of it.

New France:

We first learnt some basic stuff about New France and the European colonization. After a good background we did lots of learning on two main fur trading companies that had a major rivalry. The HBC (Hudson’s Bay Company) and the NWC (North West Company). The HBC was more dominant, but both were great for different reasons. The NWC came about from many different smaller companies that combined. In the end the NWC gave in to the HBC and obviously the HBC still exists. After all of this our group still hadn’t learnt about what we needed to in order to create our tableau for act 5. All the other groups had started planning, but we still needed to lear about the fall of New France.

Act 5:

As I just said, we still hadn’t learnt about the fall of New France. Well, finally we got to learn about what we really needed in order to finish our act. We learnt about deportation and how the Acadians got kicked off their land. The deportation was tragic and eventually they gave up and let them back into the country. We also learnt about the 7 years war and its impact on New France, but more specifically the battle of Quebec. I loved learning about all of this and after we were ready to actually get started on making our tableau’s. We decided to have 3 different tableau’s for our act. One to show Prospero giving up magic, one to show Prospero forgiving everyone, and one showing everyone returning to Milan. We decided who was going to play what character and who those characters would represent. Instead of explaining everything about the Tempest and our play I will just have a YouTube video at the end of this blog post. So scroll down to check out our play if you’d like.

Act 5, Vol 2:

After getting a set idea of who was going to play what we still had one task. The background. We were given the task to create a backdrop to be behind us well in our freezframe. We made three very good still images that had one or two things within it moving and some sound effects. I was happy with how ours turned out. After getting everything all set we were prepared to present at the gala evening later.

Act 5, The upset:

One thing I should have added… I wasn’t able to make the gala evening to present. I had an important baseball game that I had to attend. I thought I wasn’t able to go so I had my group practice with only three people so that they were ready. Funny enough the weather decided to start raining. All of a sudden my baseball got cancelled and I could make it to the gala evening.

The Gala Evening:

I showed up very unprepared with no spot to go so we had to come up with something quick. We decided that I was just going to be a random Acadian that was in every tableau in our act. I practiced it twice through and was ready. Our recreation of the Tempest turned out really good and I was so happy with how all the narrators did. They had to memorize there lines in only a day or two. The funniest part af the whole concert was probably my part, but only because of Gabby’s narration. It was hilarious. Anyways, here is the video of our play.

I hope you enjoyed this post and watched our Tempest recreation. I really enjoyed this unit and I think our group worked really well together. I learnt so much and can’t wait to carry it into Humanities 9.

Until next time… Aedan Loughran