Colonizing in a Tempest

This term in Humanities we learned about the colonization of Canada, specifically New France. We also did Shakespeare’s play, The Tempest. Now you may be wondering how you can combine these two things? Well, we got to perform The Tempest but in the setting of New France.

In The Tempest, people arrive to a new place in boats (insert ships from France), they get separated and have to explore the island (cough, cough, New France). There are people on the island (New France) that attack the newcomers. Buhm, buhm, buhm! There is a lot of drama and eventually everyone forgives each other and gets along.

So how do you condense a Shakespearean play into 14 minutes? You use tableaus. Tableaus are freeze frames with a short narration and a small amount of movement. We took snap shots of the modified story and presented them in tableau form. We made images for the background and projected them onto a screen behind us, and different groups of students performed and narrated each scene. We told the audience, a friendly audience of family and friends, how each of our New France characters represented the equivalent character from The Tempest and what would happen in the tableau. Here is one of the scenes that I was in.

And here is the full play:

We had a lot of fun coming up with costumes and designing the backgrounds, especially Miranda’s wig and Caliban’s mask. Doing the tableaus helped me to put The Tempest into a context that was easier to understand. One of the things that I’m learning is that our method of approaching our studies from multiple disciplines at the same time has allowed me to have a much deeper understanding of each of the subjects we are studying. I really appreciate how the combination of different learning methods aligns best with the way I learn as a dyslexic.