Colonizing in a Tempest

To wrap up Grade 8 Humanities, this last unit focused on learning about Shakespeare’s play The Tempest and the colonization of New France. It seemed unusual that these two topics would go together, but I sooned realized that many of the themes in The Tempest relate to the early history of Canada. Like always, the project at the end was a challenging one. The task was to put on a performance of Tableaux Vivants from each scene of the play, but set them in New France.

Since we are all teenagers in the 21st century, none of my class had read any Shakespeare before. We read introductions on the playwright, and talked about some of the mystery behind who he really was, and how his fame came to be. After that, we could start reading the play. Everyone downloaded a new app, with the same name as the play, which had all the information anyone could ever want. Since the history of New France co-aligns with the story of The Tempest, the lessons went like this; go through next act while watching the movie (there is a film version), go through the next section out of five about New France, repeat. 

I don’t want to spoil the play because it’s certainly full of twists, however I’ll say that it has themes of colonization in the first act. In Act 2, the ideas were like those of settlement and trade. After explorers from Europe discovered all this land that was new to them, they wanted to take control over it. This is colonialism, to settle and control other lands. Once settlers arrived, they began to trade all the resources that were new to them. Many different countries took hold of large sections of North America, and started importing/exporting many goods. 

Next, in the third act characters could be compared to the major players in New France, and their daily lives. Religion was a difficult topic in the 1600s, as the aboriginals already living in North America had their own beliefs, and the French were hoping and trying to convert them all the Christianity. 

Act 4 was my group’s act (group was Anika, Jackson and Jason), so I paid careful attention to the lessons on the Fur Trading companies. The Hudson’s Bay Company and the North West Company were pivoted against each other through their mutual wanting of control over the trading of beaver furs, essentially the currency of the New World. 

To finish Act 5 in the play was about resolution and in the other lessons our class learned about the fall of New France. You may know about how the British used strategy and force to take power over the people of New France.

When we had finished reading the play and completing assignments, it was time to begin work on our performance. Each group/act had three scenes to pose for that would show the main plot pints in their respective act. We started with making backgrounds that would help tell the story, as we would all be frozen after doing small motions.

Then, I wrote the script that the narrator said before the each pose, so the audience could know what was going on. This ended being hard because we were merging to seemingly different things together. After that, we rehearsed as a class several times, and I got to try out the booth. Lucy, Kyle, and I were in charge of the lights and backgrounds, and I had fun working behind the scenes. That kind of job was something I’d always wanted to try, and even though I didn’t have that important of a role, it was still interesting. 

Don’t watch the video if you don’t like spoilers but here is what the end product was!

The night of the performance was fast approaching, and my nerves were going up. That was bad because shaky hands can’t press the button for the next slide that well. Once we got going it was much better though, and by the end I was honestly very happy at seeing how well everyone’s hard work paid off. This unit was in my top three favourite units (weird list, I know), because I loved reading the play and the use of the old language. History always interests me as well, and learning more about the origins of Canada was compelling. It was a really fun way to finish off humanities for the year.