Hey guys, for the last couple of months we have been working on a project called Colonizing in a Tempest. The purpose of this project was to teach us about the colonization of New France or, as we now call it, Canada. However since this is PLP we never just learn about something, we make a project surrounding what we learned. This unit’s project was a reenactment of Shakespeare’s The Tempest set in New France shown as a series of tableaus. For those of you who don’t know what a tableau is, a tableau is an scene created using actors bodies and generally you don’t talk during it. Now that you have some basic knowledge of the project it’s time for the rest of this reflection blog post.
One of our first activities was learning about how to be a good anthropologist, this was so we could think critically about what we were taught about New France in a non-biased way. The six main terms that we learned were: stereotypes and radical individualism, ethnocentrism and radical uniqueness, and cultural relativity and cultural superiority. I put these terms into pairs because all of them were the extreme opposites of their pairs. By learning these terms and why they are bad examples of anthropology we were able to look at New France through a culturally sensitive lens.
We did lot’s of other activities after that one but they all lead up to the multiple drafts of scripts and backdrops for the final tableau. The first backdrop that was made for scene 2.1 was made by Rhiann and animated by me although the fire animation was good, the moth looked terrible and the background wasn’t even done yet.
The second draft was better with a finished background and a shooting star animation in place of the moth one. However nothing is ever done on the second draft and this time it was the background that needed work. I had also finished the first version of the script but it too was turned away by Ms.Willemse for having too many lines.
The third and final background took me over an hour to complete due to the fact that I had to redraw the whole background. This was actually a good experience for me though because I had to make the background more lifelike so to achieve that I had to find a picture of an authentic log cabin which helped me understand the architecture of New France a lot more and create an even better background. Since I also had to revise my script to only have one line per character I had to really think what lines were needed to tell the story. Overall I learned a lot about New France and just simply creating and revising pieces of work hopefully I can use what I have learned from this project in the future.