Today I am going to share my Tempest/ New France project. Now I know that title sounds very weird but I will explain everything below.

Our goal was to incorporate parts of the history of New France with the the Tempest so we could present a play only using tableaus ( still pictures using actors) to show both the history and the dramatic aspect of the tempest.

During this project we did many little things to help us understand the Tempest ( one of Shakespeare’s last plays) and New France, things like doing our own Tableau’s, and making history charts, but I am only going to share the ones that I think were the most important to me.

First we start off with history part. This is where we started learning all about New France through videos, demonstrations, and just reading things that people have written about this era, but the most important thing for me was the New France time line that we did. This was basically a giant piece of paper that had many important events that happened in New France, things like the Beaver Wars, first contact, trading posts, etc.. I found this chart very helpful because it let me visually see the events in the right order from oldest to youngest. This was important later on when we had to base our tableau’s off of what actually happened at that time. 

The rest that helped me was reading information from a secondary source, this to me is helpful because it was just the information I needed, and pairing that with time table chart I knew everything I need about each sene and and the event that matched with it. Timing in this presentation was very important because if the events were not in order, then the play would make no sense.

The second part of this blog post is the play/tableau aspect part. Here is where we learned all about tableau’s and how to preform one properly. The best part of learning these things was when we actually watched professional actors doing the tempest, this really helped me get a full understanding of how dramatic the play is and how we can represent that through our own tableau’s. I learned that in the play most of the scenes there are some weird or unusual characters, so to go along with that most of our scenes had to be acted very weirdly or had to me dramatic enough to show that these characters are different. I definitely got a better sense of the type of play this was and how we could incorporate this with our knowledge of New France.

There was a second thing we did which was act out little parts of the play in tableau form so we could get a sense of the speed and how it would work with multiple actors. We were able to go from one setting to the other fairly quickly, but we got better as time went on.

In the end our tableaus went very well, we had everything down and we even had costumes ( the costume part was very cool). This was a great opportunity to show what we had learned about New France and the Tempest and was a good challenge that was tough, but manageable. I had a lot of fun making this presentation.

This presentation made me realize how complex these plays are and how bazaar the characters Shakespeare made are, but looking at all of it together now it makes more sense than ever because all the events we chose Made sense in the time line of history, and the tableaus we presented showed how The Tempest  works as a whole to show what the story was about.

That’s all for now.