Hello, its me again! Aren’t you exited to read all about my latest school project? …You are? Awesome! Lets get right into it then!

I had always heard about kids learning about Shakespeare in school, but to be honest, I wasn’t sure if they still did that anymore, but low and behold, they do. In our case we knew we were going to be reading Romeo and Juliet and then creating a modern abridged parody and preforming it as a class. having just watched the other half of our classes performance, we were definitely a bit daunted by the prospect but we knew we could do it.

First, in order to understand the message of Romeo and Juliet which was one of the big parts of the unit, we did some practice interpreting theme and creating theme statements of stories by watching short stories like “KitBull”.

[Kitbull theme study]

We then had to read the play, I chose to read the simplified/modernized version in order to have a better understanding of the story if not the author or language of the time. I thought the story was alright, not my favourite but I’m also not exactly the target audience or even target century so I think that’s understandable. Along the way we had some small assignments and quizzes just to make sure we actually knew what we were reading. 

After doing a bit of a deep dive into the concept of parody itself, we broke up into groups to work on creating our modern parody which we determined (after a lot of discussion) would be replacing the two families (Montagues and Capulets) with America and Canada. We themed the story around the stereotypes of each country and tried to make it humorous as possible. In terms of teams, I was working on the audio and visual side of things. This meant that I helped with creating backdrops, finding audio effects, and a little but of practical effects but the practical effects didn’t work too well.

I also worked on compiling the full script together although I was not assigned to do this, but I felt I could do it well and it needed to be done, as we had each act in a entirely different format. To help fix that, I also whipped up a easy to use formatting guide that I was very proud of, and may have been one of my better products from this project:

I was assigned an acting role too, originally our teacher was planning for me to be the second half of Romeo (We had too so that there was less stress on each actor to memorize lines), but I told my teacher I wasn’t great at memorizing lines, and as proof of that, I then struggled to memorize the lines I was assigned, and so I used a script during the performance and still got some lines wrong, so that’s definitely something to work on.

One of the biggest challenges we faced as a group was trying to make our adaption relevant to a modern audience, but I learnt a lot of the importance of relevance for a viewer, and how that helps them connect with the story though finding common similarities between the story and their life or the modern world. It just adds an instant level of interest from anyone who sees your story.

So in terms of adapting Romeo and Juliet we found that relevance through shared experiences, good storytelling and performance, and good planning were all required to help modern viewers understand the theme of Romeo and Juliet. 

My favourite part of this project was probably either creating the full script and formatting guide, or doing some stage direction after I was done acting. I think there is some room for improvement in said acting, some of the initial ideas and execution of the audio and visual side of things, as well as just my performance skills in general.

Thanks so much for reading, and I hope to see you again soon!