Colonizing in a tempest.

Hello and welcome to my blog, this post is about our latest project in humanities Colonizing in a tempest. For this project we learned all about Shakespeare’s the tempest and the history of New France and threw them together to stage dramatic tableauxs that we recently performed in front of an audience.

 Before I go to much into detail about the end of this project I’m going to explain the process from them begging, starting with why the first peoples traded with the new comers. Before we started creating our tableauxs we had to learn about the whole history and events in New France we would be representing to an audience.

 So we began learning about certain events such as trade, wars and treaty’s. One activity we did after these lessons was write a paragraph about trade between the French colonists and first peoples trading. Here it is here…..

From this assignment I was able to reflect on what I’ve learned and learned more about this event. Which helped me later on in The project.

Another activity we did to represent our learning was create a skit that explained what life was like in a colony. In a group we wrote a quick skit that demonstrated the lifestyle colonists had. We had too then present them twice once as a pantomime and then again with audio. Here is the video of me and my group presenting our skit.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=b6EofXXBX7U&feature=youtu.be

After presenting our demonstration of life in New France I had a better understanding of the history because in way we brought what we were reading about to life which not only helped me understand the history but also how or what we would kind of do at the end of this project.

 After learning quite a bit about early New France colonization, we focused more on the tempest. We started watching the tempest and recording and demonstrating our work through our active reading activities for each act of the play. 

Each active reading helped me understand the plot of the tempest better and helped me keep track of the different acts and what happened during each one. Watching and reading the tempest helped me understand the story better and the language in the tempest.

After we had learned about both of the main topics of this project it was time to merge both of them together and begin to plot our plot of our tableaux. We were put into groups to write our tableaux. I was in a group with Noah and Kaden. And we were writing the tableau that would represent act four of the tempest and explain the event in New France history of the acadians (a group of French colonists living in Nova Scotia) being deported. At first I was a little confused of how we would accomplish the task of mixing them together, But with my group we were able to connect the two and create a script for our tableau. Next we also had to create backgrounds for our tableauxs, which I thought would be pretty simple but then I found out we had to animate them which is a little more complicated…. Originally my group was making two tableauxs for act 4. So Noah drew one and he drew the other while Kaden was in charge of the audio and parts of the animation. Later on we found out one of the tableauxs were cut so we used Noah’s backdrop because his was a lot better than mine and was better suited for that tableau.

After the backround was completed everyone was assigned tableauxs to act in and we then learned our lines. Which was a little challenging since our lines were in “Shakespearean “ language and was difficult to understand. But after memorizing our lines and some rehearsals it was time to present colonizing in a tempest. Rehearsal was a little difficult but mostly went smoothly with only small stops or mistakes. Soon came Friday night and we presented our play……

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(A link to my groups tableaux)

From our presentation I learned more about continuity and how to keep a play going even if mistakes are made.

Overall I learned a lot from this project, ranging from understanding Shakespeare to knowing major events in New France. As well as a better comprehension of work quality and how to continue to try even after you fail or don’t understand the topic or goal of the project. Thanks for reading, Kaia