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For school, we did a project called colonizing in a tempest. This was where we used tableaus to show our understanding of the historical significance of colonizing to answer our driving question; How can we use Shakespeare’s “The Tempest” and the history of New France to stage dramatic tableaus that help an audience understand the lasting effects of colonization? Wow, that is really long. Ok so how did we do this?
Well, we started off by first learning what tableaus actually were. For those of you who do not know, tableau’s are a group of motionless people who are staged in poses to represent a scene from history, a story, etc. We were put into groups where we chose a random line from a poem, and showed it in a tableau that we came up with on the spot. The lines used were from some of Shakespeares works. This ended up being a really fun way for us to familiarize ourselves with Shakespearian language, what tableaus were, and the people that we would be working with for the next while.
Next we learned the history and the play. This was not my favourite part of the process, however I think that it was really helpful and important aspect of learning. For this, each day we watched on Act of the tempest, and since there are 5 Acts, it took us 5 days. While we watched we did something called active reading and pre-readings. The pre-readings are these pages that we read before we watched the act. It was kind of like a Summary of the Act before we watched it. It also had definitions of words that we might not understand. The Active readings were these small activities that we did while watching the play. It was 1, to make sure that we were actually paying attentions and doing work, but it also helped us pick out words and phrases that we could use when we were staging our tableaus. Honestly, I think that the active readings were a hassle and just extra work but I do admit that it helped me understand the language that was used and made me process what was going on in real time, rather than going back after and breaking down what I had seen so understood it.
While we were watching the play, we also learned about the history of New France, and the important aspects such as why people wanted to colonize it in the first place (God, Glory, Gold), and why they stayed. This was mainly about how the Europeans colonized New France, treated the First Nation, started the beaver trade and businesses, created conflicts, and ended up solving those conflicts with a whole bunch of treaties, such as the treaty of Paris. It was quite interesting and at times hard to keep up. One of the more interesting things that I found, was that even thought the Europeans acted culturally superior to the First Nation, they still relied heavily on them in order to survive.
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Finally we got together with our group and created the tableaus by writing and mesmerizing our lines, creating backdrops, animations, costumes, music, and rehearsing a whole lot of times. We brought all the knowledge together and presented it in front of a audience. Here is our end result!
Overall this was a really fun and educational experience, and I learned a lot more then I thought I could. A main part of this was because I really like theatre, and acting and I think it’s a really good way to teach kids. As such I would like to end end with a big THANK YOU to both my teacher; Mr. Hughes, and Mrs. Willemse!