Hi people, this blog post is about are project at school “Colonizing In A Tempest”. The driving question for this project was “How can we use Shakespeare’s The Tempest and the history of New France to stage dramatic tableau that help an audience understand the lasting effects of colonization”? We had to create a tableau (a scene of a story represented by motionless characters) based on colonization in New France, but through the words and characters of the tempest.
Before we even started creating our tableau, we had to first learn about “The Tempest”. I knew about Shakespeare and his plays before, but I could never really understand them. The Tempest was one of the first Shakespeare plays that I could really understand. The Tempest is a magical tale about a wizard Prospero (Duke Of Milan) and his daughter Miranda stuck on an island with the magical spirit Ariel and Caliban. From there, Antonio and Sebastien (who’s shipwrecked onto the island) attempt to kill Alonso. Later on in the story, Miranda meets Ferdinand (Alonso’s son) and they get married. That’s all I’m going to explain but, if you want to read the rest of it I recommend you do. Now, we had to learn about New France and how we can join both of those topics into a tableau.
I learned a lot about New France. I learned everything from The trade to the beaver wars and even the different treaties signed. There is so much information and I’m glad that I learned about it. I cool thing I learned was how the Acadians were french colonists who first lived in Nova Scotia And New Brunswick. Then, there land got taken over by the British. Later on they were known as the Cajuns. After learning everything about New France, it was time to start creating our tableau!
There were many steps to completing this tableau. The first step was to choose our character/lines. The second step was to try to merge these characters into the time of history we were given (For us it was the time of the beaver wars). Lastly, we had to create our backdrop, and find sounds to go with it. I would say every step had some challenging aspect to it. Finding the line from “The Tempest” and that would fit with the beaver wars was tough for my character. Incorporating all our characters together in one scene was difficult. I’m not the best at drawing but I tried my best to contribute to the background. In the end we got it done and it was a very well made scene to the play. We finally presented our play and it ended up being a great learning experience.
In conclusion to the driving questions 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, I think that I have shown the answer to this. With using the Shakespeare characters as the french and the Iroquois through the tableau. Also how we shifted the story so that the tempest story would fit with our tableau that we created about New France. That’s it for this blog post, next one will be coming soon! 🙌 👏👏
