There are always going to be projects or assignments in your life, whether they are work or school related, that you don’t understand or are confused on. You are going to be unsure of what the expectations are and what exactly you need to produce. The Macbeth project I just completed was one of those projects for me. 

We started our first few days of the project by learning about “Avatar” and taking notes on the movie. Then we switched pretty abruptly to “Macbeth”, only being told our end product would have to connect the two. For the next week or two we started learning about theme, and the importance it has in Shakespeare’s work, specifically “Macbeth”. This was the important work that would set me up for our final product, which I was still unclear about. I found because I wasn’t sure what I was going to produce, I also was unaware of what information was going to be useful. Thankfully I was able to retain the information I learned for when it was time to put it to use.

One of the biggest things I learned during this time was that a theme can’t merely be appearance vs reality. It has to be a statement such as, appearances can deceive us from reality. This was a harder concept for me to grasp at the beginning, only because I found it difficult to read a piece of text, then pick out what the overall theme was. This was something we worked on through our, quote analysis assignments. At first I was finding it more difficult analyze the piece of text we were given to identify the theme it portrayed, but as we did more I found I was starting to understand it better. 

After this point we were given basic instructions to our project, however we had a substitute teacher for the rest of the week. This made it difficult to ask clarifying questions as to what was expected. As the week went by I started to notice that everyone I talked to had a different idea of what we needed to complete for the end of the week. I did my best to complete what I thought was expected. However the deadline of the exhibition kept looming closer and closer.

At this point I had a revised version of “Macbeth” scene 7 act 1. I had modernized some of the language and detail in the plot. One of the parts I was most confused on was how much of Shakespeare’s language I should be changing. I didn’t know if I had to rewrite all of the scene or just parts. In the end I decided to just change a few words to match the new plot. This was the right call on my part. As I learned later the idea was to keep Shakespeare’s work and words but express the scene in a modern way, by setting a different scene or changing character roles. The whole idea behind the project was to show how the themes Shakespeare wrote about so long ago are still present in our lives today. A specific comparison we were to use were the themes from Avatar, a movie that was written only a few years ago. 

One of the scariest parts, but one that I find most memorable and most beneficial to my learning was actually preforming the scene I studied live in front of an audience. The thought of having to memorize lines, especially ones written in old english really scared me. Memorization has never been a strong point for me, so having to preform in front of people pushed me outside of my comfort zone. At the time I recognized I was being pushed and it just made me more determined to memorize my lines. We were told we were aloud to have discreet little cheats, where are lines are written somewhere we can read. However I was so determined not to have a cheat, I went home and practiced over and over again. To be honest this was the part I was most scared of, forgetting my lines onstage and not having them memorized. When it came down to the performance I was really proud of what I created and preformed for the audience. I was able to go outside my comfort zone and use that as determination to complete this step of the project to the best of my ability.

This was a slow going project that definitely had bumps in the road and moments where I was confused, scared or hesitated in my decisions. These all led to a final product where I ended up being very proud of what I had accomplished. Being able to push through all the bumps and trust myself in this process was huge. I know there are going to be more confusing projects in my life where I’m unsure of what to do, but what I learned from this is to trust myself and work through the problems.