Hello readers, and welcome to my blog post for our most recent project, Romeo and Juliet. In this project we explored the play and connected the main messages to today’s world. Although the lines are hard to understand, the themes are understandable and can be meaningful even in our modern world.
For the first 3 days of the project, we were doing a few things over and over. We would first read the play itself, along with some help from the “readable English” on the sides. We would then watch one of the movie re-enactments for the scenes we just read. Some of the movies we watched were: Gnomeo and Juliet, West Side Story, Warm Bodies, and Romeo and Juliet both from 1968 and 1996. All of these were different, some were the exact same lines, but different setting, and some had a similar storyline but a totally different way of showing it.
After reading and watching, we were tasked on making a theme book that would allow us to really answer the driving question: Why does Shakespeare continue to be relevant to a contemporary audience? In the theme book, we explored the main messages in the act and how it connected to the movie. You can see my theme book here.
After working on the play itself, it was finally time we could make our version of play recreating one scene of Romeo and Juliet. We chose the final scene of the play where Juliet wakes up from her coma to find, Romeo dead before killing herself beside him. Our re-enactment was a scenario where the 2 rivalled houses were 2 big competing drug gang. Romeo walks in to find a fellow gang member ready to kill Juliet. They fight but both die during the fight. As Juliet wakes up she also kills herself. If you want to see the full scene (and you probably do), here it is.
I think Shakespeares is still relevant in our world today because although many things changed over the years, the topics which Shakespeare writ about are still very prominent today. Love, Hate, Racism, Conflict, and Power can still be seen now and Shakespeare made some of the best work to show it.
This was definitely one of my shorter posts, but it was also one of our shorter projects. None the less, I hope you enjoyed and see you guys in my next one!