Hi and welcome back to blog! Today we will talk about my experience with Shakespeare’s The Tempest.

In our version with this play we had to answer the driving question: How can we use Shakespeare’s The Tempest and the history of New France to stage dramatic tableaus that will help the audience understand the lasting effects. 

Along the way we did some little assignments that we call stepping stones. The stepping stones I will include are using ethical judgement to understand early colonization, learning to understand Shakespeare’s writing, and designing backgrounds for our tableaus. 

I will start with ethical judgement: 

Our teacher Ms. Willemse gave us a bunch of different scripts that were either written by Europeans or First Peoples. We had to decide if it was written by Europeans or First Peoples and then describe why. I was ok at this and often found good reasons why I could decide that this was written by a certain person. This was really key for my understanding of the driving question because this gave me the skill to see the emotion in a scene for both sides. I was able to tell the the Europeans were cocky in one scenario and scared in another. 

Next we have learning to understand Shakespeare: 

This one of the hardest stepping stones that we had. You realize that he was very deep and thoughtful with his plays. The problem is that you can’t understand his plays very easily. Once you get his way of writing the plays open up with new meaning. This was essential for my understanding because if I didn’t understand his plays I wouldn’t understand half of this project. 

Finally we have the background creation:

I was making background animations because I wouldn’t be able to make it to our tableau presentation. Even though I wouldn’t be at the presentation my animations would be featured in the background. My two topic to animate were the Seven Years War ( that lasted nine years ) and Treaty of Paris. These were very tough topics to animate. For the Seven Years War I had a picture of the 1765 map of North America. This map was zoomed in to the border of England and France. Then I animated both sides firing canons at each other and finished it of with the France land growing into the British. That was my short animation but it clearly got the point across. Next I had my Treaty of Paris animation, this on was a lot longer. This had a pen writing on some paper. Then the stamp came on and showed the French flag. After the paper folded itself into a paper airplane. After it zoomed out to a 1765 map of the border of the British and French with the plane moving and flying over the boarder. Then on the British side it unfolds and “says we give you land”. This was a important to my understanding because this showed how much I understood. This would show if I could see what the mood was and if I could see what the story was. 

Here are the animation backgrounds that I created:  Treaty Of Paris:761DF451-1F56-42DE-AFFF-1D9DE3463FF5

Seven Years War:D80DA11C-22D9-4E06-9505-FD00D3C91737

Finally we come to the driving question: How can we use Shakespeare’s “ The Tempest” and the history of New France to explain to the audience the lasting effects of colonization:

I believe that the way we did it was perfect. We had a animators and actors that had to mush the two of the topics together and recreate some stories. This way is a lot better because now the audience can understand our question in just one group of tableaus instead of two separate lessons.