Another project come to a successful close!

If you have scrolled down on my blog you might have seen a few posts mentioning our recent class project: Romeo and Juliet. The driving question for this project was

How can we present a live audio story that makes an audience appreciate the relevance of Shakespeare?

In this Project we completed several milestones each connected to three different competencies.

Innovative Designer: How might I design a solution to a problem, process, or challenge?

Analyzing Texts: Have I expressed an understanding of how texts use literature devices, context and language to enhance both the meaning and impact the reader?

Take Historical Perspectives: How can we overcome our current concerns beliefs and values to understand those of the people of the past?

In the next paragraph I would like to talk a little bit about how I applied these competencies to my work throughout the project.

Innovative Designer: As a class you may know that we completed a class made version of Romeo and Juliet. I took part in this by being part of the creative team. During the making of the play, with the help of my team I was able to design a solution to our problem of cramming actors/readers onto the stage. A group member and myself took it upon ourselves to make a stage plan to fix this over crowding issue.

This allowed us to have place for actors when they weren’t acting to not cause overpopulation on the stage. We also split the mic’s up so that every main role had 1/4 mic’s assigned to them. Narrators, and sound team both had their own separate mic’s and everyone else split the two central mic’s. As the script evolved and changed, so did our stage plan and unfortunately it did not make the final stage cut as there were just way to many differences and no way to relate the two.

Analyzing Texts: I have understood the way texts use literature devices, context and language to enhance the impact of the text onto the reader. I was able to complete this by reading Shakespeares play, Romeo and Juliet. In Romeo and Juliet there are many literature devices that have affected the way the reader is impacted by reading the play. An example of this is when Romeo is heartbroken over Rosaline and that he will never love anyone except for her. This is both irony and foreshadowing. This is Irony because just hours later he proposes to Juliet asking her to be his wife and directly contradicts what he said. This is foreshadowing because again, hours later he falls in love with someone else who obviously isn’t Rosaline.

Take Historical Perspective: I was able to overcome modern day beliefs and values to understand the past in many different ways. One of these ways is by reminding myself that we are in 2021 and things that were socially acceptable 400 years ago, are no longer. Making a comment on how “you will make a lady fat” (with a baby) is no longer acceptable. Calling somebody gay as an insult, is no longer acceptable. Marrying someone and picking them for your daughter is also not acceptable. All of these things took place in Romeo and Juliet.

During the duration of this project we also made podcast episodes on what makes a classic and what makes an adaptation. If you would like to check out mine feel free to refer to the link here!

With that being said, Thank you for reading and I will see you next time!