In our most recent humanities project we took a peak into the mythical and magical world of Shakespeare. That’s right, we read, watched, and performed parts of the classic Romeo and Juliet. This was possibly one of my favourite projects I’ve done throughout all of high school. Right from Willemse first announcing it to the end I was excited and I learned so much and in such fun ways that it didn’t even feel like school. Our project was after studying Romeo and Juliet, to answer this driving question, “How can we, as Shakespearean actors, use parody to communicate the timeless nature of Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet”?”. As a class we took a lot of steps before getting anywhere near the parody part and that can be shown through the milestones from this project and how they fit into the core competencies, but first please enjoy my performance.

The two competencies we focused on in this unit were Communicate and Take Historical Perspectives. Specifically in the communicate competency we had to think about how we shared our own ideas when we spoke, wrote, and represented. This is the learning I’ll be discussing first.

The app we used to read and study the play

Now one of the really big milestones this project was writing an essay that answered a tough question about the story of Romeo and Juliet. It had to include quotes from the book, literary devices, our own thoughts (without referring to ourselves), and answer the prompt. This was one of the hardest pieces of writing I’ve ever had to do because of how I couldn’t just write what I thought. I shared my ideas, like the competency says to, through connections of literary devices and Shakespearean quotes. Click this link to read my essay. Another milestone was our weekly TWIL posts in which I wrote about my thoughts on the section of Romeo and Juliet we had read the previous week and created something to answer a prompt. Instead of just using plain old paragraphs I expressed my thoughts through a sonnet, a mind map, and a pro/con list. These two milestones plus my final performance are all evidence of how I shared my ideas through writing and speech in this project.

The other competency we worked on was taking historical perspective by overcoming our current concerns, beliefs, and values to understand those of people in the past. Our first milestone of this project was to ask “Why Shakespeare?” which was a question Willemse asked to get our brains thinking about why we study Shakespeare of theatre in general. I feel like a lot of us weren’t exactly sure where to start because a lot of us don’t think about why we learn what we do at school. Everything is just in the curriculum so we don’t question it but actually having to come up with why we study plays of an old dead dude isn’t easy. My answer was that we study Shakespeare because although plays and drama don’t need to be learned about he revolutionized theatre

Current day Juliet’s Bedroom

and everyone knows of him. Everyone should have some basic knowledge about every part of culture including sports, theatre, science, and so many more simple things. Although you might not need to know it, it is useful to understand. Also the final project itself involved me taking a chunk of old english from the script and modernizing it into a bratty teenage girl obsessed with her phone. Using historical perspective I had to update it so I could maintain Juliet’s thoughts while still making the audience understand and find it funny. This was a challenge but after a few drafts I’d perfected it.

I believe I gained a lot of confidence from this project especially in my writing. I’m extremely proud of the essay I wrote, the script I wrote, the advanced background for my performance, and the performance itself. I really applied myself in this project as it was something I got so interested in and I think it showed with the stuff I created. I want to continue picking the harder option when it comes to work, like I did with the timed moving background, because thus project showed me that I’m capable and when I do pull it off I can make really cool things. Overall there is only thing I would change in this whole project and that would be watching Gnomeo and Juliet (sorry I had to say it).

My camera roll during this project