Hey traveller!
Let me tell you a story… A story of my latest journey. An Elizabethan path that meanders through conflict, family and suicide. Thats right, Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.
In all seriousness, we have just completed our final project of semester one and its time to reflect. As said in the intro, this project is all about “Romeo and Juliet;” however, unlike most analysis, we deconstructed the language not just to understand but to create as well. The end goal of this project was to make our own “modernized” version of Romeo and Juliet as can be deducted from the driving question: “Why does Shakespeare continue to be relevant to a contemporary audience?”
After a week plus of reading and breaking down the themes, we were assigned groups and began working on our own videos. I got the pleasure of working with Driez, Jakub and Nathan in this project and after some weekend toil, we presented our video ” Casino Capella” to our peers.
As can be seen, our video was an Italian crime house take on this Shakespearean classic and was based around the assigned Act I. We had come to this idea after brainstorming and realizing we wanted a smooth classy transformation from this Elizabethan play so we centred our characters and themes around the idea of a “casino”. We also had to play multiple characters due to the limiting factor of our small group; however, I still think we made it work.
For the travellers who have read my past mPOL post, you would know that I think of this project as my most successful PLP academic experience as not only did I experiment with new video techniques but I developed as a learner as well. I spent a lot of my free time editing and drafting our video while receiving feedback from peers, family and teachers. We also got positive feedback after our showing and ultimately, I was proud to see my video on the projector.
Learning Competencies:
I also wanted to touch upon the learning competencies of this project so here they are:
- Connect Critically
- Construct
Big Ideas:
We only had one big idea for this project being:
– Texts are socially, culturally, geographically, and historically constructed.
To understand how we learnt from these ideas and competencies, we broke down the language to understand the themes, the setting, the characters and the writer himself. We learnt through group discussions, individual readings and completing various relevant tasks such as our theme books. Finally as seen above we constructed our own work with all prior knowledge being put to use.
Now I just want to finish this reflection off with about the concept of “Romeo and Juliet” itself. We have all heard of the name Shakespeare before and if not, at the very least know one of his works but have we ever asked the question: “why is he still relevant?” This ties back to our driving question and although we can definitely say he is relevant because we watch him, what exactly drives us to watch these 400 year plus old plays?
The first thing is simple, the characters feel the same things as us. We watch these characters live a life of emotion we experience and even if things are different culturally, we can empathize with these characters and understand their tragedy and joy.
Secondly, Shakespeare loves to include strong themes in his plays and many themes, like emotions can be related today. Take the theme of “family obligation vs personal desire” in Romeo and Juliet. In this modern age, we are often conflicted about expressing our own interest vs doing what our family or more specifically, parents want. Shakespeare wrote these overarching ideas that continue to drive society today.
Finally, Shakespeare is a pioneer. No matter how far media can be today, they all have each of their own individual connections to Shakespeare’s works. Shakespeare influenced a lot of the writings of his own and following periods of poetry and entertainment and those went own to influence our works today. It can be said that we are all standing on the shoulders of giants.
Now thats all for this post and I thank for reading till the end. All I can say now is…
Sleep tight!