Hello everybody and welcome to the first blog post of 2019! I hope you all had a wonderful holiday season and great new year, but it’s now time to reflect on what happened just before Christmas break. By that I’m referring to PLP’s annual winter exhibition.

This year being grade 11s, my class was tasked with a very different assignment for the exhibition. Instead of making a blue sky project or creating podcasts at the exhibition, we were to make an immersive experience about the 1950s. This would require the entire class to work together as one big group, which we’ve never really done before. We had one incident last year where we all worked together but it was just to form groups for a project and well, it went a little bit out of hand. If you want to know more about this other incident you can read about it here.

So let’s take this back to the start of the unit. When we ended looking at WWII and the Manhattan Project, we went into looking at how America came to the aid of Europe to help them out. We also had a chance to learn about how Russia or the Soviet Union I should say tried to stop the Americans from getting into Berlin and helping out their sectors. With this we were assigned a little task in groups to try and pitch what we believed America should do in this situation. My group decided that it would be best to take a diplomatic and peaceful approach but be prepared with military forces if things didn’t turn out the way we hoped.

We then moved into the massive topic that is the Cold War. But most importantly we looked at how Americans handled it during the 1950s. The 1950s were an odd time, this is because America was a very happy and booming place where the economy was growing, however there was still a big fear in the country of the Soviet Union. There was fear they could be bombed at any moment and then a little bit later into the 50s they started worrying about Russians being in America to spy on them. Americans were also very scared of communism taking over the world.

At this time we also had to read the Play “The Crucible” written by Arthur Miller. The play was based on the Salem witch trials in the 1600s but was written in the 1950s and was very comparable to what was going on during the time the play was written. The witch trials were very relatable to the McCarthy trials on communist spies (I’ll get into that more later).

Now it was time to start preparing for the exhibition. As I said above our task was to create an immersive 1950s experience through the gym. We would do this with little to none teacher interference/help. Meaning the project was all up to us about how we wanted to run things and how we wanted to present this at the exhibition. We elected 2 DRI’s meaning we had people looking over us and in charge of the whole thing. This was very helpful because if we hadn’t chosen people to be in charge, we would’ve likely struggled to get our ideas out and come up with a plan.

Our plan featured six stations in this order; a speech from Eisenhower, a party in a suburban family’s house, a communist rally, getting drafted into the Korean War, being in Hollywood filming the movie of the Crucible, and a McCarthy trial. Audiences of about 15-20 people would come through the exhibition with one or two guides who played a role in each scene while still being the same character. Meaning that the guide would be called Charlie Powell and would be a part of each scene.

We then decided who would be playing what role in each scene and who our guides would be. I was assigned to be the husband in the house party scene. Meaning I would have to go out and get a dress shirt, tie, and most importantly, a fedora.

Here is a video of the entire exhibition,

As you can see from watching the video, the overall theme to our exhibition was this “Witch Hunt”. We decided this was a great term to use for our exhibition because back in Salem there literally was a witch hunt, in the 50s the trials for Soviet spies could easily be considered a “witch hunt” and it also relates to today in that Donald Trump feels that he is the prime subject in a big “witch hunt”.

My scene specifically was meant to cover the topics of the Baby Boom, the GI Bill, the Perfect Family, consumerism, and the new cookie cutter suburban housing. To represent consumerism we used an example of a new blender the family had just bought. My character was very proud of this blender and posed with it in a photo. This led to my favourite improv line that I managed to come up with “technology nowadays is amazing, everything is advancing so rapidly, like the cameras, and the blender. Everything is advancing.” The reason I came up with this is because as apart of the new two guides story, the female guide would have trouble with the new technology as in the camera and get the male guide to fix it for her.

I really enjoyed how the exhibition worked as it was a perfect combination of scripted and improvised. It was also a lot of fun and a good learning experience to work in one big group as a class. For me personally this project taught me a lot about that era and the politics around the Cold War and the fear of Communism. It was also interesting to see some of the similarities between that time and the current political climate. I also learned how to create an immersive experience and the challenge of trying to portray a different time period. Overall I feel that we pulled off a very interesting exhibition experience and made people think about the viewpoints we were presenting.