How can we use Shakespeare’s ‘The Tempest’ and the history of New France to stage dramatic tableaus that help an audience understand the lasting effects of colonization? Bam. 

I just hit you with our driving question for our unit on William Shakespeare’s ‘The Tempest’ and  the history of New France, which we had to tie together and create dramatic tableaus and everything, with lines and costumes and a very judging audience, our own family and friends! 

First of all let me just say that this project was one of the hardest that PLP 8 had ever attempted. We were trying to learn 2 subjects at the same time, then tying them together at the end,1 subject being Shakespeares ‘The Tempest’ and the other being the Europeans first colonizations of what resulted in Canada. Basically we started by reading and watching the whole play of ‘The Tempest’, once we finished we stared going into the history of New France but during that transition Ms. Willemse left for a field study with the grade 10s and left us to fend for ourselves. Nah I’m kidding, we just had a ton of TOCs which was fun but each had a different way of teaching so lots and lots of questions were asked along the way. When Ms. Willemse came back, we had limited time to get everything set up so that’s when we did a little recap of everything we (were supposed) to learn. 2 weeks before performance date was when we actually connected the two and were split into the groups we were going to acting in. Thats when I realized that I couldn’t make the performance date because I had something else going on at the same time. I felt sad because I learnt all this, not for nothing, but for an amazing end result that I was going to miss. Nevertheless I wanted my team to succeed so I worked hard to help them with their lines and history and what was happening in the actual tableau.

I’m not going to lie, this was crazy hard and I almost wanted to quit this project as a whole. We were nearing the end and our team still hadn’t figured out which characters was going to be on stage because we were quite confused about how our part of history connected with our scene of the play. I was on the verge of giving up when we decided to seek professional help and ask Ms. Willemse. She suggested that we only have 2 characters on-stage talking about what happened in the scene, which was about how the French and British signed a treaty and how the First Nations were left out of it. We ended going with that idea and it turned out amazing.

Just at that point Ms. Willemse separated the people who weren’t coming to the final presentation night and made a little group out of them. I was one of them along with 4 others. Ms. Willemse had us make 10 second animations about the history section that would play in the background while the narrator was talking. Now at first when we received our roles, mine was the Treaty of Utrecht and the Great Peace of Montreal, I knew they were both treaty’s but I had no idea how I was going portray, especially in an animation.

On top of that we had to use an app called Explain Everything, an app that all of PLP 8 hates. This app has deleted our entire projects for no reason and always buffers at the worst moments. But past events aside I had to work with what I got, and using this app wasn’t the biggest part of my problems. I asked Felix what he wanted his to look like and he said he was just going t use images from he internet. I wanted to make mine look authentic, so I decided to draw mine out, maybe use a flag or two from the internet.

I drew and drew and drew and just like the infamous Michael Scott said ‘Sometimes when I start a sentence, I have no idea where I’m going to finish, I just find it along the way’ that is exactly what happened here. I had no idea where I was going to end up but I’m so so so happy with my result. I drew until my hand cramped up and then I animated. The history I knew well but I was debating how to execute it into an animation. This is my end result: 

This was played at the presentation, which I unfortunately missed, but it’s okay because I know that I did my part and I am amazingly proud of what I have produced.

Guys thank you so much for continuing to read my blog posts and keeping up with my crazy, weird life. Have a great summer everyone!

~Malaika:)