The Celebration: Performance and Festival
Section 4
Performance speaks to everyone; even shy students bloom with the opportunity to assume a new personality. Playing with Shakespeare's writing by acting it out physically helps even lost students feel their way through the plot lines. We prepare for our celebration throughout the unit by learning about the period, discussing an overview of the play and acting as a whole class through act 2.1, so that the characters and motivations of all three groups (court, fairies, rude mechanicals) are familiar.
The class is then divided into acting groups which each tackle a different scene of the play. Students volunteer or audition for parts and spend several class sessions rehearsing how they want their scene to unfold. A useful acting exercise before the groups separate to work is to have the each group act out one scene from another play with a variety of props. We compare how the different props, body movement, and emphasis create different experiences for the audience.
We create or bring in costumes: tinsel star crowns for the fairies, capes and swords for the court, and burlap bag overshirts for the rude mechanicals. Parents volunteer to help out our acting groups and send in costuming. Students also create collar ruffs from long strips of white paper, pleated, with hole punches threaded with ribbon. I provide a book on Renaissance clothing for the students to help them with ideas.
As a parallel activity, my students also learn two simple Renaissance dances, the galliard and pavanne. We use dance in our final scene, the wedding, with music from the Renaissance. Although we can not dedicate a whole day to our celebration, we film the performances over two days and invite parents in for students' performances. Other festival activities could include sharing food of the period, staging a tournament, or viewing a reenactment of period stage combat. Tony Beaumier's article, cited in the bibliography, provides a brief listing of other ideas, with the interesting suggestion of involving the Society for Creative Anachronism (SCA) in a fighting demonstration. Overall, the excitement of performance itself creates a satisfying ritual conclusion to our study of Shakespeare, leaving students with a desire to learn more about the plays and the period.
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