Our class recently saw the Tales of Edgar Allan Poe performed at the Center for Puppetry Arts. Now, I'll admit my love for puppets. I've been a lifelong Muppets fan, and I often put on my own puppet plays from the staircase balcony in my childhood home. However, my views of puppetry were very limited. I was excited to see the show, but I was expecting something along the lines of hand puppets or marionettes moving about a tiny stage with the actors hidden behind a piece of scenery. How wrong I was.
Rather than hiding, the actors moved freely about the stage along with their puppets. I never once, however, felt like the actors were overshadowing the puppets. The show was so incredibly seamless, and the actors became an extension of their puppets. It was a very clever way of performing Poe's works, many of which contain little dialogue. The actors became the narrators while the puppets performed the actions of the stories.
I also liked that they used several of Poe's short stories and poems and blended them into one longer performance. It became a riveting mash-up of his works. Mash-ups are quite popular these days in music, and the T.V. show Glee uses them frequently. It would be a fun and exciting exercise to have my own students create a mash-up of their own and perform it for the class. The students would have to find common themes or ideas that tie the various works together, and this would give them a chance to see how the same author, or different authors from the same movement, have common threads that run through their works. I could easily see taking several Harlem Renaissance poems or Flannery O'Connor short stories and creating a longer work to perform in front of the class.
I might even make them use puppets.
Sunday, February 28, 2010
The Canterbury Tales
After our class workshop, Toby took us all down to see the Canterbury Tales at the Shakespeare Tavern. I had been to the Tavern before and enjoyed their production of Romeo and Juliet, so I was looking forward to the Canterbury Tales.
What we saw didn't disappoint me; the play was funny, energetic, and well produced. Some of the tales were more enjoyable than others, but overall I enjoyed myself. What really stood out about the play, however, was that fact that they took several of the tales and updated them into various modern settings.
The idea of adaptation fascinates me. I'm not one of those purists who deplore the idea setting Romeo and Juliet in modern L.A. or turning Julius Caesar into a Western (Harold Bloom, I'm looking at you). I think it's perfectly fine to allow directors their creative licenses, and changing the setting of a familiar story often brings a new understanding to the work. The version of The Canterbury Tales was interesting to watch. I like the disconnect between the Middle English coming out of the actor's mouths while they wore business suits or carried a machine gun because it forced me to think about the tales in a new way and see the connections these older stories have with more contemporary books, movies, and plays.
Updating and and adapting a story into a new setting can be incredibly helpful for our students, allowing them to deepen their understanding of the play. Reading a play can be incredibly difficult, especially Shakespeare. With only dialogue and a few stage directions, the students often have trouble visualizing and comprehending the action of the play. It's perfectly fine for students to act out Caesar's death with foam swords if the purpose is to give the students the chance to see how Caesar is killed and the betrayal of realizing Brutus is there. It is not a "dumbing down" of Shakespeare (again, Harold Bloom, I'm looking at you). Likewise, seeing a familiar play in a new setting forces the audience to re-think their perception of the play and make new connections and understandings of the material. It's Intertextuality at it's finest.
What we saw didn't disappoint me; the play was funny, energetic, and well produced. Some of the tales were more enjoyable than others, but overall I enjoyed myself. What really stood out about the play, however, was that fact that they took several of the tales and updated them into various modern settings.
The idea of adaptation fascinates me. I'm not one of those purists who deplore the idea setting Romeo and Juliet in modern L.A. or turning Julius Caesar into a Western (Harold Bloom, I'm looking at you). I think it's perfectly fine to allow directors their creative licenses, and changing the setting of a familiar story often brings a new understanding to the work. The version of The Canterbury Tales was interesting to watch. I like the disconnect between the Middle English coming out of the actor's mouths while they wore business suits or carried a machine gun because it forced me to think about the tales in a new way and see the connections these older stories have with more contemporary books, movies, and plays.
Updating and and adapting a story into a new setting can be incredibly helpful for our students, allowing them to deepen their understanding of the play. Reading a play can be incredibly difficult, especially Shakespeare. With only dialogue and a few stage directions, the students often have trouble visualizing and comprehending the action of the play. It's perfectly fine for students to act out Caesar's death with foam swords if the purpose is to give the students the chance to see how Caesar is killed and the betrayal of realizing Brutus is there. It is not a "dumbing down" of Shakespeare (again, Harold Bloom, I'm looking at you). Likewise, seeing a familiar play in a new setting forces the audience to re-think their perception of the play and make new connections and understandings of the material. It's Intertextuality at it's finest.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)