(My group creating a tableau for the play “Much Ado About Nothing”)

Over the course of three days, actors from Bard on the Beach came to our classroom to interactively teach us about Shakespeare and his work. I enjoyed how that we could participate in a variety of activities to help us learn. We could do small performances and then quickly talk about what we had done to better understand the play. However, it seemed that a few of the activities started to be repeated the following days, leading to it becoming repetitive and not as interesting. Because of the experience, I was able to learn numerous words created by Shakespeare and the different genres he wrote his work in. The performance allowed me to better understand Shakespeare by using interactive activities followed by discussing it as a class to better understand what was being performed. My favourite activity was creating tableaus of certain scenes. It allowed us to goof around yet be able to work as a team to decide on what we would do. After the performance, I have a better understanding of the play “Much Ado About Nothing.”  Although I still do not completely understand the whole concept of the plot, I now know more about the characters and genre. Luc and Ian taught us during their performance that there were four different types of genre including tragedy, comedy, history, and romance. The genre tragedy usually consists of loss or death, anger, and hate. The comedy usually has a relationship or love and is humorous. The genre history may be based on events that happened in the past or present. And the romance play has fantasy and magic, but is not about love. The play “Much Ado About Nothing” is a comedy because it is humorous but has relationships between characters. “Much Ado About Nothing” actually means a lot to fretting about gossip. Overall, the Bard on the Beach performance in the classroom was a good learning opportunity that allowed us to express ourselves and learn about Shakespeare in a variety of different ways.