Performing The Tempest through Skype

I had the opportunity last week to help Cara with her dramatic reading of Act 5 Scene 1 from the Tempest.  She wanted to integrate a digital mediation in the performance so we read the play via Skype and the class listened in.  I think that it was an interesting experience.  There were several technological difficulties, but in the end I think that it was cool.  The students would have had a unique time because they only heard the play, they couldn’t see us reading it, and there were no physical actors.  It would be like “watching” a youtube video with your monitor turned off.  So the experience was completely linguistic.  This meant that the feeling designed by the syntax and the flow of dialogue completely controlled the performance, and when someone forgot a line or took too long a different cast member had to step in because the flow was essential to keeping the tone and “realism” of the play alive. 

I think that it was entertaining, and was a good way of getting into the text maybe even more, because stage fright was extremely minimized.  If I had the time I think it would be great to do more analysis of this maybe looking back at radio performances done prior to the “video killed the radio stars” era.  Thanks for the opportunity Cara.  

Making a Play

So, after much consideration and analysis Martin and I have decided to write a play based on our observations of several of Shakespeare’s works, as well as a few other key plays that relate to the themes that we are discovering.  I think this will be a good opportunity to synthesize my learning, and to put into action a few of the specifics that I have observed as linguistic trends.  We have a lot of ideas and plan to record our journey from concept to concrete on our individual blogs.  To keep them from being mirror blogs of each other, I will be putting in a lot of the back reasoning behind the choices I make in crafting the play so as to show the relationship between the things I study, and the play.  If all goes according to plan we should have the plot outline completed, and a handful of scenes for the play done by the end of next week.  As I post the ideas and progress of the play, please feel free to provide as much input as you would like.  This is a bit ambitious, but it is the overall end project that I hope to do for the course since it will reflect the things learned throughout this course in an engaging way, or at least I sure hope that you find this more entertaining than a term paper.