Theatre Goers

Twenty people, all connected in some way with WHHE, attended a matinee performance of Romeo and Juliet at the Stratford Festival Theatre on Wednesday, September 3. It was a great pleasure to be able to start of our year of living education with such a treat!

(one family left before the photos were taken)

If you're interested, you can read my brief post about the production at PeaceLedge.

Romeo and Juliet

A contemporary setting for first and last scenes. A period setting for all in between. Powerful tools for communicating the truth that personal animosities, hatreds even, consume and destroy today as much as in the past.

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An expectant mother, pushing a baby in a perambulator, pauses at a cafe table in a 20th century piazza in Italy, which is furnished with lightweight chairs and tables, awnings, and a red stone-paved surface. She silently orders a coffee and a pastry to go, which are delivered in a white ceramic cup and saucer and a brown paper take-out bag. But as she sits to enjoy her beverage, the chaos erupts around her. Here, swords and rapiers are replaced with knives and guns as representatives from the houses of Capulet and Montague exchange insults, blows, and finally gunshots.

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The action was more striking to me in this modern setting than had it been depicted with sword-play. This could be any modern city; it could be Toronto. Vancouver. Moscow. It could be here.

I found the immediacy of the violence alarming as I subconsciously relived, in a brief moment, places where I have seen similar aggressive movements, heard similar threats and shouts, felt similar fears. This was no artistic look at a culture long gone, but a comment on humanity as it is today.

It was powerful.

This production, seen with My Girl and a group of 18 others, home educating families, mostly, was a gift. We were so blessed to have been able to see it, to absorb the action, the drama, the atmosphere. People in our group drove as much as almost 3 hours one way in order to participate in the experience! Grandmothers came with grandchildren, friends from 'regular school' took an afternoon away from the halls and classrooms to join us in the dark theatre. The living ideas that flowed through the centuries from Shakespeare, through the players, to us as hearers, are innumerable. Now, this is education!

Romeo and Juliet

Thanks to a home schooling friend from HOPE, we are going with a group to see Romeo and Juliet at the Stratford Festival Theatre on Wednesday! What a lovely way to start off the new school year. At least 15 people from our WHHE group and many others from here in Stratford are taking advantage of this terrific opportunity!

Shakespeare

I was inspired at the ChildLight USA conference in June to revisit Shakespeare in our home school. I'd done quite a bit of it with My Girl earlier in her education: read the Lamb's version from Tales from Shakespeare, followed up with reading the actual script, sometimes using paper dolls we'd made to help us distinguish some of the characters in the history plays. But for nearly two years now, we haven't opened up the text of a Shakespearean play, not even the Lamb's version, because it seemed too involved, too complex and time consuming to make it work with two small boys interrupting and with our other schoolwork to accomplish.

Then I attended Lori Lawing's breakout session on Shakespeare and Young Children, and I was encouraged to open up our volumes again. I'll write more about her session later, but for now, suffice it to say that we are all looking forward to re-imersing ourselves in this rich and living literature.

We are privileged to live in a small city with a world renowned Shakespeare Festival that runs nine months of the year. This spring, our home school group was included in the Festival's school outreach program, so two students from our group were selected by a draw to attend an all day theatre workshop, working on scenes from Romeo and Juliet, then performing their 15 minute version of the play on the Festival stage. My Girl was thrilled to be one of the two to attend that day. She had a great experience working on lines, projection, theatre games, and, of course, performing. That was a treat that many only dream of!

And, if that weren't enough, we are blessed to have terrific neighbours who work at the Festival and occasionally gift us with tickets to see a production.

This year has been tremendous: I have had the pleasure of attending Taming of the Shrew (with My Girl and several other home school moms and students, through the Festival's school outreach program), Hamlet (at the invitation of a friend), and Love's Labour's Lost (courtesy of our neighbours). And My Girl, after attending Shrew with me, went with one of my friends to see a matinee performance of Romeo and Juliet (again, courtesy of the neighbours) while I stayed home with the boys. Can any Charlotte Mason home school ask for more? These gifts, the excitement of attending live theatre, the beauty of the costuming, the sight of actors entering into their roles...nothing compares with this!

My Girl and I are going to start talking in iambic pentameter with rhyming couplets if we don't watch out!

But then again, maybe that wouldn't be a bad thing.