Sunday, March 13, 2016

Stage Swordfighting


I have been interested in fencing for years, even doing a very little bit of it in grad school at Indiana, and I always use my practice foil as a visual aid when explaining the plot against Hamlet in Act V.  While I wished there were some way other than watching the filmed fight scenes for my students to experience the joy of swords, I really didn't feel expert enough to try to do more.

That all changed on a July afternoon when all the participants of the Folger Summer Academy gathered on its grassy front lawn facing our nation's Capitol, took off our shoes, took up our dowels, and took choreographed swings at one another.  Since that very moment, I have been plotting to do stage sword fighting with my own students.

My first hurdle was figuring how what equipment to use.  I knew I didn't want to use dowels as we had in the Academy.  I kept hearing variations of an explanation about how one wound up shattered and embedded in a student, so I began to search for an alternative with which injury would be as impossible as I could humanly make it.

Dollar Tree to the rescue, once again.  During Halloween, they had inflatable lightsabers.  This, of course, appealed quite deeply not only to the geek in me but also to the geek in my students, so I cleaned the store out and scurried away with my prize.  They were locked safely in my supply cabinet, and every time I opened the door, I grinned at the thought of what was to come.

Finally, second semester started and our Hamlet unit began.  Since weather in Mississippi in the winter is tricky, I booked our auditorium as a backup, but my true goal was the large open green space in the center of our campus.  Despite rain early in the week, by the time we got to the magic chosen day, the temperatures were mild, the ground was firm, and the sun was shining.  The students grabbed their chosen inflatable lightsaber, and out we went.

Just as we'd been taught at the Folger, I lined them up and started with footwork.  The students laughed as they tried to master the stance and the proper movements.  I ran them forward and backward, remembering the sage advice to "wear them out" first.

I showed them the five strikes and blocks, and we practiced.  As we worked, students passed by from other places.  Some of them took pictures.  Some of them stood to watch until their teacher urged them on.  Several of them said, "Man, I wanna take this class.  What is this class?"  My student swordsmen and women fought on.

Once I felt like they had as much of the basics as a 50-minute introduction with an inflatable sword was likely to yield, I told them to come up with a scene for us that they would perform for the whole group.  I walked around and helped out, took pictures, and generally enjoyed what I was seeing.  They were putting together some amazing things.  One group of guys had more background than the others since one is active in local theater and the other actually plays sword sports.  A group of girls incorporated synchronized cartwheels.  One group had two attacking one brave defender, and a group of four girls wound up in a carefully designed free-for-all in which everyone was dead at the end.

It was fabulous.  It was everything I had hoped for all those months ago on a DC summer evening.

We watched each group perform, and everyone cheered.  Snapchat videos were shot.  Selfies were taken.  It was more than a lesson; it was a memory.  Hopefully, they will look back on their senior year at some time in the future and say, "Hey, do you remember that time when....?"

At the end, just as my teacher group had done during the Academy, I had all the students take one of the Famous Last Lines from the packet provided by the Folger, and we all stood in a large circle.  The only instructions I gave them were that they needed to be loud and as ridiculously dramatic as possible as they "died."  Melodrama abounded.  Some went quickly and brutally.  Others drew it out in a way that Bugs Bunny himself would have approved of.  We laughed and laughed.

When it was over, we dusted ourselves off, collected our battered lightsabers, and went back to the classroom. The following day, we watched a filmed version of the final fight.  As they viewed, I saw several of them commenting to their partners about the moves of the fencing.  How could one ask for more than this?

Hamlet Gallery Walk

On January 25th, my AP classes did a modified version of the tone word gallery walk activity we did at the Folger this summer. We listened to Renaissance music courtesy of a couple of really awesome playlists on Spotify including an album from the Folger Consort while the students walked around the room inspecting various artistic representations of Hamlet meeting his father's ghost.  As the students walked, they left a tone word from a list they have as a permanent resource in their writing folders on a post-it near each.

The pictures were diverse.  Many of them came from my research at the Folger courtesy of Luna,
their digital image collection.  One was a cartoon from the collection of Hamlet references I am constantly collecting from various sources.  The final was a painting I had seen in the Pinacoteca in Sao Paulo, Brazil while I was there for a summer program four years ago.

When the students were done choosing their tone words and looking at the words of others, I had them move to stand in front of the one they thought most accurately represented Act 1.4.  They had to talk with others who had also picked that image and be prepared to explain why it was best based on textual evidence. Lots of them "bandwagoned," but all of them had well-supported explanations based on the visual source and Hamlet.

Finally, I broke them into groups of two or three and told them to create a "3-D painting" of the perfect scene to convey the tone they thought the the text indicated. They had so much fun with this, with pulling each other into poses, with getting just the right facial expressions, with explaining how the use of a jacket draped across their head or a foam sword helped to convey the feeling of the scene appropriately.  I took photos of all of them to preserve their work of art, and I put them in our Google Classroom for them all to enjoy later.



As we were wrapping things up and preparing for the trip to the cafeteria, one of the students in my 5th period class said, "Ms. Waters, this was just FUN. I was expecting this class to be boring because, you know, it's reading and stuff, but this was so good. And interesting."

That may be some of the highest praise I've ever gotten. Thank you, Folger folk, for making that happen.