Tempest Choral Performance Project

William Shakespeare wrote the Tempest in 1610, six years before he died, during the dawn of the English Empire. The story begins in a storm, a tempest, which washes the passengers, Antonio, Alonso, Sebastian, Ferdinand, Gonzalo, on an unnamed remote island. This tempest was actually carried out by the spirit Ariel, and caused by Prospero, the former Duke of Milan, now stranded sorcerer on this unnamed island. Prospero, his daughter Miranda, Ariel, and Caliban, the only person from the island, are the major characters of the play, and it is from the dynamics between them, dynamics concerning race, power, colonization, patriarchy, feminism, class, and magic, that students built their choral performance projects.

Due to the performance restrictions caused by COVID 19, students conducted a choral performance rather than a collective performance. This means that we divided sections of the play, and students performed choral readings of selected scenes, which are emblematic of certain themes. These performances are called choral because we will be emphasizing the musical nature of Shakespeare’s language, as well as compressing the play into a series of scenes, like songs, and compressing a cast into a series of small groups, like choirs.