Starting Shakespeare's "Twelfth Night"

Today we started Shakespeare! I'm really excited to do this because I absutely love the Shakespean language! However, as much as I love it, I have a feeling I'm going to have great difficulty learning the lines because the language, I find can be quite confusing and at times, hard to understand. So what I'm going to do to help prevent such difficulty learning the lines is read though them over and over and over again, and also not be afraid to ask for help from another student/teacher if I don't understand what a word or a phrase means or I will look up the meanings!

We found out that we are doing Twelfth Night by Shakespeare. I don't know too much about the storyline, all I know is that it is a comedy play. 

I also know that we are going to see a show of Twelfth Night, which I'm really forward too, because we get to find out what it's about, and we can see how professional actors interpret the different characters and see what we can use in our show! 

We did some exercises to get us to understand Shakespeare. Siou gave us some lines to say from Midsummer Nights Dream, the characters were Demitrius and Helena. 

We were put into pairs and we had to give ourselves a character to be, and when Siou said we had to swap characters. 

The lines were; 

Demitrius: "I love thee not, therefore persue me not."

Helena: "You draw me, you hard-hearted adamant"

When we said the lines, we got to play games with it, such as something playing the game to avoid contact and the other playing the game to get eye contact. I found this really interesting! Because just from using or not using eye contact, it can change a whole meaning of a sentence! For instance, when I was saying Demitrius' line, and I was trying to get Sophie's eye contact, it was a lot more intimate and made was I was saying a lot nicer and honest, however when I said the same line but I was trying to avoid eye contact, I felt like I was guilty or lying about something to Helena. 

Today we also worked on moulding our partners bodies to match the emotion giving to us. We were given the emotion unrequited love. I thought this was brilliant as I had found out that Twelfth Night is about unrequited love, so it got us to think about how people allow that emotion to take over their body physically.