With our project, we want to focus on the European reception of Shakespeare and his works in realizing a production of “A Midsummer Night's Dream” (including everything that is relevant for a theatre production like technical support, costumes, props, stage design etc.). Therefore, every partner from the European countries Germany, Greece, Finland and Spain come together to work on performing the already mentioned comedy. During the 23-month run of our project, we want to work on rehearsing and playing the comedy and want to focus little projects on the topics of the play/Shakespeare (e.g. biological realization of dreams, Greek theatre, Shakespeare in modern pop culture...). Shakespeare not only connects past and present, but is also commonly read in schools throughout Europe, which means every student will come in touch with Shakespeare during his or her school career at least once. Therefore, performing a play of Shakespeare presents a creative opportunity for students to get familiar with him. Apart from Shakespeare, our project also combines several different aspects of relevance for the personal development of every student participating. Besides deepening the understanding of the European heritage of Shakespeare, being involved in realizing a theatre production presents the opportunity to explore personal boundaries. Being responsible for costume and stage design as well as the technical support and performing on a “real” stage at the local German theatre, presents specific challenges, which lead to personal growth in overcoming them. Especially when faced with combining different cultures and mind-sets during the development of the play. The final result is a theatre production that will be performed on Midsummer 2022 in the Slesvighus in Schleswig, Germany. Every participating country performs one act of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” in their own language, whereas the fifth and final act will be performed by all participants, therefore creating a mingle and mix of various European languages. This represents on the one hand our uniqueness but emphasizes on the other hand also our mutual understanding of each other. The play will be performed/produced by the students, who are aged between 15 – 19, also including the local drama clubs at each school as well as various workshops on acting in every participating country. All students who want to creatively engage with Shakespeare and produce a theatre play are free to join us. Should students not be interested in acting, they can participate in multiple other ways (costume design, sound design, media coverage, advertisement, merchandise to name only a few). During the activities, we focus on character development and developing acting skills. A character like Puck for example, who appears in every act, needs to be recognizable throughout the play even when impersonated by different students. Engaging in acting workshops and experiencing/performing on stages of various National Theatres will broaden the horizon of our students just like getting familiar with different European cultures through living in host families and working together on a common goal. Surely faced with different obstacles and possibilities, all students will learn to be responsible for their own working progress, to take a lead and communicate/coordinate difficulties and results with each other. Thus they gain insight into a multi-layered working progress, which challenges every individual. Apart from hopefully winning live-long friends over all of Europe, all participants mature emotionally, psychologically and personally, students just as teachers alike.
With our project, we wanted to focus on the European reception of Shakespeare and his works in realizing a production of “A Midsummer Night's Dream” (including everything that is relevant for a theatre production like technical support, costumes, props, stage design etc.). Therefore, every partner from the European countries Germany, Greece, Finland and Spain came together to work on performing the already mentioned comedy. During the 23-month run of our project, we wanted to work on rehearsing and playing the comedy and wanted to focus little projects on the topics of the play/Shakespeare (e.g. biological realization of dreams, Greek theatre, Shakespeare in modern pop culture...). But due to the pandemic/ Covid-19 our plans developed in a different direction. Because of the pandemic, we were not able to perform any physical mobility. Since every participating country faced different restrictions concerning travel, we kept in touch via video calls to update each other on the situation and to plan the project a best as we could. Therefore, we focussed on individual work at each school at first. Nonetheless, we were able to create opportunities for the students to meet online. The students shared their experiences, their work progress and got to know each other. We therefore strongly believe that the work on the project led to personal growth. Even the loss of our partner from Greek created the opportunity for growth in the areas of flexibility and adaption, since we had to redistribute responsibilities. The play was supposed to be performed/produced by the students, who were aged between 15 – 19, also including the local drama clubs at each school as well as various workshops on acting in every participating country. All students who wanted to creatively engage with Shakespeare were free to join us. Especially because they could participate in multiple other ways (costume design, sound design, media coverage, advertisement, merchandise to name only a few). During the activities at each school, we focused on character development and developing acting skills. Engaging in acting workshops broadened the horizon of our students just like getting familiar with different European cultures through various daylong online activities. Faced with the different, already mentioned, obstacles the students learnt to be responsible for their own working progress, to take a lead and communicate/coordinate difficulties and results with each other. Thus they gained insight into a multi-layered working progress. Even though we did not manage to have physical mobilities or to perform the play as intended, all participants mature emotionally, psychologically and personally, students just as teachers alike, apart from hopefully winning live-long friends over all of Europe.