Kara Visconage "Child Targeted Performances: Making it Worth the While"

Here we go! Here's the link to my final draft. (I couldn't figure out how to upload my doc directly so I just apple-V'd it. So the formatting of the paragraphs isn't perfect.. Sorry.)

Child Targeted Performances:

Making it worth the while.

Brigham Young University’s Young Company’s production of Henry V was captivating. Interesting lighting, contemporary top-40 music, dance numbers, and rap-like speech made me pay attention to what was happening on the stage. However, even with the strategies used to captivate attention, it was not evident that the child audience really understood what was going on. The fact that there was a war and ‘good guys and bad guys’ were fighting one another was clear enough. The importance of some major intricacies, however, may have missed the mark. This begs the question: “Can younger children relate to Shakespeare’s Henry V”? And even more specifically, “Are Shakespeare productions that target child audiences successful?”  If the aims and goals of child targeted Shakespeare productions meet the standards that educators would have for them, then they are more worth producing and attending. To begin: what measures success? Common Core State Standards lists several requirements for third grade language arts curriculum. In reading literature, it is optimal if a child/student can "recount stories...from diverse cultures...[and] determine the central message, lesson, or moral and explain how it is conveyed through key details in the text" and furthermore be able to "determine the meaning of words and phrases as they are used in a text"(CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RL.3.2 and 3.4). With these standards as a guide, four key elements come to my mind for a successful learning experience. A child targeted production if nothing else must: convey the major themes of the work through key scenes, captivate the attention of the child audience, and must create, as actor John Valdez explains, a “familiarity with Shakespeare'” and his style of speech and language.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1u5I0V_b6-UNBuop8cL2SGkWSAXDPiw4iPx0tVK7LmPo/edit