Tableaus for Humanities!
The Tableaus for Humanities project is where the students, in groups of 3-4, make their own tableaus. What is a tableau you may ask? A tableau is a group of models or motionless figures representing a scene from a story or from history, which basically means that it's a picture with a meaning behind it where actors try to act out their part as much as they can with on single position. Our tableaus were based on our vignettes(stories) that we had to write in a group as well. We wrote our vignettes as dystopian short stories, what are dystopian short stories? They're short stories that are about the future and how it could be/how it could change if something were to happen to the world or a mass part of the world. We read quite a few stories before getting started on our own, my favorite by far was The Veldt. Honestly, I think my it was only the best to me because it had a song and just because of the meaning behind it. It really shows how you can get addicted to things and end up hurting the ones you love without knowing it. Also I feel that this a lot of people can relate to and can actually see happening in many other ways than just in the way that the story describes it, in other words it doesn't just have to be in a "smart house" type thing, but technology in general or even something as common as drugs. It really helped me look at the possibilities of how to write our vignette. After reading many other short stories, we finally started writing our own. Writing as a group was actually very fun but very different. At first, I didn't know how it was going to work out at all, we were given choices on how we'd write it together. My group chose to do paragraph by paragraph and then edit as a group everyday in class. I think this was the best way to do it because we had very minor hiccups while writing it. This way ensured that everyone did equal amount of work too, which is what Laszlo was worried about with the group writing. I really enjoyed writing as a group because I got to learn off of my peers and got to really know them too. It was a different experience but I can tell it did help me grow as a writer and as a classmate. The message behind our tableau and vignette is cannibalism. Our vignette is about how there was a nuclear fallout and a boy, Lucas Vandervitch, kept a journal on how the world was then. He states that they're cannibals but he wants to change. He let's us into his journey of how he stops and then cheats on his newfound diet and then again finds the strength to start over with a new family/pack. Our tableau shows Lucas turning down some organs from his previous family to leave with his new family and start over again.
This is our final product:
Here is our final tableau: