Salt Waves Fresh: Educational Resources
Salt Waves Fresh is an innovative ecological adaptation of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night. It encourages us to think about the relationship between literature, drama and the environment, and to consider how the texts we read (and study) might illuminate our relationship with the natural world. It also confronts the challenges of a changing climate.
Malvolio (Arminelle Fleming) and Olivia (Emma Lamberton) at the Salt Waves Fresh workshop in Townsville (2023).
If you are a teacher at school, university or elsewhere, you might like to use the materials here as prompts for a range of educational activities. Here are a few ideas!
1. Invite students to explore the Salt Waves Fresh resources as an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night.
- What changes has the creator made in adapting the play? What has been added, removed, or altered? You might like to compare characters, plot and setting.
- What local, environmental, historical or intertextual references do you observe?
- How do these changes add to or subvert Shakespeare’s play?
- What do these choices say about Shakespeare’s relevance today?
2. Invite students to reflect on how the play might change if it were adapted for their specific location.
- How would you adapt Twelfth Night for your local place?
- What aspects of Salt Waves Fresh would you keep, and what might you need to change?
- Choose a scene from Twelfth Night and adapt it to your local environment. This might include consideration of weather, cultures, peoples, events and natural environments.
3. Use Salt Waves Fresh as a model for an ecological adaptation of your own, in which you guide a group of students through a collaborative, workshop-based process of:
- Reading and understanding a Shakespeare play.
- Reimagining and rewriting the play to speak to the students’ local environmental interests and concerns.
- Reflecting on what this creative process means to the students and what it means for our understanding of learning and teaching.
4. Read Scene 1 of Salt Waves Fresh and consider:
- In Scene 1 there is a character called “The Local”, who does not appear in Shakespeare’s play. Who is this Local, and how does his presence impact the opening of Salt Waves Fresh? What actor would you cast as the Local, and why?
- What books do you think have washed up on this shore? Which titles would you include?
5. Read Scene 6 of Salt Waves Fresh and consider:
- Scene 6 requires that the actor playing Feste act like a cockatoo. Have different students demonstrate their portrayals of a cockatoo using physical gestures and sounds.
- Look at Scene 6 next to Twelfth Night, Act 2, scene 3. Which Shakespearean lines have been retained in this adaptation, and which have been changed? Discuss the mixing of the Shakespearean and non-Shakespearean language.
Feste (Emily Edwards) and Toby (Christopher Tomkinson) dancing at the staged reading of Salt Waves Fresh (Sydney, 2023).