BMW 2020: For the Love of Shakespeare
Discover how a KC community reimagined its Book and Music Week traditions during the pandemic, bringing Shakespeare and the arts to life in bold, creative new ways.
This unprecedented crisis sparked our creative expressions, inner exploration and social connection in varied ways that were new to us! As a KC community, we gave thanks for the hope we saw in those opportunities and reinvented the long-standing KC tradition of Book and Music Week to ensure that the love of books, music, the arts, and of course, William Shakespeare could still be experienced and celebrated.
And what a reinvention it was! From the black box being turned into our very own live streaming studio to the the students gathering in their class for the BMW mass dance to I Just Can’t Wait to be King from Disney’s The Lion King. Based on Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Shakespeare could never have imagined this funky reinterpretation which made the spirits of KCians swing and dance to the upbeat song!
Despite being limited to their classrooms, students displayed immense creativity in bringing characters in Shakespearean plays alive! Spot the characters as they catwalk through the corridors.
These were no longer ordinary classrooms after being transformed by our innovative and artistic ‘interior’ designers into the rooms of Shakespeare’s characters.
In many ways, the pandemic provided us opportunities to slow down and reflect, and then to reimagine and reinvent. Covid allowed us to pause and reflect, to look closely at what we do and ask: Is this necessary? Does it need to be changed? How can we change it? Covid showed us new ways of celebrating the importance of the arts in our lives!