We’ve done it to Strictly, to Doctor Who and to EastEnders, now we’re doing it to Shakespeare. Britain’s cultural icons are becoming putty in the hands of a new young generation of digital dynamos!
Shakespeare was the ultimate story-teller and his plays have a universal resonance, but many young people struggle with the language.
So we are challenging teenagers to take Shakespeare’s canon by the scruff of the neck and experiment. Using ‘ShakeItUp’, which is on the BBC’s creativity website Mixital, they’ll be able to play with locations, characters and dialogue. They’ll find the basic Shakespearean ingredients there and be able to mix them up and make them their own. They can then give famous scenes a fresh, contemporary twist.
Last week we brought a group of Year 10 pupils into New Broadcasting House to try out the ShakeItUp tool. At the beginning, most of them said they thought Shakespeare was boring or difficult to understand, but within a few hours of designing their own scenes from Macbeth there was a real buzz in the room.
Purists don’t be alarmed! We believe taking the Bard and shaking him up is one incredibly powerful way to help youngsters engage with his work. If we can succeed in persuading any young person, disillusioned with Shakespeare to change their mind, I feel we will have achieved our aim.
To try out the tool, my colleague Jon Howard, Executive Product Manager for Digital Creativity, offered the teenagers three scenes from Macbeth for them to ‘mash-up’: the witches’ scene; the dagger scene and; Lady Macbeth going mad. The youngsters quickly learned how to manipulate the characters and write dialogue to create 'playlets' of their own.
By the end of the afternoon, they were writing a whole scene, on the theme of ‘What would you be prepared to do to fulfill your ambition?’
I was impressed by the results. Suddenly the story of Macbeth was no longer just about an archaic Scottish king, but modern tales of ruthless ambition and the descent into evil.
Jon also took the youngsters through a reverse exercise, ‘translating’ modern dialogue from films like the Lion King and The Hunger Games into Shakespear-ese. In a very short space of time we had them writing their own Shakespearean style dialogue in iambic pentameter and having a good laugh along the way!
We were joined for part of it by Director-General Tony Hall who chatted with them about Shakespeare, ‘ShakeItUp’ and telling stories in new, digital ways.
As the project rolls out, the material teenagers create can be uploaded to the Mixital site. The army of aspiring directors can then get instant feed-back from their peers, who can in turn take any project and build on it to create another version, and another.
Teenagers are consuming online all the time; the challenge is how to help them become more active, creative participants. They may be daunted by the array of sophisticated games and experiences available and not know how to start making their own. We believe the Mixital platform is the place to begin, so eventually they will be armed with the tools to construct new creations online. By the time they leave school or college be a step closer to filling the thousands of job vacancies in the digital world.
ShakeItUp is part of the Shakespeare Lives festival, an international online festival celebrating the 400th anniversary of Britain’s most revered playwright. The festival is a unique partnership between the BBC and the British Council together with Shakespeare’s Globe, the British Film Institute, the Royal Shakespeare Company, Hay Festivals and the Royal Opera House. Together we hope the festival can stretch the globe and reach new audiences who otherwise wouldn’t be engaged by the Bard.
We're encouraging users of ShakeItUp, their schools or organisations to share their work and get themselves noticed. We’ll be sharing the best and most interesting creations submitted between 23rd-30th May on social media - anyone can take part.
Martin Wilson is Head of Product Digital Creativity
- Shake it Up lets you remix the work of the Bard. Cast a scene, give it your own spin and invent new endings by visiting Mixital.co.uk
- Read more about Mixital.co.uk on the BBC Internet Blog
