Strike a Pose: Shakespearean Tableaux

When students tackle Shakespeare’s plays in their English classes, they often do so with trepidation. Anxious thoughts abound, such as “Will I understand the language?” or “How will I know what’s going on?” For students in Danny Robles’ 9th-grade English class, however, these fears were assuaged when Mr. Robles invited the class to put down their pencils, push back their chairs, and get the Shakespearean language “on its feet.”

Mr. Robles introduced an exercise of tableaux, an active-learning technique he first encountered at teaching conferences early in his career. Small groups of students are each assigned a short passage from a scene and, together, choose a single line that captures the emotional core of that moment. They speak that line in unison and then freeze, arranging themselves into a tableau, a silent stage picture that communicates the power dynamics, relationships, and emotions without uttering a single word. “They weren’t just reading the scene,” Mr. Robles reflected. “They had to figure out, ‘Why are you over there?’ Or, ‘Why is that character here?’ I saw them like going back into the text, which is the perfect marriage: going into the text and then realizing what that text looks like.”

The class was working through act 2, scenes 3 and 4 of Macbeth. These are charged scenes in which Duncan’s murder is discovered and the Macbeths must feign their shock (and innocence) before a crowd of witnesses. It is a scene built on dramatic irony. The audience knows everything but the other characters do not, and the tension is palpable. Mr. Robles wanted students to feel that tension in their bodies, not just recognize it on the page. 

Using his own theater background, Mr. Robles demonstrated for his class what these tableaux could look like. Along with three student volunteers, he used the scene when Macbeth encounters the three witches to build different stage pictures. “Notice how the power dynamic changes depending on where we stand?” he asked the class. “That can change the story entirely.”

The small groups then worked through their assigned passages in chronological order, so the class experienced the story as a wordless visual progression: Duncan on the floor, Lady Macbeth staging her distracting faint, and Macbeth addressing the room with authority. The frozen images traced the arc of the scene with vivid imagery.

In the class that followed the tableaux exercise, Mr. Robles noticed students engaging with the text differently, with a layer of understanding rooted in having inhabited the language rather than simply read or analyzed it. The exercise asked students to think like an actor or a director: to consider motivation, psychology, and relationship, and then make all of those things visible. 

This tableaux work is scaffolding for the unit’s culminating project in which student groups choose a full scene from Macbeth and develop a complete directorial vision for it. They write a portfolio pitch explaining their choices, memorize their lines, bring in props, and film a final performance to be screened for the whole class. 

Each piece of this unit’s scaffold traces back to the philosophy Mr. Robles learned in workshops he attended early in his career co-sponsored by the Folder Shakespeare Library and the Royal Shakespeare Company. These prolific institutions posit that Shakespeare’s text cannot be fully accessed from behind a desk or on the page. The plays were written to be performed and people are able to understand them most fully when they stand up and say the words aloud. 

“It gives students a chance to take ownership of their learning,” Mr. Robles said. “It’s fun for me, too, because it’s always going to be a different interpretation. It’s funny, it’s fun, and it’s crucial for true learning and understanding of Shakespeare.” For students, stepping inside the text proved a valuable experience, showcasing that embodying your learning can be a path to the most powerful understanding.