France/To give students a taste for the theater, a class from the Lycée Janot in Sens is twinned with the Comédie-Française

A second-year preparatory class at the Lycée de Sens, in the Yonne region, is being twinned with the Comédie-Française this year. It's an unprecedented partnership for the Lycée, which this year is one of 47 schools worldwide to be twinned with the famous public institution.

On the program: theater workshops, reviews of plays performed in Paris, discovery of professions and backstage tours. A world of theater, and even more so of the Comédie-Française, totally unknown to these high school students from the Yonne region.

A competition organized by the Comédie-Française

And what better way to understand theater than to play? The 14 students of the lycée de Sens's seconde prépa are taking part in a competition organized by the Comédie-Française , entitled "Young people pay tribute to Molière", a ten-minute video featuring dialogues composed entirely of Molière's lines. In turn, these phrases are spoken in a language that is 400 years old, then they try to retell the dialogue, in their own words. In this scenario, the students end up tagging a high school wall with Molières' verses, before being confounded by the principal. This acting exercise has its virtues," explains Thomas Roy, actor and director. He works with the Isabelle Starkier company, in residence at the Sens theater, as part of the CLEA (local contract for artistic education in the Grand Sénonais region): " Making theater implies paying attention to each other", explains Thomas Roy, "it's not a question of putting oneself in danger, but of exposing a form of intimacy by showing oneself and performing in front of others. And it's also about paying attention to others in the sense that we're watching them."

Young people from Sénonais who have never been to Paris

This twinning with the Comédie-Française will enable the high-school students to take part in workshops with a member of the Parisian institution, to discover the art of the theater and, of course, to learn more about the art of acting.art of theater and, of course, to see three plays, adds Sandy Vercruyssen, the literature and theater teacher behind the twinning: "I think that theater is unfortunately not very much part of their reality. We're only 55 minutes from Paris, and every time we take students there, many of them have never been to Paris. So, already, it's an outing to Paris and it's part of the theatrical outing for us adults."

Parents' pride

Work on theater at Sens high school is already bearing fruit. " My greatest triumph", the teacher enthuses, *"is the fact that some of my first-year students, whom I had last year, are now telling me - madam!Last year, they said to me: "Madame, can you remind me where to go? Because on Sunday, I'd like to go to the Comédie-Française and get a free ticket. Because therethere are free tickets for under-26s**every Monday. These are *suchwonderful victories, because it means they're entitled to them. And the parents are very proud. It makes them proud that their children are going there and doing things that they didn't do at their age and would probably have liked to do."

In a few years' time, the Lycée Janot plans to set up a theater section leading to a specialized baccalaureate(S2TMD).

Source: www.francebleu.fr/