One would be hard-pressed to find a place more full of cajoling than the entrance to the Lycée Français de New York this past Wednesday morning, particularly on the primary side of campus. Student after student had but one feeling to express: dissatisfaction, good-natured dissatisfaction, but dissatisfaction nonetheless! No matter how passionately I explained why school was open, students were quite unanimous in their longing for a “snow day”. “Sir,” insisted one young student with a smile. “I’m REALLY, REALLY unhappy. Last night, I went to bed thinking for sure the Lycée would be closed today. This morning I could hardly eat breakfast I was so disappointed! Why, Mr. Lynch, why?”
UNIS student Zoe Girod receives the Best Female Actress Award for playing Eve in Et Dieu Créa la Femme in Première Scène 2013.
Rest assured, this story has a happy ending. The exhilaration our students would have enjoyed while sledding in Central Park…well, they experienced that same delight inside the Lycée Français too, as anyone in our auditorium on Wednesday afternoon can readily attest. For more than two hours, in front an overflowing, captivated audience, 15 different secondary school student troupes participated in a selection process to determine which five should represent us at “Premiere Scene,” the 15th Annual International French and Francophone Theater Festival taking place at our school next Friday and Saturday.* Sometimes adapted from playwrights like Moliere, Rostand and Ionescu, sometimes developed by our students themselves, the scenes they performed were more than enough to make everyone forget the blue sky and white streets just a few floors above our heads.
What is more nurturing than theater?
And as I sat in our auditorium reveling in the creativity, compassion and comedy with which our students were performing, I was reminded of just how vitally important our theater program is to the education we strive to provide them. Is there anything better for nurturing our students’ inventiveness, for developing their ability to think on their feet, for cultivating their capacity for empathy, for sharpening their skills at working in a team, for building their confidence in themselves, for strengthening their relationship with language, for sharpening their memories, among other benefits? I would dare to say no, and all the more emphatically because we are fortunate to have such a talented, dedicated cast of theater teachers and directors at our school.
“Did you lose your coat?” I asked one of our thespians as he was about to leave the building after the auditions were over. “It’s in my backpack, sir” he replied. “But there are 15 centimeters of snow on the ground and the temperature’s below zero,” I pleaded. “Oh yes,” came his response. “Sorry, Mr. Lynch, I had completely forgotten”, our student continued, unzipping his bag and pulling out a coat, a hat and a pair of gloves which he then enthusiastically put on. Long live the seasons, I thought to myself. And long live the theater as well.
15 participating schools
*Co-founded in 1999 and organized each year by French teacher Nathalie Roussel and Physics teacher Frederic Yvelin, this extraordinary event has brought together more than 2500 students from tens of different schools. This January, 15 public and private institutions from the New York area and such cities as Paris, San Francisco, Houston and Montreal, will be presenting 35 unique scenes.
On behalf of the students who so truly appreciate this festival, please allow me to extend special thanks to the Cadahemark Foundation whose financial support to our Annual Fund has made “Premiere Scene” possible. Our deepest gratitude also to Madame Roussel and Monsieur Yvelin for their pioneering vision and to the numerous faculty members involved for their tireless commitment to the arts at our school. If you wish to follow the festival from the comfort of your own home, you can do so by livestreaming the event from this blog. And if it happens to be snowing outside, you will have the best of all possible worlds!
See last year’s results, here.
About the Author :
Sean Lynch was Head of School at the Lycée Français de New York from 2011 to 2018, after having spent 15 years at another French bilingual school outside of Paris: the Lycée International de St. Germain-en-Laye. Holding both French and American nationalities, educated in France (Sciences Po Paris) and the United States (Yale), and as the proud husband of a French-American spouse and father of two French-American daughters, Sean Lynch has spent his entire professional and personal life at the junction between the languages, cultures and educational systems of France and the United States. In addition to being passionate about education, he loves everything related to the mountains, particularly the Parc National du Mercantour.