In case you were wondering, this post won't be about a strike. Not that there aren't plenty of strikes going on in France right now. Not that I couldn't write about a strike if I wanted to. But it isn't about a strike.
The reason that I waited until this evening to post, is that Sapphire (it feels so, so, so wrong to call her that, but I suppose I'll get used to it) is a member of her lycée's club de théâtre. Mostly, it exists because high school students finish their high school careers with something called the baccalaureate (bad for short). For now, we'll just say that it's a huge test, spanning multiple weeks, that effectively shuts down all of the high schools a full month before the actual end of the school year. I'll write more about it some other day. It's also a very important test, because a student's performance on it determines whether or not that student receives a high school diploma. In fact, the bac is the diploma, more or less. In any case, the bac exam is the same for every student across France (again, not exactly, because it's determined by their filière, or path that they take through high school) and in order to pass, a student needs to earn half of the points available. Higher percentages result in diplomas given with honors, high honors, and highest honors. Clear as mud? In any case, it's possible to bump your score somewhat with certain types of extras: if you speak English fluently, for example, or some other (non French) language; if you studied Latin or Ancient Greek; if you are an actor or musician or athlete or a handful of other things you can take, essentially, a proficiency exam in your specialty and that score gets added to your total bac score. So, Sapphire's school has theater club to allow interested students to develop the skills (and knowledge) that they need to be able to take the proficiency exam in theater.
So, since the middle of October a group of around 15 students, one teacher, and a professional actress (who was doing this mostly on a volunteer basis) have been meeting for two hours every Wednesday afternoon to put together their performance of À Plates Coutures (Carole Thibaut). And so every Wednesday, instead of finishing at 3:00, Sapphire has been sitting in on the terminale's (12th graders) physics-chemie class for two hours (which I'm still not sure how she got permission to do) and then going to theater rehearsal until 7:00.
Last week Monday, the theater kids all spent the day at a high school in a different town, first performing their play for a group of judges, and then waiting while the kids who were taking the theater bac spent an hour answering questions about anything the judges could think of to ask.
This evening, they put on the play for everyone else at the town theater. The good news is that they took a very modern play, written two years ago and inspired by the battle of French female garment workers against the movement of their factories to Tunisia, and, with minimal costumes and virtually no props or scenery, hmm, pulled it off? Did a superb job? Made us all think that we ought to go out on strike? Convinced us to buy only French-made underwear? Anyway, I was impressed, even though I confess that I only understood about 75% of the script. The bad news is that my camera didn't like the contrast between the light of the stage and the dark of the audience, and so I have no decent pictures. I have high hopes that someone else may have decent video though, and that I might be able to get hold of it, because I could see several people in front of me filming. (And unlike mine, their cell phone screens didn't look like there was a supernova on the middle of the screen.)
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