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Multilingual theater for education and intercultural encounters
La Cordée "Langues et Cultures du Monde", a reflective and creative education program run by Inalco in some twenty secondary schools, rolled out a series of workshops this year at the Lycée Le Corbusier in Aubervilliers. Under the guidance of Albane Molinier, some twenty allophone students were able to explore plurilingualism, French and share their languages through theatrical practice.
After discovering poems by Jacques Prévert, the students worked as a group to create a multilingual and poetic work. This creative writing exercise is in line with the French language learning objectives of these allophone students enrolled in a UPE2A class.
Prévert's language is accessible, and his poems tackle a wide range of themes, such as love, peace and freedom, in a way that appeals to students and speaks to them.
explains Françoise Orain, their French as a foreign language teacher.
The students then translated these texts through the body and into the languages of the class, through short theatrical performances. Tamil, Mandarin, Spanish, Pashto, the students embodied these texts in the diversity of languages that inhabit them. Not forgetting a voice acting in the language they are learning, French, which resonates deeply for these students freshly arrived in France.
We feel that the activities in the space and the fact of being able to freely share words in their own languages liberate the students, even those who are struggling to get into French.
Françoise Orain
Based on theatrical improvisation exercises, collective games and language sharing, the workshop space also enabled these young people to try their hand at the art of masking, while reflecting on individual and collective identity. Masked, the students were able to let their bodies express themselves and share fragments of themselves with others. The hesitation of a hand, the shoulders that rise: a real anchoring work that enhances the students' personal and sensitive expression.
Masks allow students not to hide, but to reveal themselves.
Albane Molinier, actress and host of La Cordée
Visits to the theater helped students broaden their outlook. A play about Pinocchio led them to question "the strange" and what constitutes us as human beings. A second play, somewhere between space travel and the big bang, invited them to relativize the central place we sometimes accord humanity within the cosmos.
Valuing collective and creative experimentation, allowing each participant to share his or her subjectivity within a group of peers, this workshop cycle is a singular embrace of the ambitions of the Cordée "Langues et Cultures du Monde", showing that creation and reflection can support each other in learning and discovering oneself and others.
