Le théâtre de la nuit étoiléeLe théâtre de la nuit étoilée, or Theater of the Starry Night, is a joint project of all French classes, spearheaded by Madison's Jean Marie Walls Chapter of the Société Honoraire de Français. We have built a theater (and repaired it, three times), and sewn our own puppets. We perform every fall at the Jackson International Food and Art Fair. This past spring we took the theater to the University of Memphis Language Fair as a non-competitive presentation.
The puppet theater represents many years of work. We started in the 2019-20 school year, when we began to make sock puppets and earned the $ for the materials to build the theater. A friend of Dr. Spires, William Ide, did the labor for free, then we painted it - Jasmine Cintrón Soto, class of 2020, did the painting that named the theater. We then made all kinds of puppets, backdrops, and props. French 3 students made little skits as a quiz grade, and you see two of the best of them on this page. |
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We chose Cinderella as our first main attraction because it's a story everyone knows. Really Everyone -- variations of this story are found in cultures from around the world. The earliest known version is the tale of Rhodopis, a slave girl who marries the King of Egypt. This tale was recorded by a Greek geographer between 7 BC and 23 AD. (the source for this info is Wikipedia - I have no shame.) Charles Perrault wrote elegant versions of fairy tales in his Histoires ou contes du temps passé (1697). (This work was source material for the Brothers Grimm.) These include "Cendrillon, ou la petite pantoufle de verre." Our version takes much more from Disney than from Perrault, mostly to help our young audiences to understand the story as they listen to the French.
We also teach children the alphabet and numbers in French, perform silly skits, teach French songs and tongue twisters, and present fables from La Fontaine. In the future we will present fairy tales and legends from across the French-speaking world. We are currently preparing stories from Martinique. You see just how far we still have to go in learning how to use our puppets (the linked performances date from October 2021), and also in perfecting our roller-shade-scenery changes (you don't see the backdrops we created because the roller shade mechanism messed up during performance!!) This is hard work for these students - they need to remember lines and pronunciation while at the same time working with their hands to make their puppets come alive. We plan on giving zoom performances to our local school children and to area hospitals, and we will take our theater to schools and hospitals and perform in person. If you are interested in having us perform at your institution, let us know. This is a SERVICE organization - we don't do birthday parties or any other paid events. Here is a link to our mucky beginning - the first performance we did, for my sister's 4th/5th grade class in California, in the spring of 2021. (The actual performance starts about 8 minutes in.) |