En Scène: The Performing Arts at the Lycée

Theater at the Lycée: From Primary School to the Professional Stage of the TEM

 

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At the Lycée, theater begins long before high school. It starts with a child finding their voice — in French, in front of others — and it grows from there into something rich, rigorous, and alive. From primary school all the way through the high school theater option, the performing arts here are conducted entirely in French: a natural extension of who we are as a school, and one of the most powerful ways a language can take root.

Theater from the Very Beginning

On both our Ashbury and Sausalito primary campuses, dramatic arts are woven into everyday learning from the earliest years. For our youngest students, theater is a tool for building confidence, developing language, and navigating the bilingual world they inhabit every day. Standing up, speaking clearly, listening, and inhabiting a character — these are skills that serve students long beyond any stage. In a French immersion environment, theater is also one of the most natural and joyful ways to make a language your own.

Going Deeper: The High School Theater Option

For students who want to take theater further, the high school theater option — led by artistic director and theater teacher Frédéric Patto — offers a dedicated space to do just that. These students don't just study theater — they make it. This year, they brought Les Funérailles d'Hiver to our stage — a darkly comic burlesque by celebrated Israeli playwright Hanokh Levin. It is exactly the kind of challenging, layered text that rewards serious theatrical work — and our students rose to meet it. [Link to video]

Match d'Impro: Thinking on Your Feet

Not all theater is scripted. The Match d'Impro — improvisational theater — brings a completely different energy to the stage: spontaneous, fast, and deeply collaborative. Teams face off in structured rounds, building scenes from nothing, responding to prompts, and finding their way through a performance with no safety net. It rewards agility, listening, and the ability to make your scene partner look good — skills that are as valuable off stage as on. The Match d'Impro has become a beloved part of our theater culture at the Lycée, building camaraderie and creative confidence in equal measure.

The TLF and Première Scène: Connecting to a Wider World

The TLF — our curated program of contemporary French-language theater — brings nominated and recognized productions to the TEM each season, alongside master classes that give students direct access to visiting professional actors and directors. Our theater students also have the opportunity to participate in Première Scène, the prestigious annual French-language theater festival hosted by the Lycée Français de New York, which has brought together over 400 students aged 10 to 18 from schools across the U.S., Canada, France, and beyond since 1999. It is a reminder that the work our students do here connects them to a much larger francophone community.

A Stage Worth the Name: The TEM

All of this unfolds on a genuinely exceptional stage. The Théâtre Érick Moreau — the TEM — is housed at our Ortega campus in the former San Francisco Conservatory of Music, named in honor of former board president Érick Moreau. It is a professional-grade theater, and it sets the tone for everything that happens within it: the expectation that the work matters, that students deserve a space equal to their ambitions, and that theater here is taken as seriously as anywhere.

Why It All Matters

In a bilingual, multicultural school, theater holds a particular power. It asks students to step into lives that are not their own, to speak in languages that stretch them, and to work together toward something no one can create alone. It builds the kind of confidence that is hard to teach any other way — the confidence that comes from having stood in front of an audience and meant every word.

From the primary classroom to the professional stage of the TEM, theater at the Lycée is a continuous, living practice. And the curtain is always going up.