中文
HOME
HOME / LATEST NEWS / Content

World Languages: French Opera Debut for the SHSID Theatre Festival

December 2, 2020

On November 30th, the French musical "Notre Dame de Paris" by the 10thgrade students was staged at the Drama Center. This was the first time for a French opera to be staged for the SHSID Theatre Festival, thus showing the campus' diverse culture. Their performance from preliminary contest to the finals won over the audience and won the Best Musical Award at the 2020 SHSID Theatre Festival. The combination of French and musical performance was a new and successful try on Theatre Festival stage.

This performance was a musical adaptation of "Notre Dame de Paris". The original drama is a Broadway classic adapted from Hugo's famous novel. It tells the hunchback bell-ringer Quasimodo and the beautiful Bohemian Esmeralda’s love story. The 10th-grade students adapted the original play into a "biography" of Esmeralda's self-discovery and redemption process.

The sophomores are all from the PBL French Musical Course. In the 2019-2020 school year, the World Languages Group offered French Opera PBL courses for the first time. This course combined language learning and drama performance. Through self-directing, acting, designing (props), costume, make-up, etc., students without any French background presented their operas at the PBL Show in January 2020, which was well received.

In the 2020-2021 academic year, the teachers of the World Language Group and the Music Group jointly opened the "PBL French Musical" course. On the original basis, knowledge on musical appreciation was also added to the curriculum. After two months, through multiple weeks of brainstorming, French learning, musical adaptations, script writing, etc., the students have been able to use standard French pronunciation to demonstrate the classical clips. They still have another performance for the final presentation of the PBL course at the end of this semester, so we invite those who are interested to watch the show and join us in the future to create more interesting courses.

PBL show in January 2020

(Written/Pictures by English & World Languages Department)