France: Baroque Music Center of Versailles

AREVA Foundation is supporting the Baroque Music Center of Versailles (BMCV) to contribute funding a cultural and educational outreach activities program aimed at students inside and outside the school system of Trappes, France (Education Action Zone).

Cultural and Artistic Education Program
Cultural and Artistic Education Program

As part of a Cultural and Artistic education program, the Baroque Music Center of Versailles has joined with several schools in Trappes – the Youri-Gagarine, Le-Village and Courbet junior high schools and the Plaine de Neauphle senior high school – to produce an extract of Rameau’s “Les Indes galantes” opera-ballet. Students (junior high school level) from the BMCV’s choir school and student instrumentalists from the Versailles and Orsay Conservatories are paired with these students.

Under the artistic and educational direction of the music director of the BMCV, assisted by several contributors (a director, body movements teacher, choreographer, etc.), selected students are asked to produce this ballet act in its entirety, giving rein to their personal leanings, abilities and experience: singing, instruments, stage scenery and props, or costume production.

Working as a team, the students have gived two public performances to other students of the junior and senior high schools in February 2015, one in Trappes and the other in Versailles.

Rameau Year 2014, an opportunity to reach new audiences
Rameau Year 2014, an opportunity to reach new audiences

To mark the 250th anniversary of the death of Jean-Philippe Rameau, maestro of French opera in the 18th century, the French Ministry of Culture has asked BMCV to coordinate Rameau Year 2014.

Cultural and educational outreach activities for "excluded" members of the public with little access to cultural resources are being conducted as part of this program.