Opera house to be French center

Published 12:00 am Monday, January 10, 2011

ST. MARTINVILLE — The old Maison Duchamp Opera House in St. Martinville soon will be the headquarters for the World Studies Institute of Louisiana.

Mayor Thomas Nelson said the institute will be using an office on the second floor of the circa-1876 home, which recently underwent a $179,000 FEMA-funded renovation project to replace the building’s leaking roof and redo its floors.

Nelson said the city will lease the office space to the institute for $1 a year — a deal approved by the St. Martinville City Council at its meeting last week.

“We’re helping them out, but in the long-run it’ll help St. Martinville out,” Nelson said. “They’ll use a room upstairs for office space and we’ll keep the downstairs as a reception area. Eventually, we’re thinking about taking the whole upstairs and putting bedrooms to make it like a little French embassy.”

While renovations to the building were completed in September by the St. Martinville-based Modular Construction Inc., Nelson said plans are in the works to install a handicapped ramp at the building’s exterior exit, and eventually repaint the building’s exterior.

Phillippe Gustin, who sits on the board for the World Institute and is the manager of Centre International de Lafayette, said the institute has a number of projects in the works, including an international school exchange for French-speaking countries throughout the world.

“I can’t speak too much about it now,” Gustin said. “But our plans will be announced soon in February or March.”

Danielle Fontenette, who manages the St. Martinville Main Street Program, said she expects the institute to begin setting up their office at Maison Duchamp within the next week.

“They have several programs they’ll run,” Fontenette said, including the international school exchange program.

Fontenette said the exchange program, called LIASON, had been a topic of discussion for about four years before being launched last year as a pilot program.

“I, along with African American Board President Laura Turpeau, wanted to see students in the parish connect with French-speaking students of Canada,” Fontenette said. “But we also wanted to make sure French-speaking African countries participated in the LIASON project.”

When the exchange project launched last year, Fontenette said Teche Elementary in Cecilia was the first Louisiana school to participate in the exchange, but Fontenette said St. Martinville Junior High will be collaborating with schools in Haiti and Canada for the second year of the program.  

Fontenette said students from the three participating schools will regularly communicate via the Internet using Skype, a computer program that allows users to visually and audibly communicate using a video interface format.

The credit for getting the parish involved in the program, Fontenette said, should go to St. Martin Parish Superintendent of Schools Richard Lavergne.

“Our superintendent was the catalyst for this,” Fontenette said. “Mr. Lavergne said distance learning was key to opening the doors for our students to really expand.”

The program, Fontenette said, will culminate in the creation of a “cultural arts product” that will blend the art and music of the three participating countries into something new.

Fontenette said the three-way exchange is slated to kick off next week.