TotalEnergies Corporate Foundation, main sponsor of the cultural initiatives department of the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence, Passerelles

Passerelles, the educational and socio-artistic service of the Festival d’Aix, was created in 2007. For more than 15 years now, Passerelles has been working to promote the inclusivity of a diverse population and offers many activities including mediation, awareness and amateur arts practice throughout the year, in liaison with the municipality and the Sud-PACA region.

Every year, the program offers hundreds of free workshops, adapted to a broad target audience - children and adolescents from associative, educational, health and social structures - developed with its local partners and led by multidisciplinary artists and educators. These awareness-raising programs include artistic and creative workshops (choral singing, writing, art and visual arts, theatre, dance, etc.), meetings with technical teams, musical events and meetings with the Festival artists.

TotalEnergies Corporate Foundation supports three programs in particular:

• The Technical Professions course: Discover opera through its backstage professions
  Tailored to local organizations for professional integration and support and to programs for customized vocational training, this course is built around a series of encounters between the Festival’s technical teams and participants (high-school students, apprentices, and adults looking to (re-)enter the job market), who wish to learn about various skills and professions in the performing arts.
• The Discovering Opera course: Expressing personal views and experimenting by yourself
  This course is designed to provide members of the public who do not have access to the world of Opera with the keys to understand and appreciate a performance so they can attend and enjoy it. Discovering the performances is also an opportunity to discuss the themes raised in the different operas, based on the participants’ experience and perspectives.
• The Participative Project, a creative residence project for the 40^th anniversary of the Orchestre des Jeunes de la Méditerranée
  For the 40^th anniversary of the Orchestre des Jeunes de la Méditerranée (OJM), its musicians and singers attended a 10-day residential course in four partner educational establishments and care homes: the Jas de Bouffan middle school in Aix-en-Provence, the Metropolitan Apprentice Training Center - Aix-en-Provence Trades Campus, the Jas de Bouffan Independence Residence and the Astrée Center in Marseille. This co-creative project fosters meeting spaces for professional and amateur artists whose aim is to produce a unified and shared artistic performance to be given in public at the Festival.