Danièle Gaillemin

Our mum was a force of nature. Her time at Michael Hall, supporting and challenging her students, will be remembered by so many.

She was often a guardian, a tutor, a drama teacher, a French teacher, a fundraiser, a boarding parent to dozens of children and young people, a member of college till late Thursday night after Thursday night, a mentor, a regular on the Italy trips, a creator of The Ardente Company which got audiences at the Edinburgh Festival for school plays transferred there for a solid run (after a couple of nights on at the hall or the open air stage), and a creator of her own language.

Whilst packing up Butler’s Gate, our family home in the school grounds last August, where mum lived for a full 34 years, we found a book of thanks written by her students with the following sub-headings at the front.

English according to Danièle:

Has the salad been dressed? / Enter here. / Zap, zap, zap. / Unglue yourself. / Bon alors! / Come children. / Are you happy children? Say thank you. / When you direct a play, you invite me. / But of course. / Bon, lets go. / Exceptionally! / Where’s Nino? François? / Where’s Angela? / Where are my keys? / Be good. / (In all fairness, they could all have benefited from an exclamation mark!)

Rehearsal Time according to Danièle:

2 minutes = about 15 mins. 30 seconds = half an hour. 5 seconds, children = 45 minutes.

Danièle wrote a biography for the school in 2020 – below we have summarised some highlights from her incredibly full life.

Born in Marrakesh, Morocco, her love of grammar and high-quality education began when she attended a top French Lycée, where she gained her Baccalaureate. Mum completed primary school early, having been an eager learner and ending up fast tracked a few years.

Having lived a life full of financial privilege and comfort in Morocco, mum moved to Paris as a refugee with her three sisters, her mother and her grand-parents, and life was turned on its head. This was where she learnt that chasing/earning money was not the point of life as it could easily disappear: much more important to find, not necessarily your calling, but work that would fulfil you, and to aim for that.

By great good fortune, at this time she met François, our dad and the love of her life, whilst attending La Sorbonne University.

Mum gained a masters in Modern Languages and Drama at a very exciting time to be in Paris: the French Student Revolution of 68 which she fully participated in. What an incredible baptism of fire regarding politics, which our dad was integrally involved in.

Mum became a state school teacher in Paris. Dad was already very interested in Anthroposophy, and during her early years of teaching took her to a lecture by Francis Edmunds, a core member and founder of both Emerson College and Michael Hall School.

The lecture had a huge impact on them both, and when it ended mum asked Francis for an interview in order to attend Emerson. Mum always made an impression, and remembers him saying “You are in!” and fast tracking her to start in the second year of training.

And so the journey continued, from Morocco to France and now England. They packed up their belongings, into and onto their car in massive metal trunks, and together with Olivier aged 2 and Josh aged 1 they arrived in Forest Row in 1975. The plan was to complete Emerson before returning to Paris and bring with them these new-found Steiner ways.

Having completed her teaching placements at Michael Hall, mum fell in love with the school and applied for a full-time job. She was given it and we all moved into an old WW2 hut on the school grounds, (which went on to become a kindergarten and is now on the site of the gym). Aloÿse had joined her two brothers, completing the family. The hut having four bedrooms, a couple of boarders were squeezed in, which mum continued to have until she stopped teaching during the pandemic.

Butler’s Gate from 1981 was more than a family home. There were eight of us living there full time, but it was always considerably busier: a semi-official common room for many teachers, a rehearsal space, a chance to collaborate on designs for sets, costumes, musical scores. Lucky students got to do their Saturday detentions there, nominally helping with the garden but in reality chatting over cups of tea and slices of toasted Seasons’ sesame loaf.

Danièle loved creating and directing plays, teaching main lessons and sharing her love of language and culture. She delighted in enabling young people to discover their gifts and blossom into young adults.

In her early years at Michael Hall her French Mentor was Uwe Jacquet. He deeply inspired mum to teach a foreign language as a mother tongue. Mum would use plays, poems, songs and stories to teach French – picking out grammar and pronunciation. Mum taught classes 1–12 and found that the French culture and folklore she used was relevant and deeply resonant to the issues faced in the 20th and 21st centuries.

Mum was never off sick. When really poorly she would look at her timetable and always realise the next possible day she could have off would be a half term or a holiday… Even during the time mum had to take time off for cancer treatment, she continued to plan lessons and schemes of work which she had Aloÿse deliver, and then be quizzed as to how each lesson went before adapting the plans for the next lesson to cater to her students’ needs.

At the start of mum’s dementia journey, whenever asked by medical staff, she identified as someone who had been a teacher for over 40 years and was keen to continue to support new teachers and fundraising at the school, even long after she was capable of doing so.

From 1970 to 2020s mum taught in her own unique way. She was deeply inspired by the Francis Edmunds quote: “Education should be the greatest Art of all, calling out a better form of Manhood.”

We are grateful to Angela, Sarah, Dawn, Annabelle, Daisy and Lorraine for their time, effort and care in putting together this exhibition that celebrates a great number of the countless fantastic plays mum put on at the school. They were all collaborative pieces with so many deeply artistic, incredibly generous people giving their time, their expertise, their patience, their love and their care to make them happen. Mum was always incredibly grateful for the chance to put them on. She loved directing plays, and being at the helm of so many extraordinary productions suited her perfectly.

Aloÿse, Josh and Olivier Gaillemin

In the period between 1996 and 2018 I collaborated on more than thirty theatre productions with Daniele at Michael Hall, providing incidental music for plays by Brecht, Lorca, Farquhar, Goldoni, Sheridan, Dylan Thomas and Wilde as well as seven by Shakespeare. We mounted Menotti’s opera Amahl and the Night Visitors and wove Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro and Don Giovanni into plays by Beaumarchais and Moliere respectively. In addition there were two Gilbert and Sullivan operettas; The Pirates of Penzance and The Mikado, involving students, staff and members of the local community. Over the years we enjoyed the support of many fine musicians who dedicated hours of rehearsal and performance time to enhance the musical offering.

Diane Howard

When it was time for Daniele to leave Butler’s Gate we came across the many bags of photographs, albums, CDs and programmes that François and Daniele had kept as a record of her amazing drama career at Michael Hall. This spanned 40 or more years, where Daniele and many other talented teachers put on professional standard plays, enabling so many students to take to the stage, find hidden talents and especially forming a tight-knit class.

 

What to do with them? With a group of friends and Lorraine Jones from Michael Hall we decided to honour Daniele’s work by mounting an exhibition and have spent many hours going down ‘memory lane’, preparing this exhibition.

I began working with Daniele, making the many costumes, helping dress the sets and preparing for the ‘A’level Drama when that was introduced. We worked very well together, spending many creative hours around her kitchen table, planning style and colour to suit the characters and bring an overall harmony to the stage. We began getting more and more intuitive to the working of each other as the years went by. Sometimes healthy clashes would occur, Daniele’s exotic choice of colour versus my very English one, but we always found a compromise. Great fun was had going down to our favourite shop in the Lanes in Brighton, run by a very patient Indian family to buy fabrics, or visiting every charity shop locally for tweed jackets and cord trousers. We were also very fortunate to work alongside very talented people who became great friends like Brian Gold and Vicky Dunlevy who would design sets and costumes for us to make.

We were also very blessed to have the amazing theatre to use for our plays as well as the Green Rooms, Costume Storage and Sewing Room, we could not have had better in the West End. For many years we used the Open Air Stage outside the Mansion for our Midsummer Plays. This enabled actors to arrive and depart from many places adding much movement, surprise and magic to these productions, (we were only rained off once and had to dash into the theatre in all the years!)

Daniele has become a great, lifelong friend (with Nino Radojcin we still have lunch together once a month) and I had the privilege to visit her childhood homes in Morocco when we went together on an amazing holiday. It gave me a real insight into Daniele’s gifts and was so very good to see her in her own environment.

I look back with such joy at my time at Michael Hall and especially working with someone as talented as my dear friend Daniele.

Angela Davis