Abandon Hope all ye who enter here!

Coming out of either Chez Jeanette or Mauri 7 you find yourself in Rue du Faubourg St Denis. Overshadowing it is a mini arc du triomphe, in absurd contrast to the sleazy hustle-bustle that surrounds the school. There are fruit and vegetable stalls outside shops, dirt and old cardboard boxes lying around, always people slouched against railings, smoking and chatting and around one o'clock and six o'clock groups of multi-coloured students in a dense cluster around the heavy iron door that leads into the passageway and up to the school itself.
Last year the cobbles of the passageway were constantly chewed-up with never-ending, ineffectual building work. You negotiated your way around workmen and past piles of sand and rubble. Now, in time for the 50th Anniversary celebrations that went on this summer and will continue throughout the year, the clean, grey stones are attractively even.
At the end of the passage, after a gasp of a courtyard, you push another door, this time smooth, dark wood and find yourself inside the school itself. The posters advertising theatre in Paris on the pinboard to your immediate left have been cleared away and in their place is a fantastic collage of passport photos of all the second year students that have attended the school. Great fun is to be had finding first yourself and your friends, then the teachers and finally marvelingng at the fashion choices people have been making for the last 50 years.
It'’s amazing how you can tell what era a photo is from, not just from the haircut and clothes of the protagonist, but the colour of the reproduction, the fuzz and black and white of the early years, the sickly orange of the ‘60's through to the sharpened variety of now. I've found Paola, Joss, Jin-Wu, Jason and Christophe. I've laughed at my own photo (eek!) and checked out the people from last year I fancied. I'’ve spotted Simon McBurney, Marcello Magni and Lilo Baur but I'’m still looking for Geoffery Rush and Jessica Lange.
Then in, past a table with flyers and general info on Paris and quite often a basket of walnuts from Fay's, (Lecoq'’s widow) garden in the country. Past the desks where Martine and the other wonderful secretaries sit and into the corridor with the changing rooms and toilets leading off it.
Whoosh! And you’re in the grand salle, the heart of the school. I think it started life as a music hall venue and certainly in one of it's previous incarnations was used for boxing tournaments. There'’s a fuzzy black and white photo upstairs in the mezzanine level that looks down onto the grand salle of a boxing match. The ring is in the centre of the space, a punch flying, white light blinding out the action and unintelligible, upturned faces all around it, blurred excitement, emotion and action. For me it's everything about the school and that room. I like to think of those matches, old sweat, adrenaline and excitement seeping into the fabric of the building, learning it, aging it ready for the black-lycra clad students to come tumbling in.