Choreography, visual world and staging: Nicolas Musin
Musical creation: Sébastien Trouvé
Texts: Extracted from Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities
Artistic collaboration: Jean Bellorini
Lighting: Jean-Marc Skatchko

Production: TNP – Villeurbanne and Fondation UMA

Premiere: 6 November 2021 / TNP – Villeurbanne

Running time: 1h10
Suitable for school audiences

More than a sport, Skateboard has always been a culture, a way of living and inhabiting the world. Tolerated and irreverent, carrying a set of ritual acts tied to an adolescent sociability, skaters reinvent the city and rewrite it. Free and clear-eyed, they move through urban space along dynamics of push, of pull and of struggle against gravity. In their own way, they dance.

Nicolas Musin draws on this imagination to create a show at the crossroads of public space and the arts of movement. Jean Bellorini, who places transmission and youth at the heart of his artistic project, breathes into it the poetry of words, with extracts from Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, an atlas of cities that can only exist in dreams. Archipel is the urban tale of sixteen young actors, riders, tracers and dancers, made of words, figures and projections, at the crossroads of languages. A long urban sentence, a score with its rhythms, its scansion, its stammers, its dissonances. A call to the imagination, resolutely contemporary and timeless.