Concept, visual world and staging: Nicolas Musin
Musical direction: Pedro Winter
Texts : Kae Tempest
Choreography: Nicolas Musin, in collaboration with the performers
Lighting: Jean-Marc Skatchko
Assistants: Fernanda Diniz, Maxime Renaud and Chany Jeanguenin
Performance: La Troupe UMA
Production: Fondation UMA
Coproduction: Pavillon Noir and Théâtre Am Stram Gram
Revived in April 2025 at the Théâtre du Châtelet, Paris. Originally created in December 2022 at the Théâtre Am Stram Gram, Geneva.
Running time: 1h05
Suitable for school audiences, ages 9 and up
A multidisciplinary and inclusive show at the crossroads of public and theatrical space, Ollie is an ode to individual and collective freedom. On stage, a huge Skateboard ramp gives body to a liberating and electrifying show, mixing the languages, gestures, words and questions of today’s youth. The choreographer Nicolas Musin draws on their imagination to paint the portrait of a generation in search of meaning, in a show that is resolutely contemporary and timeless.
What is an ollie? The fundamental Skateboard trick, which consists of making the board leave the ground without using the hands.
After Archipel, presented at the TNP Villeurbanne in 2021, Ollie takes us into the favourite playgrounds of the young, revealing their ways of life, of gathering and of claiming urban space. By installing a huge Skateboard ramp on a theatre stage, Nicolas Musin creates a physical theatre of a new kind, at the crossroads of urban, sporting and artistic disciplines. A collective work on movement, energy, space and time, opening a territory between the real and the dream, a poetics of contemporary youth.
Ollie tells of the adolescent space of the Skateboard and of Parkour: a place with no name, on the margins of school and society, where each person’s subjective place is expressed through a challenge against gravity.
For a little over an hour, the audience is immersed in the imagination of these performers, poets of the contemporary city, at the heart of the bodily, visual, tactile and auditory sensations that accompany their close engagement with urban space. These words of Roger Caillois, in Man, Play and Games (1958), capture the experience well: a game based on the pursuit of vertigo, an attempt to destroy for an instant the stability of perception and to inflict on the lucid mind a kind of voluptuous panic.
Urban and contemporary dancers, seasoned in creation and performance, accompany skaters and tracers in this transformation of spontaneous acts into artistic gesture. The musical creation, under the direction of Pedro Winter, brings together the new talents of the French Touch. The tracks composed for the show, carried by a text from the British artist Kae Tempest, feed the imagination of the performers on stage, who weave in their own lives, memories and aspirations.
Press
Un choc visuel et poétique, un moment de respiration et de beauté. Une réussite ! (Le Parisien)
UMA a conquis l’audience du Théâtre du Châtelet. Un spectacle électrique. (Le Temps)
Ollie déroule au Théâtre du Châtelet une ode bienvenue aux cultures urbaines. Une véritable harmonie visuelle et musicale. (Les Inrocks)
Un spectacle éblouissant qui incarne l’avenir de l’art vivant. (Viral Mag)
Un spectacle surprenant et captivant. (Paris Capital)