Performance - °Up, Le Phare National Choreographic Center of Le Havre, Normandy

With °Up, Fouad Boussouf champions his love of improbable and fruitful encounters. By bringing together Paul Molina, a freestyle football prodigy, and Gabriel Majou, an exceptionally gifted violinist and composer, he pursues the aesthetic and ethical quest that defines his work: the art of making worlds communicate with one another, and of bringing into dialogue languages once thought foreign to each other.  

To the sound of a leather ball bouncing, the pizzicati of a dancing violin reply, and Paul Molina's juggling finds a perfect extension in Gabriel Majou's closing reggaeton. A duo thus comes into being before our eyes over the course of the show. For Fouad Boussouf, the aim is even to orchestrate the birth of a new, two-headed musical instrument. In this respect, the structure of the piece is highly symbolic: setting out from their respective solitudes, the artists seek one another, lend each other their ball or their violin…  

And then, at last, each finds his place by exchanging passes that is, in the fullest sense, by learning to play "together." As it turns out, they shared a predestined common ground: the art of playing with one's feet, one with his ball, the other with his pedalboard. And when it comes to virtuosity, they complement each other quite naturally: dance is in the DNA of Gabriel Majou, with whom Fouad Boussouf had already worked on the creation of Vïa for the Ballet du Grand Théâtre de Genève. And Paul Molina has a profound sense of music indeed, the choreographer treats the sound of his percussion-ball like a basso continuo that sets the tone for the entire piece. We are, of course, charmed by the freshness of this duo, which never stops opening up the field of possibilities. But above all we are won over by the almost metaphysical experience that runs through the show: that of an attention turned toward the other, and of a listening pushed to its very limits. One must see the intensity with which Gabriel Majou fixes his gaze on the ball as though it were a living being. And the concentration with which Paul Molina follows the melody of the violin as if it were as vital to him as his ball. In short, hearing, touch, and sight join hands in a round dance here and we know how dear this motif is to Fouad Boussouf, as his previous show Fêu attests, in which a group of women dancers set the stage ablaze in a circular choreography that races toward infinity. After a piece for nine women, here then is a duo of men, and always the same obsession: to reveal what binds us together, under the sign of beauty

Title: °Up
Company: Le Phare – National Choreographic Center of Le Havre, Normandy / Artistic Director: Fouad Boussouf
Premiere: 2025

Artistic Director and Choreographer: Fouad Boussouf
Performers: Gabriel Majou and Paul Molina
Music: Gabriel Majou
Lighting: Romain Perrillat-Collomb
Costumes: Salina Dumay
Stage Manager on Tour: Romain Perrillat-Collomb or Yaël Vallée
Production: Le Phare - National Choreographic Center of Le Havre Normandy / directed by Fouad Boussouf
Co-production: Equinoxe, National Theater of Châteauroux; Mission Danse of Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines.
Residency Support: Magny-les-Hameaux Cultural Services, Institut Français du Maroc, Théâtre Riad Sultan (Tangier, Morocco)
Le Phare – CCN du Havre Normandie is funded by the Ministry of Culture / DRAC Normandy, the Normandy Region, the Seine-Maritime Department, and the City of Le Havre.

Instagram Le Phare - CCN Le Havre Normandy

Fouad Boussouf - Choreographer

Of dance, Fouad Boussouf says that it is impetus, movement. A definition that also captures his own trajectory, marked by an ever-alert curiosity and a constant desire to escape. His early years in Morocco, in an isolated village in the Moulay Idriss region, imprinted his imagination with family celebrations and a natural setting of monastic simplicity. At the age of seven, when his family settled in France in Romilly-sur-Seine

near Troyes, he discovered a new world whose culture and codes were taught to him at school. In his teens, he took up hip-hop, learning to the sound of Prince and Michael Jackson cassettes. What began as a socially valued way of expending physical energy soon became for him the path to a genuine process of self-construction, in which surpassing oneself through the body brought, as an added reward, the recognition of his peers. Between 2020 and 2022, Fouad Boussouf was an associate artist at the Maison de la Danse in Lyon, at Équinoxe – Scène Nationale de Châteauroux, and at the Maison de la Musique in Nanterre. Chosen unanimously to head Le Phare – Centre Chorégraphique National du Havre Normandie from 1 January 2022, that same year he received the insignia of Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres.

Paul Molina (aka Pablito) - Freestyle soccer player

A young athlete who dreams of being an artist. Like many young people, he started out on the football pitches before drifting gently, but surely, toward what would become his passion: freestyle football. This art of juggling brings together multiple artistic, sporting, and acrobatic disciplines, with a single tool: a football. Obsessed with this new medium, he avidly explores the endless possibilities it opens up—an art he now seeks to transpose into the world of the stage. A graduate of a prestigious business school, he decided to step away from that world and take the risk of throwing himself, body and soul, into this new artistic adventure, armed with the ball with which he strives to defend a discipline so dear to him. It is a discipline on which he had to cast a new eye—an "artist's" eye—in order to break free from the competitive framework in which a "drop" (the moment when the ball touches the ground after a failed move) is synonymous with the ultimate, intolerable failure. He had to rethink this notion of failure in order to portray a sport where a successful move is only possible on the condition of tirelessly repeating the same movement and hearing the echo of that ball striking the ground, over and over again. Paul Molina takes the risk of seeing the ball fall as he leaves the forecourt of Équinoxe—the place where his training began and has continued for the past four years—to share his passion from another angle: that of art. Paul gathers the flashes of brilliance and frozen moments of freestyle football into two shows: a sensitive danced solo choreographed by Mélodie Joinville, Portrait dansé, and another staged by Wilmer Marquez, Mouton noir, in which circus and theatre blend with freestyle to tell the story of his wild passion.

Gabriel Majou - Musician & Composer

A French composer born in 1992, Gabriel Majou places his sense of musical narrative at the service of image and stage. A graduate of the Paris Conservatoire in violin and composition, he trained in jazz at the IMEP and under Didier Lockwood. He then joined the Berklee College of Music in Boston (USA), where he earned his Bachelor of Music degree in Film Scoring and Conducting. In 2017 he received the composition prize of the Fondation Georges Delerue. In the United States, he spent three years as assistant to Christopher Tin and associate producer of the symphonic album To Shiver the Sky (Decca Gold, 2020), recorded at Abbey Road Studios with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. He also composed for the United Nations Chamber Orchestra and was invited by Melody Gardot to record on violin for the album Sunset in the Blue (Decca Records, 2020). In 2021, back in Europe, he created Le Spectre de la Rose in response to a commission from the United Nations Chamber Orchestra—a score for voice, strings, and piano broadcast for the International Day of La Francophonie. In 2022, at the request of the City and the Orchestre d'Harmonie of Roubaix, he created a Variation autour du Mépris for a concert paying tribute to Georges Delerue on 16 December. Gabriel Majou also collaborates regularly with several dance companies, including, in 2023, the Ballet du Grand Théâtre de Genève for the musical creation of Fouad Boussouf's ballet Vïa, and the Cie Tiss N'Ko, for which he composed the score of Concerto pour deux danseuses in January 2024. He is also the musical director of the Bakannal project (Parad, Bal, and stage format) led by the Cie Difé Kako, on the theme of Creole, French, and Venetian carnivals.