Pichet Klunchun and Jérôme Bel

Jérôme Bel and Pichet Klunchun couldn’t have less in common if they tried. One is a conceptual French choreographer, the other a traditional Thai dancer. In Pichet Klunchun and Myself, the pair face each other on a bare stage—just two men sitting on the floor with a laptop between them—demonstrating the disparity of their cultures by grilling one another with the dexterity of chess players and punctuating their points with dance. By the end, their differences swirl down a drain of their own making. It’s a stunning work of art—complex and curious, full of rigor, humor and esoteric ideas, yet astoundingly accessible. Pichet Klunchun and Myself was created in four days: It’s been touring the world for two years.

“I couldn’t have expected such a reception,” Bel, 42, says in an interview from Rio de Janeiro. “This is a little discussion between artists, which normally wouldn’t interest anybody. Thai traditional dance and my own practice? Who is interested in this?!? Nobody. But strangely, it becomes a situation that everybody can deal with. It’s like being a tourist. People in my circle said, ‘Of course, because this is an issue about globalization, and you are in the eye of the storm, questioning relationships through the dance.’ The subject is the dance— and for this, I’m very proud. ”

At its core, the work poses two seemingly simple questions: What do you do, and why do you do it? Initially, the prospect of collaborating with a Thai dancer made Bel a little wary. “I don’t trust cultural exchanges at all,” he says. “Most of the time, it’s very problematic: How do you go and spend ten days in a country and make a piece about this country?” But the success of Véronique Doisneau (2004) changed his mind. In that solo, which also mixes talking and dancing, Bel had Doisneau, nearing retirement from the Paris Opera Ballet, discuss a frustrating life spent in the corps de ballet.

“I thought, Maybe I can do the same in Bangkok,” Bel says. “I knew vaguely that there was a tradition of corps dance in Bangkok, so I said to my curator, ‘Maybe it would be nice to meet one of the practitioners of this tradition.’ He asked, ‘Who do you want?’ And I said, ‘I don’t know, anybody! Just find me one.’ So he found Pichet. That’s how I got him.”

Initially, Klunchun was suspicious. “He would tell me, ‘No, I cannot come to rehearsal,’ when in fact he was bored,” Bel says. Klunchun, 35, who specializes in Khon dance, was also unimpressed by Bel’s conceptual choreography, in which it seemed that not much was happening. A DVD of Bel’s witty and controversial The Show Must Go On, which is set to pop music, did little to change his mind. “People standing in one line and looking to the sky?” Klunchun describes with a heavy sigh during a phone interview from Thailand. “Tell me something more. But after we talked to each other, we knew that we believed in something very similar. The form is different. I have a question about dance all the time: Why, why, why, why? Jérôme has a question about his work, about the theater, all the time: Why, why, why? I want to change something in my culture, and he wants to change something in his world too.”

Bel dominates the first two thirds of the show in his role as  the Western choreographer. After much conversation about classical Khon movement—Klunchun performs the parts of demons and monkeys, to Bel’s mystification—the tables are turned. Klunchun becomes the interviewer, and Bel the defender of ideas. “This piece is talking about your life,” Klunchun explains. “It is very easy to understand, but it has a very strong concept, and by the end you can understand two cultures. We play Ping-Pong. I play with Jérôme, and sometimes I play with the audience, and sometimes Jérôme plays with the audience. It’s like there are three people—it’s bong-bong-bong-bong the  entire time.”

The piece is created on the premise that any question can be asked at any time. For an entire year, one in particular stumped Bel, who, in the work, demonstrates his favorite move (just standing still). “Pichet asked me, ‘Why do people pay to see your show if you are doing nothing?’ ” Bel recalls. “For one year I could not answer that question. I was like, Shit, shit, shit. Then, one day in the supermarket, I realized that money is nothing in contemporary arts. You don’t go to buy something, because you don’t know what you will see. This is so important: It helps people in the audience to understand contemporary dance.”

Even now, this exchange remains Klunchun’s favorite. “People are interested in something they don’t know about, and they are paying because they want to know.” He laughs with warm satisfaction. “I think the answer is very good.”

Pichet Klunchun and Myself is at Dance Theater Workshop Nov 7–10.