NEW YORK, NY.- In dance and in sports, there is a common ritual: warming up. As much an art as an activity, it energizes not just the body, but also the mind, speaking less to effort than to surrender. What does it take to get into the zone, that place where the body and mind show up as equals?

Since 2022 France has been warming up — on a grand scale. Culture, along with sport and education, is a pillar of Olympism, and France has taken that seriously with its Cultural Olympiad, a program of multidisciplinary arts events directed by Dominique Hervieu, a choreographer, an experienced leader in the arts and a former dancer as well.

The thread running through this Olympiad is the connection between sports and art. When do they find symbiosis? When do they diverge? As Hervieu sees it, what binds the Olympic Games is culture, and there, the dance values she embraces play a role: “It’s a way to think with your body,” she said in an interview in Paris. “To think about society, to think about individuality, to think about space.”

In other words, to be aware of yourself in the larger world. The contemporary mandate for including a cultural component with the Games began in 1992 in Barcelona, Spain, Hervieu said. But how to integrate it is a choice made by the host city, and Hervieu decided on the sports-art connection.

There are obvious similarities between the two — the idea of excellence and surpassing oneself — but Hervieu also wanted to “show that art is not sport and vice versa,” she said. “The dimension of physical performance, which is the goal of sport with a view to winning, is not the goal of art. This difference is fundamental, because virtuosity in art is always a means of creating a space for meaning or poetry.”

Programming has been robust and will continue throughout the games, although managing it all has been a challenge. “It has been very, very difficult,” Hervieu said. “At the beginning, I didn’t know how many people would apply. We have 2,500 projects, and it’s incredible. It could have been only 500. And everybody would be happy with 500. Me too! But I think it’s because of this spirit of the Olympic Games.”

Throughout her career, Hervieu has emphasized two areas of the arts that are important to her: creation and democratization. This isn’t surprising given that she was previously the artistic director of the Lyon Dance Biennial, where planning the popular défilé, or dance parade, was one of her favorite jobs — a way to spread the gospel of dance. Because of her background — and the obvious connections between dance and sport — the Olympiad’s dance programming is particularly plentiful.

“Even when I was a dancer, I spent 25% of my time with children, with older people, also, to have this kind of transmission,” she said. “I think it’s necessary with dance and with all arts for the Cultural Olympiad” to be accessible to a broad audience.

Hervieu engaged hip-hop choreographer Mourad Merzouki to create an official dance of the games, or la danse des jeux, a simple, participatory work featuring images — or winks, as Merzouki called them — from sporting events like boxing and archery.

“The aim was to make a dance that youth, old people, people with disabilities — everybody — could participate in,” Merzouki said in a video interview. “It’s reflecting the image of the Olympics, something that people can share.” (During the games, it will be part of the festivities at Club France in the Grande Halle de la Villette.)

Dance played a part in an Olympic torch relay earlier this month when Paris Opera Ballet stars Dorothée Gilbert and Hugo Marchand appeared alongside 35 dancers performing an excerpt from “Swan Lake” at the Place de la Bastille. Hervieu was especially happy about the student component — more than 200 dancers, diverse in every way — from local schools, taking a ballet barre there. “Only 12 were from the ballet,” she said, referring to the Paris Opera. “The others were dance students and very mixed.”

For applicants to be considered for the Cultural Olympiad, their projects had to have a link with sports, they had to be artist-led, and they needed an audience component. They couldn’t just, in other words, wallow in the land of process. “It could be small,” Hervieu said. “And we had small projects — very funny, very dedicated.”

She cited an exhibition in Marseille exploring the athleticism of animals. “They don’t get an award or a medal,” she said. “It’s very simple. But at the end you learn many things.”

The dance performances I saw as part of the Cultural Olympiad — a drop in the bucket, in light of the immensity of the programming — in varying ways highlighted the intelligence of the body while showing how dance must embrace spontaneity to push aside the self-conscious self. This was the case, most profoundly, at the Panthéon in “Möbius Morphosis” by French-Algerian choreographer Rachid Ouramdane who harnessed the physical prowess of acrobats from Compagnie XY, the innocence of young singers from the Choir School of Radio France and the lithe, luminous dancers of the Lyon Opera Ballet.

The cast members flowed through the air like flocks of birds — running, flipping, flying, as they gradually transformed, their sheer power giving way to a more poetic and almost unnerving display of vulnerability. It was, Hervieu said, an instance of Olympic values — friendship, generosity — being transformed into art.

Saïdo Lehlouh’s “Apaches,” featuring dancers from the Paris Opera Ballet and from the world of hip-hop and beyond, was an exploration of Hervieu’s other aim: democratization. Here, just as important as who was onstage was the stage itself, the Palais Garnier, the home of classical dance in Paris. In just an hour, Lehlouh dismantled notions of aesthetic hierarchy by putting street dance on an equal footing with ballet. He made it clear that there are no winners or losers in dance.

Breaking is a new sport at the Olympics this year; in one week of Cultural Olympiad programming just before the games began, Hervieu intriguingly showed different aspects of the art form — including “Apaches”; “Hip-Hop 360 Show”; and a staged battle between B-boys and B-girls at the Olympia theater.

“All these things are the world of breaking,” Hervieu said. “I think there is no danger in France that people are focused only on breaking as sport. This diversity is really why France is rich.”

In the battle at the Olympia presented by RStyle, the organization of hip-hop pioneer François Gautret, four illustrators from the Angoulême International Comics Festival drew the performers in real time to create, essentially, a live comic strip that was projected over the stage.

But the real jubilance came from the dancers, notably Campanita, the victorious B-girl who danced with force and fire but also understood that the spirit of a battle isn’t competition but generosity.

“The sport part is where athletes are showing they are the best,” Gautret said. “It’s all the competition spirit. But in culture we are talking more about exchanges, sharing with people.” What wins in a dance work? Imagination and individuality.

RStyle — the “R” refers to Riquet, in the 19th Arrondissement, where Gautret grew up dancing — also presented his more extravagant production, the cinematic, three-part “Hip-Hop 360 Show” at the Théâtre du Châtelet. It looked at hip-hop’s 50-year history and featured three choreographers, including Lehlouh, whose starkly poetic section was a dreamlike rendering of the body as a retainer of emotion.

Now, with the games in full swing, programming continues outdoors: There are performances at the Parc des Champions, where Olympic athletes will be celebrated, and a block party hosted by RStyle. On alternate days, there will be a vogue ball by Vinii Revlon as well as a performance by Merzouki featuring breakers, stilt-walkers and BMX. And there is also a mini-spectacle of classical and electro dance for 40 performers by celebrated choreographer Angelin Preljocaj.

“It’s a kind of défilé,” Preljocaj said, “It’s like walking on the street and dancing, which is completely different than being onstage. In this case, the dramaturgy is completely pushing out. It’s a completely different art in terms of the sensation of the dancer.”

It’s an homage to the Olympic Games and to the joy of moving — no matter if it’s dance or sport. “I deeply believe in the wellness of the sport on the body and on the mind,” Preljocaj said. “I know if you move your body, if you invest with your body, your brain also grows. It gives you a kind of sweetness and joy.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.