NEW YORK, NY.- Beneath the soaring dome of the Panthéon, performers, dressed in black, spilled across a vast stage. Suddenly their bodies stopped and with it, the breeze in the air. Now still as sculptures, they began to shift their heads, gradually locking eyes with one another and with members of an audience that surrounded them on three sides.

Slowly, they lifted their arms like wings before swinging them down to smack their thighs, like a call to action. They took off in runs — not the polite, floor skimming runs of dancers but frenetic sprints of velocity and speed. Acrobats popped high into the air. The space, once quiet and solemn, was alive as bodies spread across it like rolling, rippling waves.

“Mobïus Morphosis,” created by French-Algerian choreographer Rachid Ouramdane and performed in Paris in July, was extraordinary: A piece of art — a dance both soft and hard — surrounded by art in a French monument.

Ouramdane, 52, stands out in the dance world, not only for his vivid, poignant choreography, which uses dance as a way to put a spotlight on communities and people — sometimes marginalized ones — but also as a leader. In 2021, he was named director of the Chaillot, Théâtre National de la Danse, in Paris, one of five national theaters in France and the only one with a focus on dance.

His job is huge. His friends and fellow artists ask him how he finds time to create when he is in charge of so much — planning seasons, devising programs for children and even overseeing a major renovation. And then there’s his own work. In November, he will unveil a new dance at Chaillot, “Contre-nature,” which continues his exploration of aerial movement. But for him, the two sides of his job — being an artist and a director of a major institution — mirror each other.

“I think it’s what all artists do,” he said. “Often, you transform what you see from your life through abstraction or a figurative approach. You share your vision of the society.”

Ouramdane’s work looks to the larger world beyond dance. He believes that dance has the potential not only to uplift, but also to forge connections between disparate worlds, which is what he strives for in his choreographic portraits of people and of their communities. That has led him to exploring the intersection between art and sport — the aim of this edition of the Cultural Olympiad, a program of multidisciplinary arts events in conjunction with the Olympic and Paralympic Games. With “Mobïus Morphosis,” it’s as if the Olympiad were catching up with his vision.

The art and sport connection has been a focus of Ouramdane’s for years, going back to 2001 when he created a work with boxers and wrestlers as part of a residency in Reims.

In delving into the intersection of athletics and dance — it’s only natural, we all have bodies — Ouramdane has focused not so much on sport, but on how a society can be created through sports.

After the 2005 riots in Paris, which were set off by the deaths of two teenagers, putting focus on the lives of immigrants in the banlieues, or suburbs, he worked with young athletes on “Surface de Réparation” (2007).

“I had the feeling that we never really heard them,” he said. “I thought maybe this is the right moment to make a portrait of those people and to try to make them speak about what was a violent act. And maybe the theater could be this place for more articulated speech.”

Sports were an entry point. “They would say, ‘Ah, you want a demonstration of basketball?’ ” Ouramdane said. “No — a demonstration of who you are. But maybe we can speak about why you decided to do basketball.”

Ouramdane was an athlete himself. He played soccer and did mountain sports because, he said, “I grew up in the French Alps.” He was a skier; he also participated in group sports and in fighting practices like aikido and boxing.

Those experiences have influenced the way he approaches groups in his choreography. In team sports, there is an innate kinesthetic knowledge: How you scan a field or a court when you run.

“Where is your partner, and where is the person from the other team?” Ouramdane said. “It is the vision you have to develop to locate yourself in the space. Sometimes in dance you don’t develop that because you focus so much on your body and on your skill.”

It’s important, especially in a dance like “Mobïus Morphosis,” a spectacle with many moving parts — acrobats from the collective Compagnie XY, dancers from the Lyon Opera Ballet, young singers from the Choir School of Radio France and a sweeping electronic-percussion and mixed choir score by Jean-Benoît Dunckel of the French pop duo Air.

The trust and connection among the acrobats when performing was as inspiring as their physicality: They created vertical formations by standing on one another’s shoulders — as many as four people at a time, with the one at the top leaping off to glide through the air like a swan. In other moments, they tipped to the side, toppling in slow motion. The point of “Mobïus Morphosis” is the power of the group: “If they do it collectively,” Ouramdane said, “they succeed.”

In this work and others that preceded it, the inspiration was the natural phenomenon of murmuration, or the way birds flock together as they fly through the sky. The dancers and acrobats transformed the stage into a landscape of racing crowds. But there were quiet moments as well: When, in one scene, a child singer faced the group, her body still and vulnerable in contrast with her stoic expression, it was as if time had stopped. “Mobïus Morphosis” is a piece about extremes, about what the human body is capable of. It’s a dance about bravery, inside and out.

There’s always a sense of striving, of hope in Ouramdane’s dances: When they end, you are changed from the inside, armed with a feeling that there is a possibility for a better world. It’s a transference of energy, of optimism that happens with the poetic convergence of movement, music and, just as important in dance, moments of stillness.

Lately, Ouramdane has been working on creating a blurring effect in his choreography, both in “Mobïus Morphosis” and in “Outsider,” a work he premiered this year for the Ballet du Grand Théâtre de Genève. Choreographically, his aim is to construct a kinetic experience with “movements that go by very fast so you are not sure about what you have seen,” he said. “They are not focusing so much on the body, but on how the body activates the space.”

For the XY acrobats, “that was really a common point,” he said. “Because the way they walk, it’s really a kind of flying.”

The XY performers are effortless, silken. (The combination of their ease and prowess has made it harder than usual to watch Olympic gymnasts power through clunky floor routines at the games.)

“This collaboration really opened up a whole new vocabulary,” Airelle Caen, a member of XY, said in a video interview. “It’s as if the choreography is not just in the dance — it can also be in the acrobatic, it can also be in the everyday walk. And that it’s really about seeing the choreographic gesture in every aspect of our everyday life and in every movement.”

Part of what Ouramdane explores in his work is the idea that people are capable of more than they think. “When you go beyond yourself, it’s not to become someone else,” he said. “It’s not to discover something new, which is not from you. It’s the opposite. It’s to know yourself better.”

This relates to Ouramdane’s position at Chaillot, where he is focused on celebrating “diversity and hospitality, but not in, as I often say, a messianic way,” he said. “It’s not saying that we are the culture we are going to bring, but much more recognizing what’s going on to give space for the counterculture. It’s what we are doing with the electro culture, with the voguing culture, with the queer culture.”

The recent election in France was on Ouramdane’s mind: “We have now to consider all those people that were not convinced by the recent politics, too,” he said. “I hope that’s what we are doing in Chaillot. I really do believe that a lot of institutions should focus on this aspect of transmission, of taking care of the population with art.”

One way is through the Chaillot Colos — inspired in part by AileyCamp, a free summer day camp — in which children experience dance throughout France and in French territories. And since dance is so ubiquitous — in film, in fashion, even in sports with the inclusion of breaking in the Olympic Games, Ouramdane wants to draw more people to it. “Dance is everywhere,” he said. “It should be a tool to transform the people.”

It’s just as important to present established choreographers — to encourage different artistic and social worlds under the artistic umbrella of Chaillot. He sees it as his responsibility as a director of a national institution, where he has the responsibility of creating an artistic home for all. “You also promote other artists,” he said. “But by doing that, I also have this feeling that I express what I believe even more by organizing or showing works that are not the kind of work that I’m doing.”

That feeds a bigger need. “What I often say is that I lead this institution the same way I’m making an art piece onstage or for a specific site,” he said. “I’m just trying to propose an experience to an audience with all the elements and with all those artists that I’ve gathered. Suddenly the piece is not the piece of the scale of the theater. The piece is of the scale of the city.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.