A Vancouver International Dance Festival presentation. At the Roundhouse Community Arts Centre on Saturday, March 7. No remaining performances

There isn’t much dancing in this first collaboration between French conceptual artist Jérí´me Bel and Thai classical dancer Pichet Klunchun, but it is, nonetheless, a choreographic tour de force.

The basic idea is simple: equipped with only a laptop, two plastic chairs, and a pair of wireless microphones, the performers reenact their initial meeting, which took place in Bangkok in 2005. Within this minimalistic framework, however, Bel and Klunchun stage a provocative pas de deux of cultural interchange that spins headily through history, mythology, philosophy, anthropology, postmodernism, choreographic theory, and the writings of French Marxist theorist Guy Debord.

At first, one fears a banal experience. Bel, professing ignorance of Klunchun’s art form, khon, questions him about this masked telling of the Ramayana legend, known in Thailand as the Ramakien. Klunchun complies, illustrating with a few subtle gestures how Thai dancers establish the fable’s basic characters: man, woman, demon, and monkey. His movements are fascinating, and utterly unlike anything in the western dance repertoire, but he’s continually interrupted by his interlocutor, and perhaps with good reason—a full cycle of the Ramakien can run for up to a week, 24 hours a day. To show grief, for instance, a performer might take 20 minutes to walk, ever so slowly, across the stage. The audience is torn between the hope that Bel will shut up and let Klunchun dance, and the fear that he might.

Soon, however, Klunchun is questioning Bel, in a welcome reversal of anthropological orthodoxy. Somewhat awed by Klunchun’s physical precision, Bel fumbles through an explanation of why he decided to turn away from traditional dance and move into more conceptual areas; when he’s asked to show his favourite choreographic move, there’s something noble and yet hilariously blank in the way he stands, scanning the audience with a hangdog look on his face, before slowly clasping his hands behind his back.

“Jérí´me Bel, I’m very, very disappointed,” Klunchun comments, to general hilarity.

And then the piece, which has been inching along, picks up. Bel, who is known for having his dancers perform in the nude, wants to demonstrate this to Klunchun. The Thai artist, citing his culture’s tradition of modesty, demurs. Bel asks about the strip bars he’s seen in Bangkok, where the Thai dancers are “very naked”. “They’re performing for tourists,” Klunchun replies.

But the irony is that khon, these days, is almost always performed for tourists; most Thais have abandoned the classical arts for video games, pop music, and the cinema. They’ve been seduced by the same “society of the spectacle” that Debord has written about and that European avant-gardists, such as Bel, are dedicated to undermining. In the process, though, those artists have lost access to the public, performing only for an elite.

After more than an hour of work designed to convince us that the two performers are a million miles apart, it’s suddenly obvious that they’re engaged in a similar struggle. One comes from a strongly religious tradition, while the other operates in a world where all the old gods—and rules—are dead. But they’re both battling to show something meaningful in a culture that craves only distraction, and in this eye-opening conversation they do.