Two men enter the stage and sit on plain office chairs. One opens a laptop and begins to question the other. That was essentially how “Pichet Klunchun and myself” began, two years ago, when Jérôme Bel was invited to a dance festival in Bangkok and proposed a piece with a traditional Thai dancer.

Neither Mr. Bel, who might best be described as a French dance metaphysician, nor Mr. Klunchun, a traditional Thai and contemporary dancer and choreographer, knew much about the other’s work or culture. The two talk a lot and dance a little for each other in the funny, touching and provocative “Pichet Klunchun and myself,” part of Performa 07, the citywide festival whose focus this year is on live performance.

The piece says a great deal about the subtleties of skilled performing and the nature of dance, and also about dance history, particularly the New York postmodernist movement of the 1960s and ’70s. Mr. Bel has long been interested in that era and what it had to say about art and artifice. But he approaches that often grim terrain with a blessed dash of irreverent humor.

His explanation of why disappointed audiences — he has had his share of rebellious ones — should never get their money back is one of the highlights of the evening. Another is Mr. Klunchun’s unexpected, poignantly tender response to Mr. Bel’s lip-syncing dance-along to the pop song “Killing Me Softly.”

The fascination of the must-see “Pichet Klunchun and myself” should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with Mr. Bel’s career as an endearingly rumpled, brilliant enfant terrible and master of wry, sly minimalism. But he has found his perfect complement in Mr. Klunchun, a practitioner of khon, a form of classical Thai masked dance, who wanders serenely with Mr. Bel through a series of cultural collisions until the gentle cataclysm that suddenly and amusingly ends the conversation.

Jennifer Dunning 09.11.200