No wonder Boris Charmatz’s latest outing is about sleep: he can’t be getting much of it lately. In 2023, the French iconoclast who has made a career of persuading bulky institutions to let him dismantle them took over the directorship of the venerable Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch. He attached the famous German troupe to his own deliberately provisional laboratory of ideas, called [terrain]—yes, the brackets are part of the name. The merger may sound unwieldy, but as the people at Wuppertal assured Charmatz, “It was my specialty, working on impossible things!” Though his dances have grown increasingly populous and anarchic since his beginnings in the 1990s, this latest, Somnole, is a solo—for himself. Trained at the Paris Opera ballet school, which set him up early to know what he didn’t want from dance, Charmatz is a big man who moves with uncommon grace. The 60-minute piece is indeed “like a body seeking sleep”: antsy, antic, and endearing. —Apollinaire Scherr