For the last six years, Jérôme Bel has not set foot on a plane. The last time this clever Paris choreographer needed to be in New York, he took a boat. More often, Bel choreographs by videoconference. Which is to say, place matters to this highbrow-lowbrow (minus the middlebrow) dance conceptualist, but only perversely. Danses non humaines, a 2023 Festival d’automne commission, takes us through the Louvre to admire not the humans turned to stone but those turning themselves to flower, lion, water, sun via iconic works by Loie Fuller, Isadora Duncan, Pina Bausch, Xavier Le Roy, and more. This collaboration with Estelle Zhong Mengual, an art historian specializing in “the relationship that art has with the living world,” nods to its museum setting in its thematic organization. But no matter the conceptual framework, what a compendium of dance historical treasures! —Apollinaire Scherr