Paris’s Festival d’automne invites the creators it chooses for season-long Portraits to pull out all the stops. This year, 40-something omnibus artist (choreographer-dancer-singer-conceptualist) François Chaignaud will mount nine shows, dating from 2009 to a premiere this month. Chaignaud’s oeuvre is an acquired taste—acquired in Paris, probably, among the young and brave. Collaborating with an installation artist, a Hildegard von Bingen expert, or a butoh master, Chaignaud performs in nearly everything—an androgynous presence, with his long blonde curls, slim frame, royal profile, and a voice that ranges from falsetto to a priestly, lugubrious baritone. His work is experimental in a root sense: it takes a manageable if perverse idea and sees where it goes. Sylphides swaps air, tulle, and otherworldliness for pitch-black body bags that entomb the dancers for most of its 45 minutes. With Radio Vinci Park (Reloaded), whatever machismo and speed a helmeted motorcyclist represents is quashed when you realize that only Chaignaud will be moving—crawling like a spider up the bulk of this incognito hulk on his stationary bike. Tickets for Portrait events are selling fast. —Apollinaire Scherr