Arts & Lifestyle

Dancers in France called off a threat to strike during the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games in Paris after event organizers met some of their demands, labor unions said on Wednesday.

Thousands of dancers, musicians and other performers are expected to line the bridges and banks of the Seine River on Friday for the ceremony, which for the first time ever is being held outside rather than in an enclosed sports stadium.

Some dancers, angered by disparities in pay, had threatened a walkout, which would have partly disrupted a widely anticipated and high-risk event that will be watched by millions across the world.

About 200 dancers even briefly interrupted a rehearsal on the banks of the Seine in protest earlier this week, standing motionless with their fists raised in the air for the duration of their eight-minute routine.

Labor unions were complaining that about 250 to 300 dancers employed on temporary contracts were being unfairly treated compared with the majority of the production’s dancers, who are full-time employees of dance or ballet companies.

But the S.F.A.-C.G.T. union, which represents artists and performers, said after a meeting with the Games organizers on Wednesday that it had reached a deal on one of the dancers’ main demands: increased broadcast royalties for the temporary contract dancers, who previously were going to receive far less than others.

In a statement, the union claimed a “victory” that was “not total” and said the dancers had agreed to lift their strike threat.

The Paris 2024 Organizing Committee welcomed the outcome, calling the discussions with the dancers “constructive.”

“The opening ceremony of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games will be a unique moment of celebration and unity,” the committee said in a statement, “and we are delighted that it will be held under satisfactory conditions for all those involved.”

But the union was unsuccessful in another of its main demands: increased housing and transportation stipends to ease the financial burden of dancers from outside the Paris region.

Labor unions have also worried that dancers positioned on some of the French capital’s rooftops along the Seine are not receiving adequate protection from lead dust that has accumulated there over the years because of erosion, or that was deposited there more recently by the 2019 fire at Notre-Dame Cathedral.

Ghislain Gauthier, the secretary general of the C.G.T.-Spectacle, an umbrella union for cultural and show business performers, said that it was unclear whether the organizers had followed rules governing work sites with risks of lead contamination.

“Normally, an expert laboratory has to come to evaluate the toxicity,” Mr. Gauthier said. “We don’t know if that was done.”

At the Paris Olympics, hundreds of competitors will try to marry athletic prowess to artistic grace, but only those competing in dressage will attempt it while sitting astride a willful animal.

Popularly known as “horse dancing,” dressage involves riders directing their horses to perform a series of moves, including pirouettes, that are thought to have military origins.

This year the sport has been in the headlines for all the wrong reasons. Last week, a video emerged of a star rider whipping a horse repeatedly during training. For many dressage fans, the video was a shock. Dressage isn’t meant to be about forcing horses to perform; it should be a showcase for how riders and their steeds can come together. And despite requiring a huge amount of practice and strength, it’s meant to look effortless.

That’s especially true for the freestyle event, when the horses perform to music and are judged on artistic excellence as well as technical accuracy. The main dressage competitions begin on July 30, and that star musical turn is scheduled for Aug. 4.

The horse whipping scandal forced Charlotte Dujardin, a top rider on the British team, to withdraw. The team’s reserve rider, Becky Moody, will take her place. On a recent visit to her stables (before the whipping video became public), Moody explained what it takes to nurture and train an equine ballerina.

1. Find the right horse

Some dressage riders try to buy success, offering millions of dollars for trained horses. But many, like Moody, breed their own horses, cross their fingers and hope they can turn a foal into a star.

Moody, 44, said she lucked out with Jagerbomb, her current horse. Bomb, as Moody affectionately calls him, is 10 years old, over five and a half feet tall and weighs about 1,600 pounds.

Some horses are naturally graceful. Others are clumsy. As a youngster, Bomb was in the middle, Moody said, so hardly a standout. He also appeared to lack the energy needed to perform dressage’s hardest moves.

It wasn’t until Jagerbomb was 6, Moody said, that things clicked. One day, he got excited and began prancing in place in a move known as the piaffe, which is like a horse’s version of the running man. Moody realized Bomb had a chance.

Now, he is in demand. This spring, another rider offered Moody more than two million pounds (about $2.5 million) for him. Moody declined.

2. Get strong

Dressage is so intense, Moody said, she trains her horses only three or four times a week, for 40 minutes a time at most. To keep her horses strong and happy outside training sessions, Moody rides them along local roads, particularly up and down hills. Some of her horses also spend time on a treadmill fitted to the base of a water-filled box (pushing against the water provides an extra challenge).

A rider has to keep an eye on a horse’s mental state too. Laura Tomlinson, another British rider, who won team gold and individual bronze at the 2012 Olympics, said that horses were a bit like children: If you overwork them, they get bored and won’t want to dance.

3. Repeat and reward

Dressage training begins with the simplest moves: walking, trotting and cantering. A horse needs to do all three elegantly, Moody said, as well as be able to transition smoothly between the speeds.

Gradually, the rider will add more complex actions. They may start by walking the horse in a wide circle. Then, a smaller one. Those circles get tighter and tighter, with the horse’s hindquarters turned in, until the horse is effectively pirouetting.

Whatever move she is working on, Moody uses a “repeat and reward” technique. If the horse does something badly, she asks it to do the move again. If the horse performs well, she gives a reward: a “good boy” and a pat on the neck. (In a follow-up interview after the whipping video surfaced, she said it “shocked me, and it’s also made me really sad as it’s not even vaguely a reflection of what our sport is all about.”)

Eventually, Moody said, a horse and rider develop an almost secret language so that the rider simply has to make a tiny movement with her reins, calves, thigh or core, and the horse responds. Sounds can help too, but in competition, judges penalize riders who click their tongues or use other noises to instruct the horse.

4. Practice in front of a mirror

At Moody’s indoor stable, a mirror about 65 feet long runs along one of the walls, making the arena resemble a dance studio.

Moody sometimes checks Jagerbomb’s form in the mirror, such as when working on the half pass, a move in which the horse travels forward and sideways at the same time, its legs crossing over each other. “You can think that you’re in an angle,” Moody said, “but you look in the mirror and realize you’re not — the body’s straight, and only his neck is bent.”

Mirrors aren’t for everyone. Moody said that David Hunt, one of her coaches, disapproves. “‘You should be able to feel it!’” he shouts.

5. Look pretty

Dressage’s rules are complex; the official judging manual runs 68 pages. Judges don’t give marks for appearance, but Tomlinson said “judges are human” and are influenced by the horse and rider’s looks.

Moody had hair extensions woven into Jagerbomb’s tail to make it appear thicker and give it a more balanced appearance. “With a skinny tail he’d look a bit pathetic,” Moody said.

At competitions, she uses a needle and thread to braid Jagerbomb’s mane. It takes her 25 minutes, she said, time she uses to calm her mind and visualize the ride to come.

6. Set it to music

During the freestyle event, riders and their horses perform six-minute routines in which they twirl and prance around the arena, while continually changing pace. Moody uses an app to design her floor plan, a map of her horse’s movements around the arena, and tries to showcase drama and difficulty.

She thinks about music only after she has choreographed a full routine. She sends ideas, along with a video of a run-through, to a composer, who then stitches together several songs or orchestral pieces to match the horse’s movements.

Tom Hunt, a composer who specializes in music for dressage, said that most riders want movie soundtracks, asking for soaring orchestral pieces from “Frozen” or “Indiana Jones.” Such easy listening means you won’t risk offending the judges, he added.

If Moody qualifies for the freestyle event, she will perform to something quirkier: a medley of Tom Jones hits. Moody said she initially worried that having Jagerbomb dancing to “Sex Bomb” would be “far too cheesy,” but the songs turned out to fit her horse’s crowd-pleasing personality.

Bomb himself rarely hears the music outside competitions. When Moody practices, she sometimes listens on headphones to check timings but is focused mainly on perfecting Bomb’s technique.

So, if he is happy to perform without music, is Jagerbomb actually dancing to Tom Jones? Or simply doing what Moody tells him, as songs blast from a stadium’s speakers? Patrick Moody, Becky’s father, said the horses aren’t ballerinas. They are responding to instructions. Dancing is merely “a convenient term for what they do,” he said.

For riders, though, the perspective is different. Tomlinson said she has ridden horses who have an instinctive sense of rhythm and move to the sound of any beat they hear.

For Becky Moody, there is no question about what Bomb is doing. Whenever he performs, she said, he does so with expression, fluidity and drama. “I’m teaching my horse to dance every time I ride it,” Moody said. Music “just adds that element that makes it dancing for everybody else.”

Beneath the soaring dome of the Panthéon, performers, dressed in black, spilled across a vast stage. Suddenly their bodies stopped and with it, the breeze in the air. Now still as sculptures, they began to shift their heads, gradually locking eyes with one another and with members of an audience that surrounded them on three sides.

Slowly, they lifted their arms like wings before swinging them down to smack their thighs, like a call to action. They took off in runs — not the polite, floor skimming runs of dancers but frenetic sprints of velocity and speed. Acrobats popped high into the air. The space, once quiet and solemn, was alive as bodies spread across it like rolling, rippling waves.

“Mobïus Morphosis,” created by the French-Algerian choreographer Rachid Ouramdane and performed in Paris in July, was extraordinary: A piece of art — a dance both soft and hard — surrounded by art in a French monument.

Ouramdane, 52, stands out in the dance world, not only for his vivid, poignant choreography, which uses dance as a way to put a spotlight on communities and people — sometimes marginalized ones — but also as a leader. In 2021, he was named director of the Chaillot, Théâtre National de la Danse, in Paris, one of five national theaters in France and the only one with a focus on dance.

His job is huge. His friends and fellow artists ask him how he finds time to create when he is in charge of so much — planning seasons, devising programs for children and even overseeing a major renovation. And then there’s his own work. In November, he will unveil a new dance at Chaillot, “Contre-nature,” which continues his exploration of aerial movement. But for him, the two sides of his job — being an artist and a director of a major institution — mirror each other.

“I think it’s what all artists do,” he said. “Often, you transform what you see from your life through abstraction or a figurative approach. You share your vision of the society.”

Ouramdane’s work looks to the larger world beyond dance. He believes that dance has the potential not only to uplift, but also to forge connections between disparate worlds, which is what he strives for in his choreographic portraits of people and of their communities. That has led him to exploring the intersection between art and sport — the aim of this edition of the Cultural Olympiad, a program of multidisciplinary arts events in conjunction with the Olympic and Paralympic Games. With “Mobïus Morphosis,” it’s as if the Olympiad were catching up with his vision.

The art and sport connection has been a focus of Ouramdane’s for years, going back to 2001 when he created a work with boxers and wrestlers as part of a residency in Reims.

In delving into the intersection of athletics and dance — it’s only natural, we all have bodies — Ouramdane has focused not so much on sport, but on how a society can be created through sports.

After the 2005 riots in Paris, which were set off by the deaths of two teenagers, putting focus on the lives of immigrants in the banlieues, or suburbs, he worked with young athletes on “Surface de Réparation” (2007).

“I had the feeling that we never really heard them,” he said. “I thought maybe this is the right moment to make a portrait of those people and to try to make them speak about what was a violent act. And maybe the theater could be this place for more articulated speech.”

Sports were an entry point. “They would say, ‘Ah, you want a demonstration of basketball?’” Ouramdane said. “No — a demonstration of who you are. But maybe we can speak about why you decided to do basketball.”

Ouramdane was an athlete himself. He played soccer and did mountain sports because, he said, “I grew up in the French Alps.” He was a skier; he also participated in group sports and in fighting practices like aikido and boxing.

Those experiences have influenced the way he approaches groups in his choreography. In team sports, there is an innate kinesthetic knowledge: How you scan a field or a court when you run.

“Where is your partner, and where is the person from the other team?” Ouramdane said. “It is the vision you have to develop to locate yourself in the space. Sometimes in dance you don’t develop that because you focus so much on your body and on your skill.”

It’s important, especially in a dance like “Mobïus Morphosis,” a spectacle with many moving parts — acrobats from the collective Compagnie XY, dancers from the Lyon Opera Ballet, young singers from the Choir School of Radio France and a sweeping electronic-percussion and mixed choir score by Jean-Benoît Dunckel of the French pop duo Air.

The trust and connection among the acrobats when performing was as inspiring as their physicality: They created vertical formations by standing on one another’s shoulders — as many as four people at a time, with the one at the top leaping off to glide through the air like a swan. In other moments, they tipped to the side, toppling in slow motion. The point of “Mobïus Morphosis” is the power of the group: “If they do it collectively,” Ouramdane said, “they succeed.”

In this work and others that preceded it, the inspiration was the natural phenomenon of murmuration, or the way birds flock together as they fly through the sky. The dancers and acrobats transformed the stage into a landscape of racing crowds. But there were quiet moments as well: When, in one scene, a child singer faced the group, her body still and vulnerable in contrast with her stoic expression, it was as if time had stopped. “Mobïus Morphosis” is a piece about extremes, about what the human body is capable of. It’s a dance about bravery, inside and out.

There’s always a sense of striving, of hope in Ouramdane’s dances: When they end, you are changed from the inside, armed with a feeling that there is a possibility for a better world. It’s a transference of energy, of optimism that happens with the poetic convergence of movement, music and, just as important in dance, moments of stillness.

Lately, Ouramdane has been working on creating a blurring effect in his choreography, both in “Mobïus Morphosis” and in “Outsider,” a work he premiered earlier this year for the Ballet du Grand Théâtre de Genève. Choreographically, his aim is to construct a kinetic experience with “movements that go by very fast so you are not sure about what you have seen,” he said. “They are not focusing so much on the body, but on how the body activates the space.”

For the XY acrobats, “that was really a common point,” he said. “Because the way they walk, it’s really a kind of flying.”

The XY performers are effortless, silken. (The combination of their ease and prowess has made it harder than usual to watch Olympic gymnasts power through clunky floor routines at the games.)

“This collaboration really opened up a whole new vocabulary,” Airelle Caen, a member of XY, said in a video interview. “It’s as if the choreography is not just in the dance — it can also be in the acrobatic, it can also be in the everyday walk. And that it’s really about seeing the choreographic gesture in every aspect of our everyday life and in every movement.”

Part of what Ouramdane explores in his work is the idea that people are capable of more than they think. “When you go beyond yourself, it’s not to become someone else,” he said. “It’s not to discover something new, which is not from you. It’s the opposite. It’s to know yourself better.”

This relates to Ouramdane’s position at Chaillot, where he is focused on celebrating “diversity and hospitality, but not in, as I often say, a messianic way,” he said. “It’s not saying that we are the culture we are going to bring, but much more recognizing what’s going on to give space for the counterculture. It’s what we are doing with the electro culture, with the voguing culture, with the queer culture.”

The recent election in France was on Ouramdane’s mind: “We have now to consider all those people that were not convinced by the recent politics, too,” he said. “I hope that’s what we are doing in Chaillot. I really do believe that a lot of institutions should focus on this aspect of transmission, of taking care of the population with art.”

One way is through the Chaillot Colos — inspired in part by AileyCamp, a free summer day camp — in which children experience dance throughout France and in French territories. And since dance is so ubiquitous — in film, in fashion, even in sports with the inclusion of breaking in the Olympic Games, Ouramdane wants to draw more people to it. “Dance is everywhere,” he said. “It should be a tool to transform the people.”

It’s just as important to present established choreographers — to encourage different artistic and social worlds under the artistic umbrella of Chaillot. He sees it as his responsibility as a director of a national institution, where he has the responsibility of creating an artistic home for all. “You also promote other artists,” he said. “But by doing that, I also have this feeling that I express what I believe even more by organizing or showing works that are not the kind of work that I’m doing.”

That feeds a bigger need. “What I often say is that I lead this institution the same way I’m making an art piece onstage or for a specific site,” he said. “I’m just trying to propose an experience to an audience with all the elements and with all those artists that I’ve gathered. Suddenly the piece is not the piece of the scale of the theater. The piece is of the scale of the city.”

Under the gentle radiance of golden chandeliers stood dancers, rows and rows of them, gleaming onstage. The scene was like a painting steeped in mist, its width diffused by shards of light and fog, its depth seeming to reach into infinity. The mood was dreamy as packs of dancers moved as one, filling the stage with the force of unison, or breaking away for solos, more meditative than flashy, yet each — and this was important — showing intent and individuality. Within each body, you felt dance history.

For this version of his dance “Apaches,” the choreographer Saïdo Lehlouh opened the Foyer de la Danse behind the stage at the Palais Garnier, the opera house that is a hallowed home for classical ballet. The foyer, a gilded salon where dancers warm up, is not a space the public usually sees.

“It’s kind of the background, the underground of the opera,” Lehlouh said. “I wanted to add it to the scene onstage. For me, there is no wall between the backstage and the stage itself.”

Breaking down walls, pushing past boundaries is what “Apaches” is all about. Created in 2018, the dance, named after the Parisian street gangs of the early 20th century, has had different iterations depending on the performance space (often outdoors) and the cast. “Apaches” is meant for all kinds of dancers and all types of movers: professional, untrained, people with disabilities. Lehlouh’s 8-year-old son wants to make an “Apaches” with kids. (“I can assist him if he wants,” Lehlouh said.)

At the Garnier, the performance mixed classical dancers from the Paris Opera Ballet with dancers from the National Choreographic Center of Rennes and Brittany, of which Lehlouh is a director as a part of the FAIR-E collective. (In French, the verb faire means “to do,” but the name also references the idea of being fair — in how the collective and its art meet the world.)

The dancers who work regularly with Lehlouh come from a variety of backgrounds — hip-hop, krump, electro, waacking and even flamenco. In bringing their skills to the Garnier stage, the production showed more than varieties of technical expertise: With so many dancers and dance forms on display, “Apaches” made a gorgeous statement about hierarchy in dance.

As it developed, the stage effect of infinity became both a visual tool and a desire for the future. What if all forms of dance — ballet, hip-hop, krump — were valued equally? What if they had the same resources? Along with the performance itself, this was the point of the Garnier “Apaches,” presented as part of the Cultural Olympiad, a program looking at the relationship between art and sport.

Set to a score by Thomas Bangalter, formerly of Daft Punk, and washed in extraordinary lighting by Tom Visser, “Apaches” was both ephemeral and rooted in the here and now. Dancers improvised from the beginning to the end, but that wasn’t always apparent. The dance never lost its way. Lehlouh’s structure kept its life force moving.

Direct, purposeful walks across the stage swirled into circles or cyphers; in one breathtaking moment, three happened at once. Pauses in the action occurred, too, with the dancers, standing en masse. In these moments, the stage settled, filling the space with air.

There were sharp, striking solo moments, as when Mounia Nassangar, a waacking virtuoso, used her arms to slice the air with such razor precision and supple dexterity that you half expected her to lift off. A series of duets, Lehlouh’s homage to dance battles, emerged with subtle force. This was a statement, too. The Olympic Games will feature breaking as a competitive sport starting Friday, but here Lehlouh showed the artistry of battles, how they are conversations between dancers.

“I wanted to give back to the value of what is a battle, because a battle today has become really commercial,” Lehlouh said. “You say ‘hip- hop,’ and you imagine directly a battle. It’s become something like a tool for the culture.”

But a battle is how a dancer grows, learning how to deal with improvisation and with music that can’t be anticipated. “It’s how you react in the moment, and it’s a way of experiencing yourself in a total space of life,” Lehlouh said. “This is the first time in ‘Apaches’ that I put in a battle. I said to myself, I think the Opera Garnier is one of the best places to show the value of what is a battle for us.”

While working on “Apaches,” Lehlouh, who started out dancing hip-hop as a teenager, had the option of having more time to create it or for performances to be free. It was more important, he said, that the people he “grew up with in a suburb of Paris could have access to this kind of place.”

Two shows were booked in six hours. “We come from an environment where when you dance, our families cannot imagine that you can make a life through dance,” he continued. “It was also to give this possibility and say, Invite your parents and show them that you are an artist.”

Amid the dynamic head spins, twirling windmills and athletic airflares that will be on display at the Place de la Concorde during breaking’s Olympic debut, one question looms large: When dance is crammed into the category of sport, how is a winner determined?

All subjectively judged sports, especially those that reward artistry, face some form of the same question. But few arise from the battle-centric beginnings of breaking — never “break dancing,” a term disdained by pioneers and practitioners — where spontaneous crowd response and the reaction of peers were the ultimate rewards.

Sixteen B-girls will compete on Aug. 9, followed by 16 B-boys on Aug. 10, all of whom will be measured by a panel of nine judges from around the world. Here’s how they’ll determine which breakers will win medals.

How will it work?

Breakers will face off in head-to-head battles, similar to the competitions at parks and parties when breaking originated in the Bronx during the 1970s.

The competitors will be separated into four groups in an opening round-robin round and will not know the music ahead of time. A D.J. will spin, and the breaker will try to marry their moves to the music.

Each battle will consist of three rounds, or throwdowns, with the breakers alternating one-minute turns. The breaker who wins the best of three will advance.

Eight winners — two from each group — will advance to the knockout or quarterfinal phase, where they will be ranked in a bracket according to their opening-round scores. The No. 1 ranked breaker will battle No. 8, No. 2 vs. No. 7, and so on, eliminating competitors through a final four and gold medal battle.

What’s the scoring system?

The judges will score breakers on five criteria: vocabulary, technique, execution, originality and musicality.

During most cyphers, the circles where breakers battle informally, the applause of invested audiences declares a winner in real time. Likewise in the Olympic competition, viewers won’t have to wait until after a battle ends to know who is ahead. Judges will use digital sliders, like the faders on a D.J.’s mixing board, to represent each of the scoring criteria, moving a slider toward the breaker they believe is ahead in, say, originality at that moment. There are penalties for crashes, wipeouts and falls.

Breaking will also be the only Olympic sport with a misbehavior button. At its core, breaking is a battle of one-upmanship. But a judge can hit three different misbehavior buttons if a competitive act crosses the line into crassness.

The buttons range in the severity of the transgression, with the third reserved for the most overt ones like inappropriate moves or comments. In that case, the athlete’s total score will be reduced by 10 percent.

Who came up with it?

Breaking in Paris is overseen by the World DanceSport Federation, which ushered it into the Olympics.

The umbrella organization governs a wide range of dances, including Caribbean and disco. Nearly 30 years ago, it tried to introduce ballroom dancing to the Olympics.

The federation has no ties with breaking’s roots, raising eyebrows for those wary that the art form would be appropriated. In 2017, more than 2,000 people signed an online petition titled “Get the WDSF’s Hands Off Hip-Hop,” which accused the federation of trying “to exploit breaking as a Trojan horse to get its foot in the door of the Olympics.”

But the organization worked with breakers in mapping the journey to Paris. The DanceSport Breaking Committee, the organized branch of U.S.A. Breakers, includes Zack Slusser, a founding member of the Pro Breaking Tour who goes by B-boy Cracker Zacks, and Zahra Hamani, known as B-girl Jeskilz, a member of Rock Steady Crew.

“They want to pick different opinions, different styles to be as fair as possible, because all these dancers come from different places,” said Beta Langebeck, a B-girl who has judged breaking competitions for Red Bull. “The good thing is they have that option. They have options to get judges from all different styles to make it as fair as possible.”

Who’s going to win?

On the men’s side, medal favorites include: Victor Montalvo, known as B-boy Victor, the first American to qualify for the Games and a two-time Red Bull BC One world champion; Menno van Gorp (B-boy Menno) and Lee-Lou Demierre of the Netherlands; and Japan’s Shigeyuki Nakarai (B-boy Shigekix).

Leading contenders among the women include: Dominika Banevic, a Lithuanian B-girl who just turned 17; Ami Yuasa and Ayumi Fukushima of Japan; Sya Dembele (B-girl Syssy) of France; and Logan Edra (B-girl Logistx) of the United States.

Like comedians, dancers tend to be good imitators. They’re both masters of fine detail, able to pinpoint and replicate the minutiae that make a choreographic phrase, or a sketch character, click into focus.

As a dancer and a comedian, Sarah McCreanor, known as Smac, likes to up the ante. Why mimic a dance or a person when you can turn yourself into an emoji? A head-bobbing chicken? An object being crushed by a hydraulic press?

“I think one of the funniest things you can do is try to dance the undanceable,” McCreanor said in a Zoom interview. “I look at, like, a video of a hydraulic press crushing something, and I see choreography.”

You have to go back a generation or two to find a good analogue for the 32-year-old McCreanor. Her physical comedy evokes the vaudevillian slapstick of Donald O’Connor or Lucille Ball. But she’s figured out how to translate that fundamentally retro style for a very online audience. On her TikTok and Instagram accounts, where she calls herself “a variety show,” she’s attracted millions of followers with her dancerly reproductions of the weird-yet-familiar images and memes that shape internet culture.

Recently, McCreanor even earned the endorsement of the venerable National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, Australia. (She grew up in Brisbane, though she now lives in Los Angeles.) The museum featured a large assortment of McCreanor’s social media videos in “Hydraulic Press Girl,” part of its Triennial exhibition.

It might have been the funniest Smac moment yet: austere gallery walls filled with elegant screens, on which McCreanor was turning herself into the eggplant emoji or a smushed roll of Lifesavers. Christopher Guerrero, who teaches a course on viral comedy at the University of Southern California, said it felt akin to the Dada antics of the artist Marcel Duchamp.

“When you put this kind of content into a stringent museum space,” Guerrero said, “that’s so Dada.”

McCreanor said that before the exhibition, she hadn’t thought to take her videos seriously. (She still doesn’t, really: the goal, she said, remains “to crack people up.”) But they’re underpinned by serious dance technique, as well as training in theater, visual art and comedy.

Dance came first. Her mother put her in classes when she was 5, hoping they would help her overcome her shyness. A few years later, McCreanor and a friend concocted a jokey routine for the dance studio’s talent competition. “We were bonking heads and doing slapstick stuff, just playtime,” McCreanor said. The number proved so popular the studio began bringing it to local dance competitions. “We won every single one,” McCreanor said. “And I’ve basically been making things like that ever since.”

McCreanor found that she most admired dance artists who used movement as a form of wit: O’Connor, Bob Fosse. (“Fosse is absolutely comedy to me,” she said. “His timing!”) She also identified a kindred spirit in Mr. Bean, a k a Rowan Atkinson, whose wordless buffoonery is deceptively well choreographed.

As she grew up, she started performing in musicals and watching live comedy shows. In high school and college, she studied visual art. “I chose it specifically because I knew they’d let me get away with everything I wanted to do,” she said. “I could dance, write, direct, perform, and it could all be labeled ‘visual art.’”

At 18, McCreanor left college to join a touring stage version of the film “How to Train Your Dragon.” The tour brought her to Los Angeles, where she decided to stay — with no plans, but plenty of curiosity about the entertainment world. “I’ve never really had a dream job, except to be performing somehow,” she said.

Though she got an array of dance and music video gigs, television commercials were her bread and butter. She estimates that she’s acted and danced in nearly 70 ads, including spots for Google, Apple, Jockey, Kohl’s, Toyota, Honda and KFC.

McCreanor found a kind of freedom in the overtly transactional nature of advertising. “The whole game of it fascinates me,” she said. “When you’re in a commercial, you’re very important, and yet you’re also not at all important. Talent is so little of it. Ninety percent is just, you had the right hair color.” She learned how to figure out what producers were looking for, become that person if she could, and not let it upset her if she couldn’t.

But eventually she tired of being a cog, even if a well-paid one. In 2019 McCreanor tried out for the television series “So You Think You Can Dance,” excited as much by the chance to choreograph her own audition solo as by the thought of reality-TV fame. Her gonzo “Boogie Wonderland” number — think Napoleon Dynamite’s dance performance, if Napoleon could actually dance — was completely unlike the other auditioners’ glossy routines. Though she didn’t make it to the show’s top 20, her choreography knocked the judges’ socks off. After it was posted online, it delighted a big chunk of the internet, too.

“That was my first experience going viral, which was thrilling because that solo was all me,” McCreanor said. “It was a huge motivator for me to get back to sharing my own ideas instead of working other peoples’ jobs.”

Her epiphany was well-timed. A few months later, Covid’s arrival wiped out conventional performance opportunities, and McCreanor suddenly had lots of time to play on social media. Though she wasn’t interested in the dance challenges then sweeping TikTok — “I knew early on that I didn’t just want to do other peoples’ trends,” she said — she was keen to figure out what else made the app tick.

She hadn’t forgotten the lessons she’d learned from advertising. Malia Baker, a dancer and friend of McCreanor’s, said McCreanor has a natural gift for targeting an audience. “She knows what ideas are going to hook people, but somehow it never feels calculated,” Baker said.

Many of McCreanor’s posts feature ingenious imitations of other, already-viral videos. The hydraulic press series, in which she mimics strangely mesmerizing clips of unlikely objects being squashed, has been a huge TikTok hit. Goofy animals, one of the internet’s favorite subjects, are other frequent duet partners. Baker often pops up in McCreanor’s “ChickTok” series, which copies the amusingly dance-like bobs and bounces of a very popular flock of Italian chickens.

The videos are fun partly because they’re unpolished, with whatever is in the closet costumes and plenty of bloopers. “It’s all very high school drama department D.I.Y.,” McCreanor said. But her obvious skills as a performer bring a degree of integrity to the silliness, said Sophie Prince, a curator at the National Gallery of Victoria.

“It’s held up by what you can just tell is 10,000 hours of experience,” Prince said. When McCreanor makes her body into various logos for her blithely ridiculous “logo performance art” series, for example, the angle of her Nike check mark is precisely right. And her videos are in some ways museum friendly. Their clean aesthetic — simple white backgrounds, straight-on camera angles — lends them a pop-art gloss.

McCreanor said her “mind was blown” by the National Gallery of Victoria exhibition. As a visual arts student, she’d hoped for just that kind of recognition. It’s both funny and slightly subversive that she got there by making internet memes. “She didn’t realize that the tools that she was using might be perceivable and appreciated by the art world,” Prince said.

On the other hand, given the scale of McCreanor’s online popularity — her videos have collectively earned more than a billion views — the museum might have gotten the better end of the deal.

“She didn’t need us,” Prince said. “We’re lucky to have shown her work.”

Like the museum scene, the professional dance scene can get mired in its own earnestness. Baker thinks many dance artists would be happier if they followed McCreanor’s example, using humor to pop the balloon of self-importance.

“Dancers tend to make themselves miserable because the stakes get so high, and they’re so critical of themselves,” she said. “Not taking herself seriously has really become Smac’s superpower.”

There’s an innocence to that lack of self-seriousness, too. McCreanor’s videos are aimed at a general audience, but her National Gallery of Victoria exhibit pulled in children like a magnet. “It’s that Mr. Bean thing,” McCreanor said. “There are no words, it’s just a body, and so it’s global — everyone understands, everybody gets the joke.” She envisions herself moving into children’s entertainment.

Whatever the audience, McCreanor’s work is going to be physical, and it’s going to be funny.

“I’m clearly biased,” she said, “but I just think dance is way better if it has humor in it.”

Summer is hot dogs and ice pops, shaggy dinners at dusk, the melting mixture of energy and malaise that gives the season its shape. But that’s not fall. Fall is crisp. Fall is orderly. There’s no malaise and no melt. Those anything-goes August dinners give way to meal plans sketched out on Sunday and empty lunchboxes waiting to be filled.

I’m guessing the last thing you want to do is figure out those meal plans (and don’t even get me started on those lunchboxes). Maybe you even want to reboot your cooking altogether? Let me help you.

I write a newsletter for New York Times Cooking called Five Weeknight Dishes, and last September, I created a list of 100 dinner recipes for you to try. Now I’m back with a whole new list for you to make in the months ahead, in honor of the back-to-school energy that rolls off Labor Day weekend and propels you through the months ahead. (And, to keep that momentum going, and to answer the eternal question of “what should I make for dinner?,” we’re also starting a new newsletter, Dinner Tonight. Starting Sept. 16, it’ll send a fast, easy recipe to your inbox every Monday through Thursday around 4:30 p.m. Eastern. Sign up here.)

The list below is brimming with jammy eggs, chile crisp, citrus and feta. There are smooth sauces, crisp edges and caramelized crusts. There are many, many ways to chicken. But the thing all of these recipes have in common — aside from their fast cook times and streamlined approaches to ingredients — is that they are all delicious.

Suqaar Digaag (Spiced Chicken and Vegetable Sauté) Buy or make a batch of xawaash, the cumin-rich Somali spice blend, to use here and in the baasto iyo suugo tunna (pasta and spiced tuna sauce) below.

Sheet-Pan Chicken and Potatoes With Feta, Lemon and Dill Breezy enough to throw together for a post-work dinner, yet nice enough to serve to guests.

Grilled Tahini-Honey Chicken Thighs Easy, great and versatile — you can use the grill, stove or oven. Add a sprinkling of za’atar if you really want to have a good time.

Roasted Chicken Thighs With Hot Honey and Lime One of the flavors of the moment — hot honey — mingles effortlessly with butter and lime.

Lemongrass Chicken Punchy, spicy, salty, bright and extremely straightforward to make.

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Pasta, Noodles, Rice and Other Grains

Peanut Butter Noodles This latest contribution to the New York Times noodle canon is this nutty, salty, creamy dish that you could make with your eyes closed.

Spinach One-Pot Pasta A pound of greens stirred into the pot means you don’t need to bother with a vegetable on the side.

Angel Hair Pasta The pasta darling of the 1990s turns out to be a timeless choice.

Brown-Butter Orzo With Butternut Squash It’s giving chic but cozy autumn vibes.

Kale Sauce Pasta Blend kale with garlic and oil to coat this easy and dazzlingly green dish — an NYT Cooking classic.

Lemon-Garlic Linguine Kids can eat this silky, lemony pasta plain, and adults looking for something more can add seared shrimp, scallops, fish or mushrooms.

Lemony Pearl Barley Soup You can bulk up this cheerful pot of soup for dinner by adding more vegetables, white beans, shredded chicken or maybe even an egg.

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Fish and Shrimp

Roasted Gochujang Salmon All you need to do is spread the fish with garlic, sugar and gochujang (or miso, or harissa), and then let the ingredients do their thing in the oven.

Tomato-Poached Fish With Chile Oil and Herbs The combination of juicy fish, toasted garlic, bright cherry tomatoes and handfuls of herbs makes this recipe just about perfect.

Shrimp Pullao Shrimp mingle with gently spiced rice in this recipe adapted from Madhur Jaffrey, the queen of Indian cooking in America.

Coconut-Lime Shrimp Poaching shrimp in coconut milk with lime is precisely as good as it sounds.

Spicy Tuna and Avocado Tostadas Serve this zippy salad of tuna, avocado and lime on tostadas or with tortilla chips, or pile it on greens or rice.

Tuna Mayo Rice Bowl Possibly the best instant dinner if you’ve got cooked rice in your fridge or freezer (keep cooked rice in your fridge or freezer!).

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Beef and Pork

Pepper Steak The speedy classic stir-fry, made with soy sauce, honey and several grinds of black pepper.

Lomo Saltado (Tomato Beef Stir-Fry) Another excellent stir-fry, but with Peruvian influences (yellow chiles, French fries) skipping along in the pan.

Sweet and Salty Grilled Steak With Cucumber Salad Inspired by nuoc cham, the marinade here — fish sauce, brown sugar, garlic, lime and jalapeño — couldn’t be better.

Bistek Here’s a sublime rendition of the Filipino treasure, with simply cooked steak, onions and juicy citrus.

Easy Burritos Because I would never ask you to make difficult burritos on a Tuesday.

Mushrooms on Toast Just mushrooms, butter, garlic and toast. Some days, dinner doesn’t really need to be much more than this.

Sheet-Pan Paneer Tikka A winning after-work dinner: Coat firm, slightly salty paneer with spiced yogurt, then roast with onions and peppers. Swap out the paneer for tofu if you can’t eat cheese.