On a breezy and rare clear day last fall in the Jardin du Luxembourg, at the side of the Palais, several strollers stood gaping up at a chestnut tree where, high above them, two men were rapelling. They were dressed in workman's clothes, so they were probably working as they trapezed from one branch to the next. But their aplomb was that of performers; or perhaps that the civilians regarded them as an audience might inspired them to comport themselves like cirque stars.

The scene was just one example of how art and life in France don't just intermingle, but are in a way inseparable. You see it in the way the boulangerie attendant, who has the most conservative of demeanors, takes advantage of this strange American holiday Halloween to paint a bright orange and black jack-o-lantern on her face. You see it when you descend the stairs of a toilette near the church Madeleine, and there find not only mahogony urinals and stalls, but a well-coiffed, matronly woman watching over them, as the aching strains of Edith Piaf issue from her radio. "Merci," she says, after you're done. And you see it most of all in the monuments, statues, arches, and fountains that are everywhere in Paris. Every time I got lost, it seems, I turned around and there was a statue of Joan of Arc. One late afternoon returning from the Sarah Bernhardt exhibit at the old Bibliotheque Nationale, I rounded a corner and there was Moliere, in a fountain. Not mobbed with tourists...just kind of there. Art exudes in the rushing and rippling of the Seine, too, and in the bridges and ponts that demarcate it, and the street merchant stalls that line it on either side. And of course it's there in the artful displays of the outdoor marches.

For an art-lover like me, one of the hardest parts of returning to the U.S. from France was to adjust to the way we confine our art. It's in museums, in boxes, caged, something we appreciate looking at, but not that surrounds our daily life as much as it does in Paris. And where it does, it's terribly confined and restricted. Have you ever seen a nude statue in NYC??? I mean, not in a museum, but just out on the street? They're all clothed, the contours of their bodies muddled. Statues give heft and permanance to the beauty of the human body; when they're naked, they're eternal. Our statues, at least here in NYC, are very prim and proper. And it isn't just the old ones. Last year, the city sponsored a city-wide "cow" fest, in which artists submitted proposals to do up and dress up cows according to various themes. The New York State Arts Council was initially asked to jury the submissions, but bowed out when it was told it couldn't select any works that related to social, political, or sexual topics. "What else is there?" an exasperated NYSCA panelist told me.

Statues, and dance, and the Luxembourg Garden, and the Seine, and Dante, and strange wonderful music from strange found objects, and yo-yos even, play roles in Laury Granier's "La Momie a Mi-Mots," a throwback of a film I caught last night at the Dag Hammarksjold Auditorium of the United Nations, where it was screened by the Association Culturelle Francophone, with the assistance of the French Embassy. It's really a multi-generational, multi-genre, seemingly organic happening caught on film. The central, whimsical and at the same time grave figure is played by Carolyn Carlson, a legendary dancer with the late Alwin Nikolais's LATE company (it's time to let that cat out of the bag, folks; while the Martha Graham company's travails are at least due to an internal struggle, the Nikolais-Louis company has self-imploded apparently because its beloved director, justly tired, would rather the company give up the ghost than turn the reigns over to others) who went on to direct the Paris Opera Ballet. (Talk about multi-genre! The best analogy would be if the directors of Pilobolus or Moses Pendleton were suddenly made directors of the New York City Ballet.)

I don't know if I want to be so presumptuous as to sketch a "plot" for the movie. Better I think to share the images which remain. The film is really a passage. We know this because of handy-dandy, multi-lingual subtitles which highlight the journey, but also because of the constantly swirling, ascending, descending, swooping Carlson. At the Jardin, she picks up a Statue of Liberty mask, dances around with it through some paths for a while, then ceremoniously places it in a pond, where it promptly turns over and sinks. Up on a roof, a friar-looking man lays gold bowl after gold bowl on the edges of the roof, of different sizes, before striking them as bells. Nearby, a man determinedly yo-yos the same pattern, over and over. Later -- perhaps after the Carlson figure has "passed on" -- passengers, in speeded-up frames, board rowboats that are launched out onto the Seine by a man in a carnival mask, as a band plays horns and burns flares on the river bank. The scene, which seems lit by candles, of course evokes Dante's journey and the journey on the River Styx. Back at another garden, in the shadow of the Eifell Tower, Young girls grab onto ropes dangling from a sort of carousel and turn it by running in circles, as a mother looks on approvingly. Then they assemble and paste together sheets of maps -- I was reminded of a whole platform at the Luxembourg where a map of the world is laid out at your feet, and tourists walk over it pointing to where they live -- which morph into rectangular map kites. Watching is a figure on a bench, covered in paper and wearing a Chinese dragon mask. She removes it -- it's Carlson, who then ascends one of those beautiful fountains. This one has spouting turtles at its base, then massive stallions, topped by a ring of naked women and I think a man, too. As Carlson climbs it, they eventually start spouting, in all sorts of different patterns. (See, in Paris, nothing is taking for granted, the artistic opportunities in every design explored and exploited. The fountains are no exception; the Stravinsky fountain in back of the Pompidou center is comprised of what might be called cartoon figures, some of found objects which turn mechanically; the timing and shape of all the water sprays is different. In another fountain, near the city's Vietnam-town, there are no such fancy objects, but the plain spigots still go off canonically.)

The film began simply, with Carlson in a studio, in only warm-up clothes, stretching as you might do. By the end she is transformed into a water sylph, at home in a strange environment peopled with the fairy-tale creatures of modern life. No matter how marvelous her surroundings get, Carlson easily moves from open-mouth marvel to "owning" her environment. The dancer is as at home among this epic and folk art, the strange music, and the eccentric characters. As at home, you might say, as dance and art are in the wider culture in France.

And there's no reason you can't get in on this, American Dance Insider! The official festival circuit can be a tough noir to crack in France, but have you considered the unofficial route? Pittsburgh-based Attack Theater's Michele de la Reza and Peter Kope know the way to Avignon, and that's it! Working with producers Pascal Keiser and Sabine Voegtlin, who produce several events at Avignon's off festival, and eclectic virtuoso (of violin, cello, and several other instruments) David Eggar, Attack lays siege this summer to Avignon's Quartier urbain Place Crillon, where its "Some Assembly Required," a process improvisation performance, will wind its way down the rue Petite Fusterie, bringing its audience with it from gallery to gallery. Performers will feed off the audience, who will in turn feed off the art on the walls of the galleries. This piece, previously performed at the Carnegie Museum of Art and the Frick Museum in Pittsburgh, as well as London's Tate Gallery, runs in Avignon from July 16 to 28.

Main festival attractions, dance-wise, include Jan Fabre's "Je Suis Sang" (I am Blood), all about, yes, blood. And " Le temps du repli" (Time for Withdrawal), by France Moves festival hit Josef Nadj. Nadj desscribes the work by citing the words of Octavio Paz: "'To love is perhaps to learn how to walk in this world." In this dance, he says, "The couple contains the potential for all dramas because it carries with it original sin. Something was broken in the primordial couple of Genesis. In this show we try to stick the pieces back together again."

While you're in the neighborhood, why not hop on the TGV to Montpellier, about an hour away? There's the festival of course, which this year features the Merce Cunningham company, plus a new work by Mathilde Monnier on dancers from the Royal Swedish Ballet, Jiri Kylian's "Colorful Black and White," and more. Here to there's an underground festival. "Plug & Pray -- Phase 1.2 : musique -- danse-- arts plastiques -- video" takes over La Chapelle, a church space, June 25, 26, and 27. Artists include Jean-François Blanquet, Nessim Bismuth, François Ceccaldi, Delphine Chomel, Marion Diagues, Eve Diagues, Eve Jouret, Fréderic Khodja, Claire Menguy, Leonardo Monteccia, Bastien Paquier, Laurent Pichaud, Christophe Brombin, Emmanuelle Santos, Etienne Schwarcz, and Eric Vaquer.