PARIS—If its name is irrefutably, drolly straightforward, the Nouveau Festival’s program — as glimpsed during its opening days last week — is anything but. The opening night of the Centre Pompidou’s new five-week art and performance festival (timed to coincide with the ever-elegant FIAC) included an orchestra of accordionists outfitted in theatrical black eye masks; a guitarist in a black-and-gold tasseled shirt who offered what sounded like a Quentin Tarantino spaghetti-Western score by way of Sam Shepard, played amid an installation of gold bon-bon–like sculptures; and a louche troupe of actors performing ribald tableaux vivants with a turkey dinner and some phallic stuffed objects that looked like they had been stolen from Louise Bourgeois’s studio for the occasion. While watching this last performance — to a frenzy of surreal laughter, including my own — a fellow art critic turned to me and noted: “This is the Frenchest thing I have ever seen.” Oui.

If this description sounds dizzy, well the show was, and perhaps pointedly so. Curated by Bernard Blistène, the Pompidou’s recently appointed director of cultural development, the Nouveau Festival is meant to be a “non-stop research lab into today’s creation.” If that sounded a little broad as I made my way to the Pompidou the first night, Blistène further elucidated his concept over lunch with Pompidou president Alain Seban the next day at the president’s official apartment. “The festival is meant to reinforce what the Pompidou was in the 1970s — this notion of performance, of crossing boundaries,” he told the canapé-strewn room. As Blistène went on to describe the five weeks of performances, workshops, events, poetry readings, and concerts that would take place in the theater-curtain-heavy installation designed by Heimo Zobernig in the Pompidou’s south gallery on the first floor — which was also outfitted with a hodgepodge of familiar sculptural works by artists like Jorge Pardo (a fluorescent orange corridor) and Carsten Höller (his eerily empty and mirrored merry-go-round) — the curator allowed that he wanted to use the Pompidou “as a flâneur,” and in so doing encourage the audience to be flâneurs themselves. Then Blistène smiled grandly: “The Pompidou is an event.”

Indeed, this month it is. As I scanned the exhibition’s hefty schedule I got dizzy from the stats alone: 160 artists (of every persuasion) scheduled for a bag of overlapping performances and exhibitions. From readings by an array of French experimental poets and concerts from the New York avant-garde musical collective Stars Like Fleas (see their 2007 album The Ken Burns Effect) to a reconstruction of Blinky Palermo’s puppet theater and lectures on the paintings of Sarah Morris, Anselm Reyle, and John Tremblay, the festival’s calendar — which was also helpfully writ large in a grid on the plaza outside the museum — was duly packed. And although the roster of artists was decidedly French-heavy, a selection of well-known international artists popped out on the set list as well. Among them were Elmgreen & Dragset, who premiered a new work, Drama Queens, with a libretto by British director Tim Etchells, on Thursday evening, as well as the Wooster Group and Andrea Fraser, who would be performing an update of her pert 2001 art-award satire Official Welcome.

In addition to the Pompidou-centered offerings, the Nouveau Festival included an exhibition curated by Christian Rizzo and installed at the infamous Salle des gens d’armes of the Conciergerie. The impressively historic sixth-century gothic building (once a palace, then a prison whose most famous resident was Marie Antoinette) held a small show of figurative works improbably called “The probable fate of the man who swallowed the ghost.” Clad in a faded Motörhead t-shirt and crimson basketball sneakers, Rizzo showed us around the exhibition himself. Called a “human orchestra” in the press release but also an artist and choreographer, Rizzo explained that his show was devoted to a “representation of the body in motion.” This was evident in the exhibition’s pièce de résistance, a black mirrored catwalk-like plinth that stretched across the musty room with an assortment of figurative sculpture and television monitors riding its back. Lovely Merce Cunningham performances spun out of the TVs, while straightforward sculpture by the likes of Marnie Weber, Kiki Smith, James Lee Byars, and Folkert de Jong celebrated the figure both human and animal. To the side was a table vitrine holding complicated glass cockrings by Jean-Luc Verna, which the heavily inked and pierced artist — who was present — explained were meant to be used. Bodies in motion, check.