‘Hors Pistes’ Is an Arts Festival About Sports, for People Who Don’t Like Sports

When it comes to the biggest sports show on earth, many Parisians have reached the stage of begrudging acceptance. The level of disruption — and metro price hikes — to get the city ready for this summer’s Olympic Games hasn’t exactly endeared the event to locals, especially those who favor culture over sports.

“The Olympics are coming — whether we like it or not,” a curator from the Pompidou Center, Linus Gratte, said as he introduced a performance there this past weekend as part of the “Hors Pistes” festival. The audience chuckled.

“Hors Pistes” (meaning “Off-Piste”), a festival the Pompidou Center says is devoted to “moving images,” came with an Olympic-ready theme this year: “The Rules of Sport.” It is part of the Cultural Olympiad, the program of arts events that is now a part of the Olympic experience in every host city.

For the Paris Cultural Olympiad — spearheaded by Dominique Hervieu, an experienced performing arts curator — the city has opted to go big. Any cultural institution could apply for the “Olympiad” label, leading to a sprawling lineup of sports-related exhibitions and performances, which started back in 2022. This has led to a degree of confusion over what, exactly, the Olympiad stands for: Its official website currently lists no fewer than 984 upcoming events.

And quite a few of them end up exploring a paradox, because art and sports rarely mix in France. As a rule, the country’s artistic output leans toward intellectualism rather than the virtuosity embodied by high-level athletes. The Pompidou Center, a flagship venue for contemporary art, telegraphs as much in its “Hors Pistes” publicity material, which says the festival’s goal is “to question and subvert the rules of sport, and to imagine new interpretations of them.”

While the Pompidou is primarily an art museum, and “Hors Pistes” comes with a small exhibition, the festival features a significant number of performances, onstage in the center’s theater, or in its galleries. Some of these struggled to find coherent common ground with sports, however, like Anna Chirescu and Grégoire Schaller’s “Dirty Dancers,” an hourlong dance performance staged in the exhibition space, with sports-style bleachers for the audience.