The Act French festival, with its arm-long lineup and rambling time scale – it started in July – has finally finished. And I’m afraid that I didn’t appreciate it until it was almost gone. Nonetheless, the festival’s last full production makes a spectacular curtain call.

“Paradis (unfolding time),” Pascal Rambert’s strange meditation on, well, meditation, inhabits Dance Theater Workshop for the weekend. It’s ineffably sad, which is odd for a piece that features both “Puff the Magic Dragon” and a dozen electric guitars. But there’s something hopeful about it as well: It makes a convincing argument that theater’s future lies with the discipline of dance – and its adventurous audiences.

Some of the best avant-garde theater around is actually dance. For decades, choreographers like Pina Bausch have used text as a component of their dances, elbowing their way across disciplinary lines. But as the forms move forward, theater audiences hang back. Because too much deconstruction makes a narrativehungry audience twitchy, it is up to the Kitchen and Dance Theater Workshop to showcase the likes of Big Dance Theater and Joan Jonas. Dance lovers, though, watch Merce Cunningham videos with their morning coffee. Feelings of disorientation and confusion are their toast and jam.

Mr. Rambert moves across the genre-divide from the other direction, making theater that shoulders its way into dance; he emphatically isn’t a choreographer. In “Paradis,” he and his company work with extremely physical forms stolen from yoga, tumbling, and fan dancing – and do so with daunting rigor. Though you might not know it from the strong, young bodies moving so precisely onstage, only three of the movers have been professionally trained.

From the get-go, Mr. Rambert enjoys all manner of blurred distinctions. After the fluorescent lights dim, the actors come clattering out of the audience dressed in their street clothes. Assembling in a vaguely hostile group, they confront one fellow who speaks into a hanging microphone. “That Mathilde, regarding the process …” he says without inflection, and the whole group begins to strip. Once naked, they calmly unroll a yellow mat in the center of the stage; run a yellow, green, and pink flag up a pole; and begin their work.

The “Mathilde” text, which always seems to be worried about “process” and “organization,” captures pairs of actors, pulling them out of the odd behaviors obsessing the others. While the majority unroll plush blankets covered in tigers or bright roses, languorously manipulate guitars, or focus photographer’s lights, a couple will move in slow counterpoint, murmuring into microphones. Another spoken fragment sounds like a love story between Kate Moran (the only American in the group) and David Bobee, or simply a recitation of scientific achievements.

Just when the abstractions begin to seem coy, Mr. Rambert will suddenly overwhelm his audience with an actual explanation. One woman comes out to explain the affectless text-delivery – “you must take it between your thumb and forefinger and pull the emotion out of it” – and the entire cast later starts squabbling over who has archived their rehearsal videos. Such glimpses into the process keep this odd meditation on solid ground and prevent you from seeing the beautiful, nude figures as otherworldly. Still, long sections seem like Hieronymus Bosch paintings come to life: a naked woman with a head like an office chair, or two slowly waving legs appearing from behind a giant rug.

Despite carving the evening into three sections (one coded to each color in the pastel flag), Mr. Rambert’s work erases the sense of time passing. As one actress commented during a talk-back session, the distorted yoga postures stretch “both the body and time.” The piece constantly references the future, “remembering” a rehearsal from 2006, for instance, or letting a girl with her heart cut out stand up and dance. Even the hypnotic compositions by Alexandre Meyer (which he plays live from the corner) are both melodic and droning, and seem to slow down the elapsing hour.

With its matter-of-fact nudity and cheerful use of orange socks (knitwear plays an intermittent role), “Paradis” feels unpretentious, unironic, and sincere – a rare feat for an avant-garde work. Each “job,” whether it’s jumping on a guitar or taping a microphone to an armpit, eventually turns into something lovely – a group gesture, perhaps, or a song. Sure, these paradise dwellers, caught up in their silly tasks, don’t know how great they have it. But sitting in the audience, you do.

“Paradis (unfolding time),” at Dance Theater Workshop until December 10 (219 W. 19th Street, between Seventh and Eighth Avenues, 212-924-0077).