After years of successfully presenting his company DCA’s dazzling, large-scale, multimedia dance-theater works, the maverick French choreographer Philippe Decouflé drastically downsized in 2003. “So many of my big projects got canceled that creating a solo became the only sensible thing to do,” he said recently by phone from Canada, in heavily accented English. “I could count on myself, after all.”

Now he will show how less can be more. Beginning March 6, Mr. Decouflé will present his first solo work at the Joyce Theater.

Given his varied choreographic experience — for a circus, the Winter Olympics in France in 1992, films, music videos, TV commercials and various dance companies — it is somewhat surprising that Mr. Decouflé has not created a solo before now. “I knew it was a tough art form and stayed away from it,” he said. “But then I realized that if I was ever going to go back onstage, I better do it now while I’m in my early 40s, and still could. My solo is not so much physically difficult to perform; it’s the concentration it takes that makes it so challenging.”

“Solo: The Doubt Within Myself” is not purely self-reflective, though. “It starts out sort of autobiographical,” he said. “A few of my old family photos are projected on a screen. I explain everyone. But they are not so much about me as a way to indicate that we’re all the same — we all have family photos, a history. After that, I’m not specific. I’ve never been one to tell stories. I want people to step into the work and experience my abstract worlds. This is for everyone: children and adults.”

By employing camera effects, including video images and a backlit screen, Mr. Decouflé orchestrates a series of amusing vignettes populated by strange characters who climb walls, slither across the floor, transform themselves into gigantic hands, and occasionally divide in two. All of them, of course, are the choreographer himself.

“It’s tender and imaginative, like Philippe,” Yorgos Loukos, artistic director of the Lyon Opera Ballet in France, which presents Mr. Decouflé’s works, said. “It’s like a very nice interview with himself, inventive and humorous. He’s the most atypical French choreographer. He employs video, but is not of the video world. He employs dance, but he’s not of the dance world. And he employs circus tricks without being of the circus. He’s very, very special.”

Mr. Decouflé’s company made its American debut at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 2001 with the hugely popular “Shazam,” and returned in 2004 with the equally successful “Tricodex.” “Philippe is a wizard, a magician,” BAM’s executive producer, Joseph V. Melillo, said. “He has a vision of what theater can be. He constantly surprises me.”

Mr. Decouflé began developing “Solo” in a video dance workshop four years ago during a tour with his company in Japan. “I wanted to see how I could be alone and not alone,” he said. “I like the idea of multiplying myself, and playing with the images. Afterward, I brought in my lighting designer and video man. They allowed me to create images between painting and video art. What start out as tricks can become poetic images. That’s what I’m looking for.”

Mr. Decouflé’s fascination with images began as a boy growing up in Paris obsessed with cartoons. He then developed an interest in ballet from his mother’s books, and a love of spectacle after a year in a circus school at age 15. By his late teens, he was working in theater, and studying pantomime in the school of the legendary mime Marcel Marceau. What he liked most about theater was the movement rather than the words, which is why he became such a fan of Charlie Chaplin and the Marx Brothers. He took classes in contemporary dance, and then studied in New York under the wing of the American choreographer Alwin Nikolais, famed for his imaginative use of lighting. He also studied with Merce Cunningham.

“Broadway shows inspired me more than anything,” Mr. Decouflé said. “But it was the choreographer Karole Armitage who made me decide to be a choreographer. Here was a ballerina who used rock ‘n’ roll. I like mixes of things. She showed me that it could be done in dance.” He established his company in 1983, shortly after his return to Paris.

Mr. Decouflé hopes to bring the large scale “Sombrero” to New York and he plans to choreograph a work based on Les Ballets Russes, inspired by the drawings of Bakst and Picasso, a musical, a cartoon, and a serious film about a severely disabled individual. But for the moment, though he misses his wife and children while on tour, he is having the time of his life.

“When I’m directing and choreographing my company,” he said, “I have to be understood by everyone. With my solo, it’s easy. I can change whatever I want, as long as I give my lighting, sound and video collaborators enough notice. So every night, I can be a little different. And I like the direct contact with an audience. I feel the weather of the space right away, if it’s with me or not. But that can change from cold at the beginning to warm at the end. I talk to them directly and try to work things out. So far, I haven’t met with any resistance.”

Begins March 6 (175 Eighth Ave. at 19th Street, 212-691-9740).