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This quest for a performer occupies the middle part of a triptych in a well-paced and frequently very funny film (in “roving eye” documentary style) where Baë contacts several acolytes of the French contemporary dance scene to try and persuade them to perform his work. The film is a journal of the 16 days, starting with the hilarious sequence of his desperate bluff to Patrice Poyet (then Director of the Aix Festival) that he has Mathilde Monnier standing by to perform; the horrified look on his producer’s face and her subsequent gentle admonition about the morality of such a detailed artistic proposal being made without the artist’s consent. Humour continues into the next scene where Baë goes to Monnier to persuade her to dance for him and eventually admits to having already committed her to the work! Despite her producer’s protestations that this is all “very cavalier”, Monnier agrees to perform and they even start rehearsing together but her producer has the last word, reminding her of a commitment to perform in Berlin that will over-lap with this work. On hearing that Monnier will try to find a replacement, Baë’s pleading response that this alternate must be for the performance in Berlin brings forth one of the biggest laughs.

And so it continues as he approaches many of the great names in French dance, each of whom eventually has a reason for not doing it. The Gervaise reference is that all of these sequences send the dancer up in a gentle way; for example, when he meets Josef Nadj (with whom Baë performed in the remarkable ‘Les Philosophes’ at the Greenwich Dance Agency in 2005) during a quick stopover at Charles De Gaulle airport, their conversation is interrupted so many times by Nadj taking mobile phone calls that Baë never gets to ask him – the in-joke here being that Nadj doesn’t have a mobile phone in real life.

The first and third parts of the work are about the performance itself. In the opening part, Baë teaches himself the solo, taking the part of both the choreographer barking out instructions and the dancer’s implementation. At 45, Baë remains a mesmeric performer with a background in mime, music and Taï Chi which underpins everything he does: at one point he falls heavily to the floor on his back, rolls to one side and then springs back to his feet as if propelled by some unseen giant hand. He speaks in a hoarse, high-pitched tone, which is almost musical in accompanying the movement: in fact, Baë has a congenital lung condition, by which large parts of his lungs are now obstructed, leaving him with only 39% lung function. In a scripted extract of the film a “Doctor” tells him that he should be on invalidity benefit, not dancing, but none of this is intended to evoke self-pity, just an ironic counter-balance to his search for a dancer to replace himself in his own work.

As the film comes to its end, we find Baë in his dressing room in Aix, visited by the Festival Director, desperate to discover who the mystery guest is and from Baë’s evasive responses we’re led to believe that his quest has ended unsuccessfully and he's about to be exposed as a charlatan. The lights then come down and an announcement requests “dancers to the stage”.

When the lights reappear, Baë is sitting next to Catherine Diverrès – who also last performed in London at the Queen Elizabeth Hall during Dance Umbrella’s “France Moves” in 2005. She enacts his choreography from part 1, with Baë gently instructing her from the back of the stage, and whilst every aspect of the movement is tightly controlled, the difference in their performances is remarkable. Diverrès is an understated performer, whose movement is full of inherent grace and subtlety with face, arms, hands, legs, feet, ribs and spine all playing their part delicately in balance with the whole. This is an anatomy of performance since the detailed dissection of seeing Baë “create” the work on himself and then on another dancer, with all the extra nuances Diverrès brought to the same steps was palpably instructive. The “joke” in ‘Journal d’inquietude’ is that all of the film’s guests have appeared as Baë’s mystery dancer at some point since it was first performed in 2005 and I suspect that each of them have brought something special and different to his simple choreographic structure.

This was one of the most compelling works I’ve seen in Dance Umbrella for a while, lasting more than 90 minutes without a break but never seeming to drag (in fact, I was disappointed when the film, which is full of Gallic irony and self-parody, ended). It’s one of these works which will last for a long time as a signature piece and I suppose the real joke is that Baë is now as talismanic as the people he chases on the screen. Just like Ricky Gervaise and his ‘extras’.