Like many people over the past year or so, Michelle Ellsworth has often felt disoriented, as if the world had been turned upside down. But she is probably the only person who responded to that feeling by putting herself in a wooden wheel so that she can be rotated 360 degrees around the axis of her nose.

“By replicating the sensation, I can try to understand it,” she said last week, in a Skype interview from her home in Boulder, Colo. A professor in the theater and dance department at the University of Colorado there, she is quick to say that she is “a dancer, for sure.” Yet her eccentric and marvelously original art defies easy categorization. One of her works, “Tifprabap.org,” is both a performance piece and a website for a new religion. For another, “Pythagodress,” she created a huge pentagonal costume of fabric and pipes that was part confessional booth, part giant uterus.

“A dance” is how she labels her latest work, which is to be performed Jan. 9-11 at the Invisible Dog Art Center in Brooklyn as part of American Realness, the annual genre-blurring festival of avant-garde performance. That there is no dancing, per se, in this dance isn’t out of the ordinary for American Realness, but ambivalence about performance is emphasized to an unusual degree in her work’s title: “The Rehearsal Artist.”

“My father’s sister was an extraordinary pianist,” Ms. Ellsworth explained. “She would practice and practice but she never wanted to perform. And her husband said: ‘You’re not a performance artist. You’re a rehearsal artist.’”