Last November, during the climate summit in Paris, the Icelandic installation artist Olafur Eliasson transported twelve icebergs from Greenland to the Place du Panthéon for a piece titled “Ice Watch.” One night that week, Eliasson invited a group of dancers to improvise a dance around the melting ice.

“It was in the spirit of the ice project itself,” Eliasson said. “I sat with the dancers first with a bottle of wine together in a café—it was very late at night, as the only time we had was after the dancers had finished a performance. I told them about the evolving narrative of our relationship with the ice that I wanted to express in dance: I told them to try to feel like the ice.” He laughed. “But then they all got incredibly sad! So I said, ‘It’s not happy or sad!’ But the ice is very old, and it had been on a long journey, from Greenland to Paris, an unexpected journey. The ice was very tired. But the truth is, the dancers had an amazing intuitive feeling. I wanted the ice to be embodied—I said to them, ‘Just filming it isn’t going to do it! You are the bridge between the viewer and the ice.’ I told them not to wear dance clothes. I wanted people to say, ‘That looks like me!’”

One of the dancers was the prima ballerina Marie-Agnès Gillot, of the Paris Opera Ballet, who that evening had finished a performance of Christopher Wheeldon’s “Polyphonia.” She said, “ ‘You don’t need a choreographer,’ I said to Olafur. ‘For this, you just need some dancers!’ We made it a dialogue of the hands and the heart. Olafur said not to be sad, but I felt I couldn’t do that, not really. It was very cold, and we finished at two or three in the morning! The ice gave out so much cold—it was as if we were dancing on a glacier. Usually, when dancers talk, it is a little of this, a little of that. But at this moment, there was no bullshit. We were all very present and serious.”

The ballet takes place in the dark. The dancers weave in and out of the gleaming ice, taking its measure. Gillot puts her ear to the ice, listening. The music, by Jamie xx, interpolates the sound of the ice itself, crackling and melting. Steen Koerner, a Danish dancer and choreographer who has known Eliasson since they were teen-agers (when Eliasson was the break-dancing champion of Scandinavia) moves his shadow along the ice like an Indonesian shadow puppet. The dancers pair off, then separate. The stillness, shot through with dancers’ gestures of intimate dismay, recalls the thoughtful, mesmerizing Jean-Louis Barrault, as the mime in Marcel Carné’s “Les Enfants du Paradis.”

“Olafur didn’t want us to be sad,” Travis Clausen-Knight, a British dancer with Studio Wayne McGregor, said. “But he wanted us to become part of a gradual journey towards empathy, to give us an impetus to act. For me, the point was not to become a crystallization of the ice but to be part of the transition of the ice, which has its own current and system of veins. I remember watching Marie-Agnès. It was as if we became ice watching ice.”

“All of the sounds of the ice—stop-stop-stop, melt-melt-melt, crack-crack-crack—can be transferred to the body,” Koerner said. “It was an amazing experience, in the middle of Paris, in the middle of the night, in the cold. Everything was changing, second by second. I’ve been to Iceland, and to the Faroe Islands, but I have never been surrounded by ice before. And then the people of Paris stopped to watch us, watching the ice. It was a mirror.”

For many years, Eliasson has been increasingly focussed not only on making art but on how the viewer apprehends sensory experience, and how that experience can motivate change. (The heat-sensitive cover of a new book, “Experience: Culture, Cognition, and Common Sense,” from M.I.T. Press, designed by Eliasson, reveals a drawing when touched.) “I wanted ‘Ice Watch’ to have a life beyond Paris,” Eliasson explained. “Watching the dance activates the movement-based activity in your brain. I’m trying to propose that there is a link between translating an idea into doing. A work of art is always an idea on a journey to become a body. The dance is really about hosting that opportunity, to translate what we think about into what we do.”