It started, he suspects, with a decision more than a year ago to team up with the choreographer Kate Wallich for a tour of live dance performances. “I think that shook me up so much, creatively and in my life,” Hadreas said. They called the dance, “The Sun Still Burns Here,” an hour of “deterioration, catharsis and transcendence,” according to the program notes, with some singing by Hadreas.

The show affected Hadreas, “in ways that I’m still sorting through.” His disorientation makes a kind of sense. He hadn’t been looking for Wallich. Her dance group had received a commission for a live music-dance project and found him. On Instagram.

“I came across a photo of Mike on my explore tab doing, like, a crazy backbend,” Wallich said, on the phone from Seattle. She had never heard of Perfume Genius, but the way Hadreas used his body spoke to her. “Mike would send me a photo of something, and he’d be talking about a sound, but he’d be able to send me, like, a photo of trash, and he’d be like, ‘You know: like this,’ and I instantly understood that.” And Hadreas understood her: “I was just like, ‘oh, this is someone I’m supposed to talk to and work with.’” Still, the process of total collaboration is part of what drove Hadreas to commit to the process. He was hoping to be creatively destabilized by working so closely with a virtual stranger.

“Before I had even written any music and there had been any movement we were talking about what is this going to be, which is bizarre to me,” he said. The music always originates with him, alone, then he shares with his collaborators, which include his boyfriend of more than a decade, the musician Alan Wyffels. “I write all this music by myself generally, like in a very isolated way. But this was creating something in a room full of people from the very start, and in a very physical way.”

When the show opened at the Joyce Theater in Chelsea, Gia Kourlas, the dance critic of The New York Times, wrote that, “aside from some bursts of spirited unison choreography for Ms. Wallich and her group, the action is too limited, too labored.”