For the annual Tibet House concert at Carnegie Hall on Thursday, Philip Glass curated a range of performers, from chanting Buddhist monks dressed in saffron robes with golden Mohawk-like headdresses to beatboxer Rahzel (formerly of The Roots) to Tune-Yards (actually spelled, drunk-text-like, tUnE-yArDs) to the incomparable Patti Smith.

But the highlight performance of the evening came from Ira Glass and his dancers. Yes, that guy from This American Life, on public radio. “I’m combining two things that have never been seen together: radio and dance, one of which contains no words, and the other contains no movement,” the longtime radio host told the audience before launching into a piece—about a touring Riverdance troupe buying lotto tickets as a group—comprised of spoken-word, voiceover and a pair of dancers boogying to the Burt Bacharach classic “I’ll Never Fall in Love Again.”

At the end of his ten-plus-minute performance, Ira Glass joined the dancers and danced, something you’ve probably never seen him do before, either in speaking engagements or on the radio.

“I was totally surprised. I had no idea what he was going to do,” Philip Glass told VF Daily at a post-concert dinner at the Plaza Hotel. “And I had no idea he danced at the end. He didn’t tell me he was going to dance,” he added.

It seems that this was an introduction to a new phase of Ira Glass’s career: it was announced that he will soon debut a full-length performance, at the Annenberg Center in Philadelphia.

Philip Glass., By SHAUN MADER/PatrickMcMullan.com.

Composer Philip explained how Ira, his cousin, came to participate at the Tibet House event. “I realized that I’ve known him a long time—he’s my cousin—and he’s been on the radio a long time, and in the last few years, he’s been performing on stage more, and then it occurred to me, Why don’t I ask Ira? So I called him up, and I said, ‘Look, Ira, I should have been asking you years ago, but, you know, I’m going to ask you now, do you want to come do Tibet House?’ And he said, ‘Yeah.’ So then about a week later or so, he said, ‘Look, I know what I want to do.’ I said, ‘What do you want to do?’ Because I thought he would do a poem or something. Like, we’ve done that in the past, where he’s on the radio show and I played the music. He said, ‘No, I’m working on a new piece, and I want to do it with two dancers.’ And I was completely surprised. I said, ‘Well, we have had Tibetan dancers.’ And I trust him totally, and I said, ‘How much space do you need?’ And he said, and I said, ‘Well, that’s too much, we have to make it smaller, but we’ll work it out. Come on, bring them, let’s do a rehearsal.’”