Everybody knows Juliette Binoche the actor. Some may even know Juliette Binoche the painter, or the poet. But now, after about two years learning a new art form, we are to get Juliette Binoche the dancer.

“It’s not easy you know. You try releasing the hips,” she encouraged journalists yesterday. The actor was in London to talk about what promises to be a Binoche autumn on the South Bank with the premiere of her collaborative work In-I at the National Theatre, a retrospective of her films - from The English Patient to Chocolat to Hidden - at the BFI, and an accompanying exhibition of her paintings and poems.
In-I is a collaboration with choreographer Akram Khan which also features sets by artist Anish Kapoor and music by composer Philip Sheppard, who is writing and producing the music for the Olympic handover ceremony in Beijing.

What the work is and what audiences will see is still something of a mystery and one that the four artists were yesterday keen to continue. It is not just a piece of dance, or just a piece of theatre, it is both of those and more, they said.

Binoche said they began with the question what is love, but said they may not be giving any answers. “You have to be patient, we’re still on the road searching,” she said

Learning to dance was all about breaking out of comfort zones, Binoche said. “If we get too much into habits, too much into doing what we know we can do, then there is no life.”

While she has learned dance, Khan learned to play the guitar, something he may or may not do in In-I. He may also act and sing.

The title is equally enigmatic. Inside-out was considered, as was Inside-I and it was Kapoor who suggested In-I to make it more abstract. “It somehow had slightly more mystery to it,” he said. “One of the things to remember is that we are not performing a work we know, we are discovering something we don’t know and hoping that a work comes out of it.”

Producer Farooq Chaudhry called the project a “crazy, mad adventure” and said his wife may even have been the catalyst to it because she was massaging Binoche while she was filming Breaking and Entering and she took her to see Khan at Sadler’s Wells. “A few weeks later Juliette ended up in the studio with Akram and there you have it.” After a run at the National (it opens on September 18), In-I will tour around the world.

Guardian.co.uk

• Ju’ bi lation - A season of dance, film & art featuring Juliette Binoche