Sometimes you go to see a dance show that leads you, spiralling, into a reluctant reappraisal of your own wants and motivations. Why am I here? What do I want? What is it that I’m looking for when I sit in the dark with hundreds of strangers to observe this elusive artform that grunts, shrieks, wails, and sweats more often than it speaks? At the 21st edition of Lyon’s Biennale de la Danse, artists and audiences both seemed to grapple with a similar set of questions. Rather than what asking what dance is, or even what dance could be, this year’s Biennale seemed to ask: what do we want from dance? What can dance give us, that nothing else can?

Answers, like dances, darted in all directions. There was the Forum, a new Biennale project which sought to disrupt Europe’s navel-gazing tendencies by inviting curators Angela Conquet (Australia), River Lin (Taiwan), Nayse Lopez (Brazil), Quito Tembe (Mozambique) and Angela Mattox (USA) to envision a five-day tapestry of talks, panel discussions, and workshops that playfully bit the hand that fed it. The Forum offered sharp and trenchant critiques of racist, colonial, and Eurocentric tendencies in dance epitomised by mammoth institutions like the Biennale itself, which, admirably, were respectfully and intelligently received by the Biennale’s leaders, including artistic director Tiago Guedes.

The ‘indigenous and settler-led’ Australian company Marrugeku spoke of dance as a practice of ‘truth-telling’: a way to reckon with the bloody gashes of colonisation on our skins and psyches. In his performance lecture I am Black (you have to be willing to not know), scholar and performer Thomas F. DeFrantz argued, with puckish brilliance, that Black dance’s strength is its inherent unknowability – that it does not represent something, it is something. In an ornate room in Lyon’s Cité de la Gastronomie, the political scientist Françoise Vergès spoke of the invisible labour of cleaning, almost always by women of colour, which allowed us to pontificate about choreography in immaculate salons.

Elsewhere, the Biennale offered the Focus Danse programme, which provided visibility for selected French and European artists to a cadre of visiting professionals from all over the world. Moving from the Forum to Focus Danse often felt like getting a sharp blow to the head and waking up in another world. During the day, Indigenous artists from the global majority spoke of surviving as artists with little to no institutional support: making, sometimes literally, ceremonies out of the air. In the evenings, one attended brilliantine world premieres by European artists that sparkled with the lustre of investment, including, on one occasion, a literal laser show.

Whilst often more coherent and certainly always more polished, the artists of the Focus Danse programme were less clear on what their dances aimed to give, or gift, us. The Flemish choreographer Jan Martens, for example, presented The Dog Days Are Over 2.0, a recreation of his 2014 breakout work with a new generation of performers. Like an obstinate mule, The Dog Days Are Over 2.0 never strays from a single action: the jump. Over seventy minutes, the eight performers are tasked with a gruelling sequence of unison jumps, the only respite coming in changes of pattern and rhythm. It is an Olympian feat that incites a certain cerebral glee, but at the end of it all, the performers look as shattered as I feel. We are asked to appreciate their suffering, but it is unclear why that suffering is worthwhile, or what, moreover, are the ethics of watching young lithe athletes engage in masochistic aerodynamics (let alone the ethics of asking and paying them to do so). Physical endurance as a route to transcendence has long fascinated a wide range of body-based artists – think Marina Abramović or Maurice Béjart’s Boléro, to name two very different examples. Yet Martens’ use of endurance does not strike me as a magical portal. Instead, it calls to mind a dead end.

The Dog Days Are Over 2.0 is certainly impressive: both in its formal beauty, which Martens subtly and intelligently develops, and in the dancers’ admirable skill and precision. Where the workfaltered, at least for me, is in establishing an empathic connection with those watching. It’s that very connection – the recognition that you, me, all of us, are less separate than we think – which is one of the reasons we go (and have gone for thousands of years) to the theatre. Dance, which calls us to listen to our bodies as we watch others ignite their own, is uniquely placed to gift us these experiences of collective empathy.

For all its inconsistencies, limitations, and occasional overzealousness, the Biennale’s Forum programme asked of dance such worthwhile things. To open us up to better ways of being together. To increase our capacity for empathy, not admiration. To own our wrongs and mourn our losses. Rather than reduce our movements into mathematics, the Forum reminded us that, in the words of DeFrantz, it is better to be willing not to know.