I’m in Lyon, France, and I’m finding it impossible to form opinions on anything, which in media terms these days is a non-non. To paint a picture: we are here, conscientious and mostly white arts people, gathering at the 2025 Dance Biennale. Alongside the performance programme is a new series of talks called FORUM (the official materials use ominous all-caps), centred this year around the theme of hospitality. The sun is out, there are lovely hydrangeas and Japanese maples here in one of the courtyards of the Grand Hôtel-Dieu, where the talks are hosted, and everyone is well dressed and well behaved.

The speaker panels address decolonisation but in the end what all these discussions boil down to is power and capital, sometimes in the form of who gets anointed to make what dance. The irony of such talks happening here – a weirdly luxurious complex hosting shops, restaurants and a convention centre in Lyon’s old town, and owned by Crédit Agricole, France’s second biggest bank – is lost on no one: between sessions people wryly refer to the opulent surroundings, as if our rituals of self-examination always seem to depend on the systems we criticise. Beyond that, I find myself wondering what it is we are reaching for here. Amid systemic paralysis, and as public capital slowly drains away from the arts, there is a quasi-religious fervency in the art world’s righteous commitment to noble causes.

The novelist Jonathan Franzen once identified ‘the Ache of our not being, each of us, the center of the universe; of our desires forever outnumbering our means of satisfying them.’ He argued that for centuries, art and religion filled that void. Now the internet fills it faster, more cheaply, and in endlessly entertaining ways. Still, ‘the Ache’ persists, and I wonder whether that is what we are really talking about when we speak of inclusion and belonging: a need in these spiritually bereft times to address a kind of insurmountable wall of separateness. Perhaps this is why the language of dance feels so devotional, and why gatherings like this feel so fragile. Outside the Grand Hôtel-Dieu (which translates literally as the Great God Hotel), Europe’s social fabric frays: strikes, scarcity, suspicion. Inside, we rehearse a gentler world, albeit one that may no longer be sustainable.

A similar sort of longing is detectable in the language itself of the Forum talks. Academics (and sometimes choreographers) tend to speak in prophylactic sentences made of clusters of nouns interspersed with prepositions, as if to keep their subjects at arm’s length. At times though, the hint of something spiritual emerges. During the talk ‘Marrugeku – Dance, Climate and Contested Land’, Rachael Swain openly weeps in sorrow for her subject. In another talk, ‘(Be)coming Ecosomatics’, philosopher Emma Bigé reflects on the invention of the school chair, a device, she says, designed to separate children from one another. Buddhists might refer to what is being gestured towards here as dukkha; not suffering per se, but the unsatisfactoriness of separateness, or the conditioned nature of all existence. In a sense, it’s togetherness that everyone here seems to want to celebrate across these talks, the same sense of togetherness that people celebrate in churches or mosques or synagogues. In this sense, this is a God-adjacent gathering: dance as a secular church, promising redemption through empathy and reflection.

This being a subsidised church, however, it might be fair to ask what happens when the money runs out. Parts of Europe still pay for biennales, residencies, travel bursaries. What happens when there’s not enough to go around, when public funds dry up, or when flights to such gatherings become untenable? The UK may already offer a preview: slashed budgets, struggling theatres, artists and culture workers working day jobs most of the year. What becomes of our communion of the good when communion itself becomes unaffordable?

In Radical Hope, the philosopher Jonathan Lear, writing about the destruction of Indigenous American ritual and the Crow people’s Sun Dance, described three possible futures for a culture that has lost its purpose. One, keep dancing though the meaning is gone. Two, invent a new aim for the dance. Three, stop dancing altogether. It’s hard not to wonder whether our own cultural rituals are approaching that same moment of reckoning. In our valuable and necessary efforts to decolonise, and as I shuffle with my colleagues from one talk to another, to engage with, reflect upon themes of inclusion, decolonisation, care, belonging, I must ask: is our faith in our moral function an act of hope, or denial? Are we still dancing to a meaning that has long gone?

Then again, despite a certain sense of stasis, most people (me included) seem glad to be here, to feel a collective pulse of virtue in this temporary sanctuary, a place where we can rehearse being ‘good’. Sometimes virtue does need to be performed. In a few days, we’ll return to our endangered arts-adjacent jobs, if we have them, in our declining European hometowns, sustained for a while by the afterglow of having shared in something greater than ourselves. The Ache persists, and perhaps the whole point of these congregations is not to find meaning but, on the contrary, to witness its absence (its emptiness); to feel, if only for a moment, that the point is simply to keep dancing.