The inner courtyard of Lyon’s Grand Hôtel-Dieu, almost fairy-tale-like with its white pebbles and symmetrically planted greenery, is overflowing with greetings and embraces. The imposing building, which this year offered its marble floors and high ceilings to the first edition of the Forum at the Lyon Dance Biennale, was once a hospital. Etymologically speaking, it seems almost destined for a series of panels and interventions themed around hospitality.
Walking through the rest of the complex, whose renovated, glass-covered interiors now house mostly empty high-end tapas bars and even higher-end designer boutiques, that same hospitality is, by contrast, rather difficult to feel. According to curator Angela Conquet, however, it is precisely these types of discursive nuances that the Forum seeks to confront – by inviting into the heart of a prestigious and globally recognised festival artists whose voices have been (and often still are) marginalised or entirely unheard in Western contemporary dance discourse.
Indeed, in the rooms where discussions on care, colonialism and resistance, access and its absence unfold, the atmosphere fostered by this temporary community of diverse minds and bodies feels tangibly more welcoming. This collectivity, and its accompanying movement, surfaced again and again throughout the discussions, most prominently in the first and last sessions I attended.
After three days of piecing together a picture composed of seemingly disparate (yet always sensibly related) themes, everything finally fell into place for me during the closing panel, titled ‘Who Will Be There to Sing the Rain Song?’ (an excellent dramaturgical arc, indeed). I kept returning to the notes I had jotted down, nodding along, during the speech by June Oscar, Bunuba cultural leader and long-term advisor to Marrugeku, an Australian Indigenous intercultural dance theatre company.
Oscar spoke of relentless colonial repression and exploitation, land theft, and attempts to blur collective memory, but above all of how Indigenous peoples, when stripped of language, land and political agency, retained the body as an instrument of continuity, a vessel of knowledge and storytelling. Most importantly, she described the body as a keeper of collective memory, inscribed in a rebellious collective movement that weaves together the people’s social fabric.
Dance, she posited, is a conversation across centuries, carried through rhythm, not words – a fact that had echoed, days earlier, in the chattering steps of a participatory work titled Basic Punk Law by Fangas Nayaw and River Lin, which had invited us to ‘experiment with fictional Indigenous laws’. What that might mean started to dawn on me at the same time as the realisation that I’d chosen the wrong day to wear nylon tights and a skirt.
What began as a single, winding line of interlinked arms following the performers’ low chant and step pattern, soon folded, split into clusters, then multiplied and remixed into smaller travelling groups. Leadership shifted constantly, passed on through understanding glances; each body offered cues through movements that felt natural and comfortable to itself. It was a playful collective exercise in shared responsibility, trust, and – as a fortunate, inevitable byproduct – pure, childlike joy.
The frame of ‘performance’ dissolved; we were simply individuals working out the nuances of coexistence in a dancing community. The paradox embedded in the title – after all, nothing’s less punk than laws! – revealed itself as wonderfully subversive. At the end, sitting together in a circle, smiles spread across red, sweat-flushed faces, we concluded (this time with words) that law had found a new meaning: not an authority-mandated decree, but a social choreography born of collective improvisation, an agreement written in movement.
Rather than discovering something new, the experience was a recognition of knowledge long held by Indigenous communities – a kind of infrastructure of perseverance, a counter-strategy to the colonial and neoliberal doctrines that have trained us for so long in separation and individualism, those twin stones around our necks that pull us into passivity and isolation.
In this context, dance also becomes a mechanism of expression for communities that have too often been ignored or silenced, their own language of communication that operates beyond the institutionalised Western codes of space and power. ‘These truths are not just for Europeans to receive passively, so you come to know another place in the world,’ says Oscar, ‘They are important lessons for you too. To think about how to heal and be with the earth differently.’
Within the Forum, dance kept emerging as an urgent practice of care. My thoughts kept returning to the venue – a hospital, a space that takes us into care, that dresses wounds and places a soothing hand on the forehead; a place for recovery through being-with. I find the Slovene word for hospitality – gostoljubje – especially fitting: translated literally, ‘loving the guest’. Not only as a visitor, but as a fellow human, with whom you exchange rhythm and movement. A body that invites another into step is already healing something larger than itself – a reminder that strength is most reliable when shared.
I keep turning over in my mind the line attributed to anarchist, political activist, and writer Emma Goldman: ‘ If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be in your revolution.’
Perhaps dancing is the way to have one at all.