‘Listening and keeping your hand on the pulse of the communities, to their lived experience, can guide you.’ This quote by Dalisa Pigram, artistic co-director and choreographer of Marrugeku (a company in Australia dedicated to Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians working together to develop new dance languages), echoed for me throughout the words and works seen at the Lyon Dance Biennale, where the topic of hospitality linked all the Forum conversations.

When working with communities, it is essential to make dance hospitable: the space, the welcoming attitude, the vocabulary used, and the ability to read the room and respond in real time to what the people – whether trained or not – are sharing in that moment. The same happens in a creative process, where you can decide to think about the communities that inspire, contribute or simply will watch the performance. To echo the words of Angela Conquet, coordinating curator of the Forum, hospitality is a layered topic that includes inviting and responding, attention and intention.

But Marrugeku’s work was a constant reminder that hospitality in dance is not just about welcoming people: it’s about how dance can become a vessel for shared memory, for collective joy, for resistance. It’s about how bodies can host other bodies, how rhythms can host histories.

And at the same time, the lack of dance – in many cases erased by different forms of colonialism – can be problematic: ‘How to face complexity without the necessary dance and narrations?’ (as Pigram asked herself and the audience during the conversation). That is why their work is rooted in dialogue with contested lands, which puts everyone in the role of custodians, hosts and guests; and with the stories that everybody holds, brought together by the tricks of cultural dramaturgy.

When moved to the conversation with other artists and curators, South to South choreographies, this working with communities and Indigenous artists and experts proved to be powerful also in mixing the audience, and in owning a heritage by sharing (not showing) it, acknowledging diversity, mistakes and communalities, and that it is difficult to follow a natural seasonality when travelling with a performance.

All pillars of creative practice serve as a recipe for tackling even more difficult topics such as colonialism, cultural clashes, diversity, sustainability and heritage, in a more and more conservative political climate.

In this frame, with me recognising fruits and pearls of community dancing, it should have been a joy to see theatre performances that portrayed dances that generated, were created or involved communities. In About Lambada, by French group Collectif ÈS, the iconic dance craze of the late 1980s is cleverly deconstructed while shown in videos from the night of the fall of the Berlin Wall. In Fugaces, France-based Aina Alegre pays tribute to the bailaora Carmen Amaya, whose deep knowledge of flamenco led her to Hollywood and international fame. In F*cking Future, Marco da Silva Ferreira from Portugal fishes from ballroom dancing and clubbing, and typical underground/queer aesthetics and movements. But across these works, a tension emerged that I couldn’t shake off: when community dances are placed on stage for audiences to watch, the stage can become a mirror or it can become a mausoleum. Are we celebrating community – or mourning its absence?

Dance, when rooted in community, can be radically hospitable: it can welcome grief, joy, memory, and resistance. The robbery of club culture (with clubs closing because of gentrification) for ‘soft clubbing’ in gentrified locations with an overpriced matcha, the touristification of flamenco, and the lack of occasions to joyfully move together in public space, all seem to remind us of a moment where a future seems to have been stripped away from us, and loneliness (not solitude!) seems to be the ongoing pandemic – all while community cultures are either kept away or robbed of their radical imagination.

But looking at the glass half full, when those same community dances are staged, I guess they might also signal a longing for something lost. Perhaps the act of dancing together on stage is not just a performance: it’s also a reminder, a gesture towards rebuilding what we risk no longer having.

And maybe, by keeping our hand on the pulse, as Dalisa Pigram urges, we can begin to feel it beat again. And maybe, just maybe, to help every-body move together again.