Hospitality, the theme of the first-ever Forum at the Lyon Dance Biennale and Springback Assembly, was a complex topic for me to address. The last 12 months of my life have been turbulent and unsettled, filled with travelling, sofa surfing, and hopping between press trips. In short, I’ve accepted more than my fair share of hospitality from friends and colleagues. While I’ve tried to be a grateful, low-maintenance guest, it’s often bothered me that I haven’t been able to offer anyone the chance to come and stay with me in return. I’ve found myself wondering: have I overstayed my welcome in the role of guest? When will I be able to play host for a change?

That was until architect Florent Otello shared during our Springback Assembly panel ‘Cramped at Home: Hospitality in Crisis in Creative Fields’ that, in French, the word hôte means both guest and host. This prompted me to reconsider my binary understanding of hospitality. Maybe the roles of guest and host are less fixed than I had imagined? Perhaps we are constantly shifting between the two, or even inhabiting both at the same time?

The concept of Forum supported this idea. Technically, the participating artists were invited from their respective homes to Lyon as guests of the festival. But in many of their sessions, it felt as though they themselves were the ones holding space, inviting us to encounter and be hosted within their cultures and practices. This duality of guesting and hosting was particularly prevalent for me in the workshop of devynn emory, a New York City-based practising registered nurse, prescribing psychiatrist, multi-licensed massage therapist, healer, seer, educator and choreographer:

• Like a guest, devynn thanked us for the opportunity to be in Lyon, and delivered a presentation about their multifaceted practice. Switching between English and their ancestral language as a mixed Indigenous-person (which they are relearning), they shared how powerful it was to speak it in this context, for it to be welcomed and hosted on European soil.
• Like a host, devynn invited us to take part in a guided somatic practice based on the 7 directions of the medicine wheel. Through calmly delivered instructions, they created a relaxing environment for us to refind our bodies through breath and physical touch.
• Like a guest, devynn distributed gifts from their home – small bags of needles from a cedar tree in their backgarden.
• Like a host, devynn gently fostered connection among everyone in the room – inviting us to share our cedar with others as a way to spark conversation, or asking us to gather in areas of the space aligned with earth, wind, fire, or water, depending on the energy we felt we needed. This naturally formed small groups – families of sorts – bound by shared desires.

Indigenous Taiwanese choreographer Fangas Nayaw’s physical dance workshop was also a dialogue between guesting and hosting. Like hosts, Fangas and his dancers commanded the space, inviting participants to link arms in a large circle and emulate the movements – repeated stepping patterns, shunts, hops, and twists – and chants passed down through generations in their tribes. We were guests in their movement language, yet the process of embodying it also felt like hosting new ways of moving within our bodies.

After these experiences, I feel reassured that I don’t need a plush spare room in order to offer people hospitality – there are many ways of guesting and hosting in our everyday lives. It got me thinking: can dance criticism and writing itself be a form of guesting and hosting? Like guests, critics are invited into theatres, offered some of the best seats in the house – and sometimes complimentary wine – and presented with creations that artists have poured their blood, sweat, and tears into. But we also play host to those creations, offering our undivided attention, allowing them to take up space in our minds and on the page. We pore over the right words to capture the flicks, kicks, torso rolls, and elbow jabs we’ve just seen, striving to ensure they’re authentically represented in the written remnants that live on after performances have ended.

I’ve just taken 800 English words to describe the duality of hospitality that French achieves in one: hôte. Why doesn’t my native language have an equivalent? At the end of Brazilian collective Original Bomber Crew’s performance of Margin, the last event I attended as part of Forum, I had an idea. Crouched in the middle of the space, one performer invited the audience to gather around him in a large clump. We laid our arms and heads on the people’s backs in front of us, as people joined behind to do the same. We were simultaneously held and holding each other – like guests, like hosts, like humans. Perhaps that’s the only role we need to play.