Like all recipes, this one comes with a story. Mine begins in Lyon, city of silk, bouchons, and Paul Bocuse – the capital of gastronomy, where food is never just food, but heritage, spectacle, ritual. It is no coincidence that the Biennale de la danse chose to host us in the Cité de la Gastronomie, a place that insists cuisine is culture, that recipes are ways of telling who we are.
And so, surrounded by gleaming kitchens and polished copper pots, I could not help but taste the Biennale’s chosen word for 2024 – hospitality – as if it were a dish. A noble word, generously advertised on the menu, promising openness and dialogue. But like any recipe, it matters less what you announce than how you prepare, mix and serve the ingredients. Hospitality, I realised, could be cooked many ways.
This is the recipe I witnessed.
Ingredients
- 5 curators, carefully selected by the chef de maison, Tiago Guedes. Preferably friends, or at least acquaintances: hospitality here begins with trust, not risk.
- A handful of Indigenous artists: not seasoning for the cultural stew, but ingredients that refuse to dissolve. Too bitter for some palates, too real for the menu. ‘Provocation,’ they said — perhaps just a new taste.
- 4 colonial languages – French, English, Spanish, Portuguese – as the broth. Easy for international palates, though much of the flavour from original tongues is lost in translation.
- 4 mornings of Forum, simmered within the professional Focus, the Biennale’s busiest moment.
- A series of evening spectacles, already marinated for the touring market — perfectly legible to professionals, and served for maximum visibility.
Method
- Set the kitchen. Build the framework: panels, roundtables, time slots, translation booths. Hospitality requires architecture, but architecture also defines what can be cooked.
- Add the voices. Place the Indigenous artists in the broth, label the gesture ‘hospitality’. Their words cut through, pungent and sharp. Not parsley on top, but flavours, in the mix.
- Control the heat. Keep the conversations in the mornings, when professionals should be present. Yet many slip away for one-to-one meetings, chasing colleagues’ recommendations, or managing six appointment requests from the same artist. Hospitality and networking compete on the same stove.
- Serve with care. Present these artists in a side-room called Forum – elegant, curated, but nevertheless peripheral to the main Biennale menu. The banquet happens elsewhere, with dishes the market already knows how to digest.
Tasting Notes
At first, hospitality tastes generous. Rare, even revolutionary in the French dance landscape, where questions of indigeneity, decoloniality and extra-European voices are seldom served. But the aftertaste is more complex.
Because to host is also to frame. To be welcomed here means to fit into the Biennale’s schedule, its languages, its formats. Visibility is offered, yes, but in a side dish, while the main course remains untouched. Hospitality here resembles tea in the salon, while the real feast unfolds in the dining hall next door.
And yet, the paradox matters. Forum exposes what is usually absent: the works and voices of Indigenous artists, made visible for four days in Lyon. This visibility is not decorative; it is survival, a way of resisting invisibility both internationally and at home. But when confined to a curated annex, hospitality risks becoming what it claims to resist: a gesture of containment. The guest is celebrated, but still a guest. Not as host.
Dessert: The Future Soufflé
No Lyonnais menu is complete without dessert. Forum, in 2025, was more of a sorbet: refreshing, rare, but fleeting. The real challenge is still in the oven.
Will the Biennale, in two years’ time, dare to serve a soufflé that risks collapse – one where the guest no longer seasons the broth but rewrites the recipe? Will hospitality mean not only inviting voices, but letting them rearrange the kitchen itself, even to question whether the house should stand as it is?
Because hospitality, like pastry, only works if you let it rise.