When I first heard the theme of this year’s Forum at the Lyon Dance Biennale was going to be hospitality, I had conflicting feelings. Coming from the southern part of Europe, namely Greece, where hospitality is often drastically reframed by hypertourism and overplayed as a strong cultural feature but with injurious impacts on local environments and precarious workforces, I wondered what the concept might suggest, especially as highlighted by the prestigious Biennale. What does it invite us to think in times of humanitarian and ecological crises if not admitting that the arts are also in a conundrum? When artistic freedoms are brutally attacked, or rather distributed unequally between populations, is hospitality still a referent for mutual cultural exchange, for acquainting ourselves with decentred artists and their practices? Could hospitality be even proposed as a remedy, inviting us to rethink not only the division of the world according to western conceptions but also the desired healing – and how could we undertake such a process? Where is this knowledge to be found?

The Forum was curated around such ambiguities of hospitality, allowing dialogues, provocations and participatory experiences to emerge from the positions of host/guest. The collaborators for this series of events gathered embodied and living knowledge from Africa (Mozambique), Australia, Asia (Taiwan) and the Americas (USA, Brazil). The Forum featured dance rituals that explore collective energy (Ido Chichava), it brought dance into dialogue with environmental issues and contested lands (Marrugeku), it urged us to follow seven directions into a guided meditation of group resonance (devynn emory). It reprioritised Black joy that escapes white scrutiny (Thomas F. deFrantz), it decentred our view in processes of individuation and ecosomatics (Emma Bigé), it demanded our crossing hands and dancing in circle to a stomping rhythm (Fangas Nayaw & River Lin), and it melted the audience into a group hug from which people emerged smiling and spirited (Original Bomber Crew).

It actually reminded us – as Andrew Hewitt argues in his book on social choreography – that dance is a rehearsal space for possible ways of entering the social. Our bodies were (to be) found in discursive gaps, fissures between reality and theory, stamping, sweating, fidgeting to one’s ‘sweet discomfort’, always finding their ways to embody different versions of hospitality, which obviously were not only about our own entertainment and pleasure.

The urge to address critically the very issue of hospitality, especially in a context without national boundaries – one that often artfully sidesteps the antagonisms between (neglected) local and (prioritised) global dynamics, transnational versus diasporic identities – is like walking a tightrope, with the most thorny issue being what Nigerian art curator and critic Okwui Enwezor once called ‘ethnographic ventriloquism’: the rising interest of European institutions in artistic practices from far-flung places with little historical proximity to (the aesthetic values promoted by) those western institutions. Could any demand for greater inclusivity be somehow aligned with the complexity of societies in which our institutions exist today? Could we consider dance as intricately linked to urgent political issues, from environmental risks to colonial violence inflected on populations, while also inspecting its relations to the institutions inside which it takes place?

Even though there are no easy responses to such rhetorical questions, it’s worth examining how the concept of ‘hospitality’ and the long-established dynamics between host and guest could be reformulated when thinking of contemporaneity in dance. If globalisation promises proximity between different cultures and unperturbed flows of people and capital, it is also the case that these flows and exchanges rarely denote the redistribution of sources, the actual deconstruction of the roles that host and guest firmly hold. In other words, as Forum co-ordinator Angela Conquet rightfully asked: who has the privilege to be hospitable? Could western institutions be seen as both the initiator of cultural change and the harbinger of hegemonic sovereignty?

I couldn’t think of a better example to finish this short critical response than the closing dialogue between June Oscar of Marrageku (Australia) and French political thinker Françoise Vèrges. I won’t reproduce here the indigenous and lived testimonies shared by Oscar and how they were in line with Vèrges’ critical stance towards public western institutions like Museums. Instead, I would like to focus on the promise Vèrges expressed (‘to meet again’), stressing the necessity to be in the present, in many different circumstances, hearing, debating, protesting, fighting for the commonality of the world against the malaise of capitalist driven destruction. Maybe this desire could also be found in moving bodies, as well as in moving with other bodies, both human and non-human, entangled in choreographies of becoming – as suggested by some of the concepts (ecosomatics, dramaturgies of contested lands) introduced during the Forum. The felicitous promise she made is a performative act of hope, attesting to meaningful encounters with strangers who might be fighting similar fights. If language makes itself part of what it refers to, the promise ‘to meet again’ comes as a political engagement, a persistent reminder that institutions may not change at once, so it may be worth revisiting and renegotiating the meanings and dynamics between host and guest, until there is enough space for the many.