The event: a Dance Biennale to transform our view of the world

The 21st Dance Biennale offers forty shows (all forms combined in Lyon and the region) including eleven world premieres and integrates the Brazil/France 2025 crossover season with a very interesting program called “Brasil Agora” which reveals the creativity of Brazilian artists living in the country or from the diaspora in France.

Resolutely “Political Bodies”, it translates concerns that we see addressed on the current choreographic scene – identities, migration, totalitarian states, colonization of bodies and cultures, rejection of social and artistic norms, visibility of minorities, climate issues, youth – while celebrating the power of the collective, attention to others, connecting artists together, offering the public profound but also joyful encounters.

In the positioning that Tiago Guedes gives it, we perceive a common thread, that of transmission and transformation, of bodies conducting multiple cultures, histories and contemporary realities but also of a desire for mutation.

Choreographers draw on this political material to bring out profound identities and reinvent what exists, where the body in movement might not change the world but raise awareness and assert its metamorphosis. And their aesthetic approaches are different: electro/paroxysmic for some, poetic and plastic or visceral and cathartic for others. Far from the tumult, artists advocate appeasement and suspension, focusing solely on the writing games of dance and the pure exploration of movement.

A program with six associated artists as headliners

In terms of programming, we have some sure values ​​at the top of the bill – six of the nine artists associated with the Biennale/Maison de la danse – and despite their undeniable talent, we feel, from the point of view of the Lyon region, a certain frustration at not discovering others because, even if it is a long-term accompaniment, François Chaignaud, the ÈS collective, Jan Martens, Marco da Silva Ferreira, Dorothée Munyaneza have been programmed in Lyon in recent years (except Lia Rodrigues in 2013), also Dalila Belaza and Katerina Andreou. We would have liked a more varied and more international vision of dance aesthetics – France, Portugal and Belgium, alongside Brazil, are in the majority here.

Without hesitation, the Brazilians Davi Pontes and Wallace Ferreira , who in Repertório N.2 transform their naked bodies into a political force to create a combat dance in the face of the social violence of Rio's suburbs; Aina Alegre with Fugaces pays homage to Carmen Amaya (a great dancer erased from the history of art) not by reproducing her gestures but by exploring sounds and percussive movements that redraw the artist she was.

Rarely seen in Lyon, the researcher and choreographer/performer Eszter Salamon offers with Monument 0.10: The Living Monument a slow and sensory journey where creatures dressed in shimmering materials and leather create monochrome and incandescent landscapes, passing from black to white, from midnight blue to orange.

Yuval Pick for his harmonious work around Bach, Christian Rizzo for his immersion in a dance inviting the discovery of everyday gestures, Emmanuel Eggermont who, after listening to young people aged 18 to 25 around the cult references that animate their lives, weaves through music, visual elements and his own body, a writing reflecting what they are. Recently discovered with his elegy for Raimund Hoghe, the choreographer is an immense and magnificent dancer! Visual artist Miet Warlop creates with Inhale Delirium Exhale a symphony of gestures, bodies and fabrics in ebbs and flows provoked around 8,000 meters of silk, symbolizing a humanity that carves a choir in discords.

Among the events, Civil Society: Undertainment, the latest creation by William Forsythe, a major figure in contemporary dance, presented in a double bill with the Dresden Frankfurt Dance Company directed today by choreographer Ioannis Mandafounis who presents Lisa . It is about balancing acts, improvisation and choreographic structures where two generations and two different perspectives on dance come together. With The Dog Days Are Over 2.0, Jan Martens questions, through the exhaustion of the performers, the boundary between art and entertainment spectacle, the performance of the dancer transformed into an executor in the service of perfection and the expectations of the spectator. A proposition which, for us, resonates with the dance/electro/rave shows currently acclaimed for the sole reason that they are spectacular and borderline for the performers. Symbolically closing the Biennale, Philippe Decouflé, whose new creation, Entre-Temps, brings together a group of people of all ages moving in the same direction, rocked by the passing of time with its variations in life, rhythms and gestures, coiled bodies coming to terms with their differences, just to feel alive!

Led by eight groups from Lyon and the surrounding region, the parade will take place on September 7 with the theme “Recycled Dances” (understand: social dances that bring people together in the street, at balls or elsewhere – traditional, flamenco, jazz, capoeira, hip-hop, clubbing… – transformed by the contemporary perspective of choreographers, also using recycled materials).

The finale will be hosted at Place Bellecour by Mehdi Kerkouche with an excerpt from his latest piece 360. In its nomadic version, the Bingo club returns with its weekend of queer electro, hip-hop, and Afro R&B, while many clubbing events are offered in different locations, all of which will excite certain communities (although at the risk of excluding those who are not offered anything else). In the public space, the Biennale offers us nuggets, short free dance forms.

Not to be missed: Cheb , a male duo by Filipe Lourenço on traditional music from the Maghreb and popular music of today, Woods/Bosque, a monumental performance by the Brazilian Clarice Lima where bodies become forests or Rue, a percussive solo by Volmir Cordeiro, a Brazilian artist discovered in June at the Subs in a piece created with Robyn Orlin, his presence is hallucinating!

Dance Biennale – From September 6 to 28 in Lyon and the surrounding region until October 17 – Full program: labiennaledelyon.com