The project

The Biennale de la danse, devised and run by La Biennale de Lyon, has been championing dance as a common benefit since it was founded in 1984. It offers a multitude of forms and formats for every audience: amateurs, professionals, and spectators – from our first-ever Biennale-goers through to this year’s first-timers. Each edition turns Lyon, the Lyon metro area and the Auvergne-RhôneAlpes region into a vibrant hotbed of dance, where movement becomes a universal language.

To affirm dance as a common benefit means devising a Biennale de la danse open to its huge variety of practices, stories and genres, informed by dialogues between disciplines, cultures and territories. It also means questioning the world around us, for no work of art exists outside of reality.

What is dance still capable of in our crisis-stricken world? Faced with ecological, political and social upheaval, how can the moving body offer fresh perspectives, and a more sensitive approach to otherness and the living world?

Through 40 shows, including 24 new pieces and French premieres, and original spaces for connection and discussion, this year’s edition offers many paths to explore these issues.

Plural perspectives

The featured artists address current tensions, transforming movement into a language of resistance to deconstruct representations of minoritised bodies and to interrogate colonial legacies. They examine young people’s autonomy in the light of future challenges. They pay tribute to leading figures in dance and music, summoning memory and reinterpreting a heritage through works that build bridges between past and present, fusing rigorous dance vocabulary and choreographic freedom. They transform the stage into a space for metamorphosis, where gestures unfold and reinvent material, creating sensory experiences as dance converses with the visual arts. A host of visions to highlight the extraordinary vitality of the creative act.

Close ties

More collaborative than ever, the 2025 Biennale de la danse is built on many close ties; and some have given rise to inventive programmes. With the Centre Pompidou, we are proposing an immersion in the singular worlds of three major artists on the contemporary scene. And with the Brazil-France cultural year, the extensive Brasil Agora! programme, created in close collaboration with the Panorama Festival in Rio, will showcase the amazing creative wealth of Brazilian dance. Emphatically international, the Lyon Biennale de la danse is this year launching Forum, and inviting five curators and five artists from beyond Europe to create a new space for interaction and experimentation – zooming out and discovering how art and dance can make a statement in other contexts.

Togetherness

The Biennale de la danse reaffirms the importance of the collective in a variety of places where dance becomes an art of bond-building – on stage, in the street, and in unexpected alternative spaces. The large ensembles remind us of the power of the group, while the unmissable Défilé brings together thousands of amateur dancers for a big festive occasion with popular appeal. Other attractions like the Club Bingo nights encourage the emergence of collective dance energies. In an unstable world, fraught with crisis, culture must step up and stand firm. Now more than ever, the Lyon Biennale de la danse is needed to give artists the opportunity to create, invent, build bonds, examine norms and open up fresh perspectives. In this challenging context, it is essential to reiterate that culture is a right, and a strategic long-term investment. Support for these initiatives must be strengthened, so they can continue to enlighten the present and shape the future.

Thank you to the artists and to our public, private and artistic partners. And thank you to our loyal audience, whether guided by curiosity or passion. We wish all of you a good Biennale!

Laurent Bayle, Chairman, La Biennale de Lyon
Sabine Longin, CEO, La Biennale de Lyon
Tiago Guedes, Artistic director, Biennale de la danse