An international dance festival bringing artists and citizens together through performances, participatory experiences, workshops, and encounters across the city. Conceived as the final celebration of the European project SHIFT, it transforms Lyon into a space for movement, exchange, and togetherness.

Not all Festival performances will be streamed online. The platform will, however, provide access to selected talks, workshops, participatory experiences, and exclusive festival-related content.


Tickets for performances and most festival activities are available through Les SUBS. Registration for workshops organized in partnership with the Centre national de la danse (CND) is managed directly by the CND.

Maqamat

Lyon

SHIFT

Dance People Festival

Culture & Politics
A collective platform for reflection and dialogue

Proposed by Nicolas Bertrand, in partnership with Cie Maqamat – Dance People, France Festivals, Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes Spectacle Vivant, RESET! – Arty Farty, the European Festivals Association, and A Soul for Europe.

The contribution of culture to local life, economically, socially, and in terms of well-being—is now widely acknowledged. Yet, in a context of multiple crises, cultural ecosystems are becoming increasingly fragile, and cultural policies are under growing pressure.

In this context, it is essential to reopen a concrete dialogue between cultural actors and political decision-makers. Festivals hold a unique place within territories, serving as spaces for creation, encounter, and experimentation.

How can we, in this context, affirm and protect what makes festivals unique: spaces of creation, risk-taking, experimentation, and engagement with others? How can we sustain these forward-looking spaces of dialogue that strengthen local communities while connecting them to broader global challenges?

This working group will bring together pairs of elected officials and festival leaders, primarily from the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region, invited to share their experiences, needs, and practices.

The aim of this collective reflection is to strengthen the alliance between local authorities and festivals, fostering concrete avenues for collaboration at the territorial level.

Discussions will notably draw on the report “Festivals in Context: The Role of the Arts in Local Cultural Policy.”

Culture & Politics

“What motivates you to get out of bed in the morning?”
60 Seconds · 60 Minutes is a collective format bringing together 60 invited participants from all sectors (cultural, social, community, educational, etc.). Each person has 60 seconds to share a short contribution with the audience — a song, gesture, text, image, sound, or movement. Over the course of 60 minutes, these interventions follow one another, creating a moment of participation and listening that offers a glimpse into personal, simple, and authentic experiences.

The proposal: to answer, in one minute, the question: What motivates you to get out of bed in the morning?”

60 seconds 60 minutes

 Improvised Encounters is a 30-minute live collective creation bringing together 5 to 6 artists from different disciplines (dance, music, text, visual arts), unfolding entirely in the moment and without rehearsals. 

The session is entirely improvised, begins at 0 minutes and ends at 30.

Invited Artists for Session #1:  Erwan Keravec (musician & composer), Paula  Calveras (dancer),  Marion Alzieu (dancer) &  Ugo Tumino (cook)

Erwan Keravec

Improvised Encounters #1

Dance People is a title that speaks for itself. It places the values of community at the heart of creativity, claiming its presence through shared space with citizens and allowing new formats of being together to emerge. In a world driven by intelligent algorithms and AI, some of today’s most urgent questions are about gatherings, encounters, and how we live with one another. What is the space of democracy? Of culture? Of identity? How do we open space, protect it, inhabit it together? With a diverse and rich artistic group, Omar Rajeh and Mia Habis invite the audience into a collective creative moment. The work becomes joyful and festive, yet remains sharply critical of power and supremacy. Dance People is not a performance to observe from afar. It’s a gesture to share. A space to inhabit.

Mia Habis

Omar Rajeh

Dance People - pre performance 

Dance People

La WAW! (What a Whack!) is a joyful and flamboyant gathering where music and dance reign supreme. Like a disco ball, it spreads light and illuminates all identities present, allowing them to shine, to be revealed. La WAW! is a collective of DJs, MCs, and dancers, brought together around a vision of celebration rooted in Whacking culture—a dance created in the 1970s by racialized gay men in an underground club in Los Angeles as a way to emancipate themselves and break free from oppression.

Club Corps — Dance, as a dialogue between musicians and dancers, expressed through movements, postures, and attitudes, will be at the heart of these evenings. To launch, leap, spin, surrender to the club corps experience—giving in to the pure sensations that pass through us, feeling the immediate connection between music and body, and beginning again.

La Cité Bouge! unfolds as a vibrant dance space, deeply rooted in its territory, inviting its audience to take part in new choreographic experiences. This experience brings together artists and spectators, offering a platform to observe, engage, and participate.

Club Corps x La WAW! & la Cité Bouge!

Breakfast Dialogues opens a simple space to think together - an informal encounter where artists, citizens, and guests share questions, ideas, and perspectives before the day unfolds.

Over coffee and conversation, we gather to listen closely, challenge assumptions, and let the festival's themes resonate through voices in dialogue.

Towards Documentary Choreography: Performing Human Rights Between Theatre and the Public Sphere

In this talk, Zaides proposes a series of insights into the challenges that arise when navigating this complex terrain, drawing specifically on recent projects such as Archive (2014) and Necropolis (2018). Special attention will be given to the theatre space, where the spectator's seemingly privileged position is brought into question and reconfigured, and where the conditions of witnessing, responsibility, and implication are critically examined using performative and choreographic means. At the same time, Zaides will reflect on how the processes surrounding these projects extend beyond the theatre setting, operating within the public sphere and gradually shifting toward activist terrains, where artistic practice functions as a tool for civic engagement, institutional critique, and the emergence of new forms of collectivity.


Breakfast Dialogues with Arkadi Zaides

This workshop invites everyone to move together in a simple and joyful way. It uses games, imagination, and accessible movement exercises to help children feel comfortable in their bodies. There is no right or wrong movement. Children are encouraged to listen to themselves, to others, and to be aware of the space around them. Through play and group energy, the workshop explores rhythm, coordination, and creativity.

Workshop with Mohamed Bouriri

KOMOCO Workshop is designed for professional dancers and movers from varied backgrounds, offering an immersive practice that explores the body's physical and sensory potential. Through games and guided improvisation, participants reconnect with instinct, develop their artistic individuality, and explore a wide expressive range—from powerful, expansive movement to subtle qualities.

The work blends dance, theatre, and performance, encouraging movers to embody emotions and stories with raw presence while engaging with themes like vulnerability and intimacy. Professional sessions conclude with learning excerpts from the company's repertoire, supporting both technical refinement and personal transformation. Workshops are held internationally across Europe and beyond.

Workshop with Sofia Nappi

Each edition of Quatre-Quarts (French for "four forths") is unique, yet all share the same promise: a surprising experience. For each event, a theme is chosen. To illuminate its various facets, Prizmi selects four fifteen-minute presentations. Following an introduction, each intervention successively illustrates a different disciplinary perspective on the theme, alternating between artistic performances and academic talks.

For Dance People, the subject of kindness will be at the heart of our reflections. At the intersection of benevolence, inclusion and generosity, kindness demonstrates a care for others that goes beyond self-interest. Yet, in certain circles of our contemporary world, this value can be dismissed or even perceived as a weakness. What if we explored the true strengths of kindness?

Afterwards, spectators and speakers are invited to continue the discussion over a drink—and a slice of quatre-quarts (pound cake), naturally.

Quatre-Quarts 'La Gentillesse'

The Gombe Chimpanzee War (1974–78) was a violent conflict between two chimpanzee groups, the Kasakela and the Kahama, observed and documented by Jane Goodall in Gombe Stream National Park, Tanzania. Marked by territorial expansion, organized aggression, and planned attacks including instances of cannibalism, the conflict resulted in the systematic elimination of the Kahama group.

Using the form of a documentary, the performance examines the processes and contexts through which territorial violence takes shape. By reconstructing and retracing individual and collective behaviors, movements, and spatial incidents, it studies how such violence is enacted, rehearsed, and enforced.

Prelude to Violence

heartquake is a choreographic work about living on shaky ground, both metaphorically and literally. Inspired by Turkey's political and geographical realities, the piece focuses on the idea that "the land shapes the inhabitants' way of thinking" and evolves from a local ground into a global reflection on how we inhabit instability and precarity.

How can you imagine a future while shakes constantly change what you dreamed of? In a land where people grow up hearing ancient cities have been destroyed by earthquakes, how can you build something when you know it'll eventually be demolished? When everything keeps falling apart, what is left other than each other's support and the endless effort of human beings?

Corinth, the homeland of Sisyphus, is one of the most seismically active places in Europe.

heartquake

Improvised Encounters is a 30-minute live collective creation bringing together artists from different disciplines (dance, music, text, visual arts), unfolding entirely in the moment and without rehearsals. The session is entirely improvised, begins at 0 minutes and ends at 30.

Invited Artists for Session #2: Harris Gkekas (Choreographer), Charbel Haber (Musician & Composer), Elise Bruyère (Dancer), Romane Piffaut (Dancer), Mathieu Bertrand (Comic Artist).

Improvised Encounters #2

In 1975, Pina Bausch created a version of Le Sacre du Printemps for the Tanztheater Wuppertal, which became emblematic of 20th-century dance theater. Retaining Stravinsky's original score, already famous for the scandal surrounding its premiere in 1913 with Nijinsky, her version was dominated by the earth covering the ground, the violent nature of relationships, and death.

In 2010, Roger Bernat proposed a radical reinterpretation without professional ballet dancers. Stravinsky's music remains, but takes on a political meaning: it questions who leads, who obeys, and how decisions are made in a group. The work confronts each individual with their responsibility within collective systems.

Roger Bernat

The Rite of Spring

Often associated with anger and chaos, screaming is criticized, condemned, or censored in language and public spaces. Whether filled with rage, pleasure, pain, or silent, it is a powerful and deeply intimate act. It provokes instant empathy that also summons what we have in common and what is most instinctive. It is a crack in space-time.

This piece is an attempt to reclaim this radical expression in order to tame its raw and staggering power. Through a powerful physical and sonic journey, it seeks to make this vital impulse accessible, like a scream of alarm in the context of the geopolitical, ideological, and ecological crisis we are currently experiencing. 

Benjamin Kahn

Bless the Sound that saved a Witch like me

Breakfast Dialogues opens a simple space to think together - an informal encounter where artists, citizens, and guests share questions, ideas, and perspectives before the day unfolds.

Over coffee and conversation, we gather to listen closely, challenge assumptions, and let the festival’s themes resonate through voices in dialogue

Denis Plassard

Breakfast Dialogues with Denis Plassard

The workshop offered by Benjamin Kahn will address various questions underlying this piece and the trilogy of which it is a part, particularly those of gaze, portrait, emotional score, and the cry.

Based on these themes, the workshop will share creative practices with participants to better understand the stakes of these works and to provide tools for choreographic scoring and writing. This workshop thus offers an immersion into Benjamin Kahn's choreographic universe, where the body becomes a vector of emotion, tension, and transformation.

Through the study of choreographic lexicon and language, participants will be invited to explore how movement can be stretched, extrapolated, and reappropriated, both individually and collectively, ultimately redefining the space and the narrative it carries.

Workshop with Benjamin Kahn

La Cité Bouge! unfolds as a vibrant dance space, deeply rooted in its territory, inviting its audience to take part in new choreographic experiences. This experience brings together artists and spectators, offering a platform to observe, engage, and participate.

We are delighted to welcome Tine and Cie Relevant, two singular artistic proposals that infuse their performances with a vibrant energy and a captivating dynamic. A participatory and unforgettable moment awaits you, carried by their respective universes, inviting us all to dive into the joy of movement and connection.

La Cité Bouge! with Jérôme Oussou

Pode Ser speaks to us, via a dancer's enraged body, about everything that we were, the roles we have played, some assigned; and of what we could have been, perhaps. A striking solo on the difficulties of being one's self, that within months gained international recognition.

The Portuguese expression "pode ser" can be translated as "it could be" or "perhaps, perhaps not". This ambiguity is expressed clearly in the combination of the different dance styles displayed in the solo and becomes all the more powerful through the sincerity of movements and Leïla's intriguing stage presence.

After more than 200 representations since its creation, the solo Pode Ser, at first performed by Leïla Ka, has been taught to Anna Tierney in 2022 and to Mariana Faria in 2025.

Double Bill with Kms of Resistance.

Pode Ser

KMs of Resistance is a choreographic and sound performance that explores the primal act of breathing as a means of expressing resistance and inspiring collective action.

It draws inspiration from Aïta, a Moroccan oral tradition historically used to convey messages and incite resistance during the French Protectorate in Morocco. Reimagined in a contemporary context, the work offers a subtle way to confront today's pressing challenges, especially in times when direct speech is silenced or censored.

In this piece, two performers propose synchronised and choreographic rhythmic sequences using only their breath, voices, and bodies. By centering breath as the essential sonic material of resistance, the work creates a form of protest with no chants and no slogans. Instead, breath becomes a symbolic reminder of what unites us at the most fundamental level: our need for air, our fragility, our interdependence, and the urgency we feel when our survival is at stake.

Double Bill with Pode Ser.

Kms of Resistance

Improvised Encounters is a 30-minute live collective creation bringing together 5 to 6 artists from different disciplines (dance, music, text, visual arts), unfolding entirely in the moment and without rehearsals.

The session is entirely improvised, begins at 0 minutes and ends at 30.

Invited Artists for Session #3: Youssef Hbesich (Percussions & Rhythm), Ziad Ahmadie (Oud Musician & Composer), Benjamin Capelier (Cook), Yanka (Rapper), Nunzio Perricone (Dancer) and Freddy Madode / Cie Relevant.

Improvised Encounters #3

Between urban dances and contemporary dances, with this strong and always joyful physicality that is his signature, Hamdi Dridi invites us to enter the power of the soul that makes his house, his country, a nomadic scene, a universe to dance and make those around him dance, to take the public on a journey with him.

He is in turn a DJ, a sound columnist, through vinyls found in his travels, a sound manipulator, in the way of mixing, transforming, exhausting the tracks he chooses, an artisan of sound diffusion, by using diffusion sources that he moves, microphones that distort the sound or magnify it, combining it with the gesture, a dancer who listens to the resonance of the groove that he transcends.

Accompanied on stage by his team, he summons our perceptions, our actions, as well as his ancestors, to better embark us in this lively involvement associating as closely as possible music and dance, as founding instruments of our relationships, of being together, renewed by our presences, our looks, our listening and our bodies in motion, all swept away by this sharing, at the heart of his commitment.

Hamdi Dridi

Soul(s) Power

A moment dedicated to dance, from all styles and backgrounds, in partnership with CND Centre national de la danse. This large jam brings together schools and training programs from Lyon and the wider region, to share a time of celebration, encounter, and free expression featuring a DJ set by Zeid Hamdan.

Everyone is invited to step into the space for one minute — one minute to move, propose, experiment, and share their creativity with the audience. An opportunity to meet, connect, and experience the magic of live improvisation together, in the energy of the collective.

With Afromundo Tanoh Ben (Hip Hop)  Thomas Noréa (Afro Fusion) Gogue Maud (Afro Fusion) Valentin Gabrielle  METZ Juliette (Hip Hop) Yoyo Dominique (Krump) Grappe Kenia (Krump) Veyret Marion (danse africaines, trad et urbaines) Adao (Afro Fusion) Hallet Eghayan  Anna Claret Degert , Elea Julvecourt , Morgane Gripa, Léonie Jérôme, Laura Vincent Erro, Personames , porté par Loréna Sajous/Collectif Personus @atelierdemasque.e Romane Cie Désoblique - Formation I.D , La Voix du Corps/ Andréa Ronchi


The Big Dance Jam

With Founé Sow, singer, musician, performer, and dancer from Senegal and Mali, and Nader Mekdachi, author, guitarist, and producer from France and Lebanon.

Together, they have built an original repertoire where French, Wolof, and Soninke intertwine, call out to each other, and respond to each other. The music, lively and danceable, is both rootsy and contemporary, mixing distorted guitars, kora, groove box, percussion, and synthesizers. It draws inspiration from Afrobeat, desert trance, and Malian blues.

This duo promises a vibrant and unique fusion of urban poetry and deep African heritage.

Nader & Founé with Abdoulaye Traoré

What to expect when one of the most eclectic and prolific producers of the Lebanese underground scene steps behind the decks?

On June 21, for the Fête de la Musique at the SUBS in Lyon, Zeid Hamdan presents a DJ set that moves through the many musical territories that have shaped his journey as a producer and musician. A pioneering figure of Lebanon's independent music scene, he has spent more than two decades exploring a remarkably wide spectrum of sounds — from trip-hop to alternative Arabic rock, from experimental electronics to pop textures and reimagined Middle Eastern grooves.

This DJ set is a natural extension of that trajectory: a free-flowing journey through the sounds that have influenced his productions and those that continue to inspire his work today. Between rare tracks, electronic rhythms, unexpected influences, fragments from the Middle East and remixes of classics from Arabic music, the selection unfolds like a story in motion.

More than just a DJ set, it is an immersion into the musical imagination of a producer who has never stopped blurring the boundaries between genres, scenes and cultures.

Zeid Hamdan

Christophe Rollin - Radio Canut interviews Mia Habis

Paris

Romane Piffaut

Barcelona

Brussels

Elise Bruyère

Montpellier

Florence

Fabbrica Europa

Les SUBS

CND - Centre National de la Danse

Ministère de la Culture

Supported by 

Citerne.live is an online interdisciplinary digital space designed to propose a live streaming program of cultural events. It aims to provide a ‘cultural framework’ for creative thought online and to build a wider coalition of artists, cultural organizations, and festivals. ‘A voice for culture’, reflecting its innovative values as well as values of cooperation, commonality, equality, solidarity, and transnational approach.

#LocalCities, GlobalBodies

Co-creation and confusion of tongues. Chaos and creation. The difference between uncomfortableness and unsafety

Peggy Olislaegers

Tirana

THE BIG DANCE LAB

Can we hold the space together? 

Each space has its own history with former inhabitants. What could the aesthetics of action look like in non-conformative spaces? How is space defined, promised, taken, lost, and re-imagined?

Paraskevi Tektonidou

Give Me Some Space!

It is often a conversation stopper. This session will begin with an interview with Pascal Brunet, exploring the different qualities (plural) that artists and audiences seek.

Pascal Brunet

Can We Get Rid of The Word Quality?

The digital era is shaking up our habits and our fields of perception. But the digital world is also an opportunity to rethink our artistic practices. It offers and puts forward new modes of representation but also of presence in the world. It represents a powerful tool which can, if it is mastered, encourage artistic proliferation, access to culture but also allow a greater richness and openness to the world and reach new audiences.

With guests Omar Rajeh et Mia Habis, founders of Citerne.live, Fu Le from Cie Tétrapode and Éloïse Lefévbre – visual and video artist and Olivier Chervin, responsible for pedagogy, conferences and training at la Maison de la Danse.

FU LE

Olivier Chervin

Elodie Lefebvre

Désoblique

Relationships and issues between dance and video

In a natural and oppressive environment that Man never seems to have altered, TEPHRA tells in images a contemporary mythology of the volcano: the one embodied by a collective female body, half-child, half-nymph. In contrast to the figure of the hero, her resilient behavior in the face of possible danger is personified by boredom, gentleness, mutual aid, ritual and acceptance of a future that is as peaceful as it is disturbing.

TEPHRA, vidéo 8’19’’, 2021, ©SUZANNE

SUZANNE

Julien Chaudet

Vulcano

JERK OFF Festival

TEPHRA

Jedeya. A bubble of memories of the ancestral gestures that shaped the life of a Tunisian grandmother and which have been passed down from one generation to the next.
Sofian Jouini explores the memory of bodies through the prism of his grandmother. He explores the gestures of everyday life and those of working the land up to the kneading of bread. In 2020, immersed in a nursing home, with the elderly, he collected their testimonies around the daily gestures that had filled their past lives. Between Tunisia and Brittany, these life stories have nourished the creation of Jedeya. Sofian invites us to sit around a bread oven to revisit the gestures that punctuate existence.

Sofian Jouini

Belfort

VIADANSE

Jedeya

A spontaneous journey where the traveler leaves their life behind for a time to let the spirit of the landscape and architecture attract and move them. Derive is an exploration through movement and visual-arts of how our breathing bodies can leave this weight and be entranced by the existence around us.
Photo Mauricio Yazbeck


Layal Berberi

Beirut

Cameras of October

Dérive

Snakes and Ladders is an imaginary excursion, examining darkness, metaphorically, sensorially and symbolically. Hopelessly powerless bodies move, scan a dying city, try to read the future in the dark.
The film creates a duality between a human body and a concrete building - attempting to open pathways of perception by melting the fortifications of our constructed meanings – by observing matter and thought, in their raw form.
In darkness, we construct, in light we deconstruct. Photos © Nader Bahsoun


Yara Boustany

Snakes and Ladders

Turbulent flow is an expression of time and space. It was shot in the Lebanese mountains during a time of transition as well as economical and political instability in the country. There is a heaviness of some sort in the air, especially in the city. The mountains are high enough above it.
The rocks stand strong, seemingly eternally unhinged by the elements and variables, they are quite a nice refuge.
Photos © Taymour Boulos


Natasha Karam

George Nassar

Taymour Boulos

Turbulent Flow

While merging and intertwining with nature, three young girls create a metaphorical and visionary narrative of their present condition and their projections towards the future. 
Through their lightness, disorientation, vitality, and strength, they embark on a choreographic journey facing high and low tides, turbulence and contradictions, calm and turmoil. Guided by absurd questions the oranges reflect the path of the protagonists in their delicate passage to adulthood and guide us in a poetic reflection on our lives. Photos © Nuanda Sheridan & Sofia Quercetti