Just before his final festival, in 2024, the late Jean-Paul Montanari—Montpellier Danse’s director since its 1980 launch—weighed in on the current state of the art: “Dance is everywhere,” he told The New York Times. “It has been absorbed by the world.” To usher in this “dance is everywhere and for everyone” theme (which is also everywhere, if not for everyone), a new quartet of directors, among them the choreographer Hofesh Shechter, has stretched the exemplary festival to neighboring towns, while the inaugural event is a free, outdoor-indoor walking tour that covers the whole festival grounds. Many of the dances, however, reverse the terms: they don’t reside in the world so much as swallow it up. The dancers clump together—a little society—before breaking into eccentric solos that only underscore their status as “group.” The moves are also social, though shrunk way down, like a cat twitching in its sleep. Among the dozens of new and recent works, including 11 world premieres, I am especially intrigued by the endearing Collectif XY, a circus version of the conceptually savvy, pedestrian works of the postmodern pioneer Yvonne Rainer; the newcomer Efthimios Moschopoulos’s autofictional solo FÁE, in which a tic-plagued gay disco dancer doubles as a Greek sheepherder, replete with hay bales and video sheep; and the festival regular Emanuel Gat, whose subtle provocations are always worth attending to. The better question, though, is not what to see but how much. I’d say enough that the pieces’ prevailing mode of social herding plus individualism measured out in micro-moves begins to speak to you. —Apollinaire Scherr