Adi Boutrous is a choreographer, dancer and soundtrack designer. He began his dance career in 2013, when he created his first work, « What Really Makes Me Mad », which won First Prize at « Shades in Dance » at the Suzanne Dellal Centre. In 2016, he created « It’s Always Here » and soon after began work’s international tour. « One More Thing » (2020) was commissioned by Théâtre de la Ville in Paris and was presented in Europe and abroad over three seasons. « Reflections » (2023), an international coproduction that premiered at Tel Aviv Dance at the Suzanne Dellal Centre and then at the Biennale de la Danse Lyon, toured for a month throughput France and Potsdam, Germany. In 2022, after a decade of activity, Adi was awarded the Israeli Minister of Culture and Sport Prize for Dance Creation for his body of work. He was 33 years old, the youngest artist to receive the award.

Adi’s works articulate the complexity of power relations and struggle, with choreographic syntax appearing as a parable for examining power relations and struggles in larger and broader arenas. His identity – Arab, Christian, Israeli – constitutes from the outset, almost involuntarily, a condition of friction and encounter. The “other” resides within him. Yet in a time when identity often precedes the artist as a calling card, Adi maintains a complex relationship not with the fact of his layered identity, but with its public exposure. However, his biographical point of departure inherently carries a movement that strives to expand borders, build bridges, drawing a shared human destiny – all of these are central aspects of his works.

Adi draws inspiration from the canon of Western classical art world. Masterpieces from the fields of literature, painting, and cinema drive his choreographic work – both as sources of imagery and as conceptual anchors and atmospheric guides. Through them, through their mediation, and inspired by these works, he floods aspects of decadence and humanism in the light of a society in crisis, while his body carries a distinctly local identity, rooted in the here and now. The dance language embodied by Adi and the dancers who perform with him is grounded in contact between bodies – contact that moves along a spectrum between risk and support. Accordingly, the dance exists along a continuum between beauty and morality – and its absence.

In parallel with his choreography, Adi is a record collector and selector. The types of music he collects and plays cross genres, periods and geographical boundaries: music from Latin America and the Caribbean, Africa and the Middle East, and European classical music. As part of this channel of his activity, Adi holds performative listening events, in which spaces are created for the act of shared listening. The ongoing, multi-year process of collecting and discovering music permeates his dance works and gives the soundtrack an essential role in the structure of the dance, in the contact with the images and in the creation of a sense of time.

Discover La Minute du Spectateur of Lyon’s Maison de la Danse, which welcomed the show One more thing in March 2022.