Stav Struz Boutrous
An independent choreographer and dancer, born in 1990 (Jerusalem), whose work integrates folklore and contemporary dance. Her creations focus on questions of the body, belonging, and memory, emerging from the intersection between the personal and the collective, between the private body and the historical body.
She is a graduate of the High School of the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance, and formerly danced with the Batsheva Dance Company and the Inbal Pinto and Avshalom Pollak Dance Company. Her work is influenced by the meeting point between movement traditions from the Caucasus and the former Soviet Union and contemporary dance, and she views the body as a living archive of cultural identity.
Stav draws inspiration from early cinema, with an emphasis on films from the 1930s to the 1980s, and aspires to create a performative world based on visual imagery, layers of memory, music, and the exploration of time.
Her works include: Morning Carnival (2020), Sepia (2021) – awardee of the Bloom Prize at The Rose International Dance Prize competition, Nomads (2022), Spaces (2023), Farewells (2024).
Her works have been presented at festivals and dance centers in Israel and across Europe: Tel Aviv Dance Festival, Julidans Festival in Amsterdam, Chaillot - Theatre national de la Dance in Paris, and Sadler's Wells Theatre in London.
Struz Boutrous has received several awards:
Yitzhak Navon Prize from the Israeli Ministry of Culture and Sport for the preservation and cultivation of Israeli cultures (2022)
Rosenblum Performing Arts Award for Promising Artists from the Tel Aviv Municipality (2024)
Bloom Prize, awarded as part of The Rose International Dance Prize at Sadler's Wells Theatre, for her work Sepia (2025)
Alongside her artistic work, Stav teaches dance at the Arab-Jewish Community Center in Jaffa, as well as movement classes for children on the autism spectrum. She also teaches traditional folklore classes – an ancient technique from Georgia and the Caucasus, which she combines with knees work drawn from her own choreographic works. These folklore classes offer a journey into an ancient and vanishing movement language, preserving the cultural memory and movement history of various communities, and aim to provide knowledge and inspiration from the rich heritage of folklore.
