Adina Secretan was born in Geneva in 1980 and studied classical and contemporary dance and acting at the Conservatoire in Geneva. In parallel with a Master’s degree in philosophy and modern literature, she continued her training in contemporary dance with Marchepied Cie in Lausanne and also studied mediation and dramaturgy. Since 2008, she has worked intensively as a dramaturge, choreographer, director and mediator for theatre, dance, performance and community dance projects. She has also acted as a research assistant and published magazine articles on philosophy, literature and the performing arts. Since 2012, she has participated in various collective experiments, some of which she played a part in initiating, based on the principles of knowledge sharing and self-management. She was an associated artist of the far° festival of living arts in Nyon from 2017 to 2019. Adina Secretan also campaigns for fair production conditions and pay for people working in the arts.
Adina Secretan’s various creations and collective co-creations, in particular together with the choreographers Eilit Marom, Elpida Orfanidou, Anna Massoni and Simone Truong as well as the Chilean collective MIL M2, have been performed at many venues and festivals in Switzerland, Europe, the Middle East, Latin America and Australia. Place arose from a research project on urban spaces. It premiered at the Les Urbaines festival in Lausanne in 2014 and was also presented at the Swiss Dance Days in 2017. Like Place, her latest work, Une Bonne Histoire (2022), was created at the Arsenic. Invited to be part of the Sélection Suisse en Avignon in 2024, it is based on a story from the 2000s: Securitas and Nestlé hired young women to spy on activists in French-speaking Switzerland. In her dramaturgical practice, which she likes to call a “supporting practice”, Adina Secretan is also interested in developing collective intelligence and creating awareness of the power relationships underlying creative processes.
Performer, choreographer, producer, thinker, educator, storyteller: Adina Secretan never stops exploring every aspect of theatrical creation. She investigates the grey areas and hidden stories of a multifaceted Switzerland, often involving people with little access to the institutional theatre scene in her shows, always questioning the power relationships in our cultural representations. She carries out meticulous, detailed research and creates implacably radical works that take on militant, poetic and sensuous dimensions. Many of her pieces tell of her struggles and remind us of our own awareness of the state of the world and our responsibilities.
