Zachary Nicol

A grainy headshot of an individual with one hand gently on their cheek.

Performances:

A dancer with head back calmly, one elbow forward, and the other arm stretched back in a curved position.

LAB ARTIST 2023

DIGITAL DANCE GRANTEE 2021

Zachary Nicol is an artist living and working in Chicago. Their interdisciplinary work uses research in dance, movement, site, and image to unfold problems of the performing body. Their work has been shown at Links Hall, Co-Prosperity, Trap Door Theatre, Lumpen Radio, Filmfront, OuterSpace, Compound Yellow (Chicago), National Museum of Romanian Literature (Bucharest), and S1 Gallery (Portland), has been supported by Chicago Dancemakers Forum and Chicago Artists Coalition, and through residencies at Ragdale Foundation, Annas Projects, ACRE, and Links Hall. Nicol works as a collaborative and performing artist and has contributed to recent projects by Anna Martine Whitehead, Joe Namy, Aram Atamian, Dulcinee DeGuere, and Mlondi Zondi.

Zachary will spend the Lab Year developing a performance work that uses the myth of Narcissus to explore the concept of self: the primacy, problem, and myth of “self” in solo performance, ego and the psyche’s fixation on narrative, the presence and absence of a “black interior,” and the mutability and multiplicity of identity that the frame of performance can offer. The project builds on the artist’s questions of whether representations and images offer a potential other than capture for the performing body, and considers how the frame can be a site of mutability and transformation in our actions to transgress it, divert it, and exceed it.

Photo: Headshot, Courtesy of the Artist. Action image by Meg T. Noe. Video by Jovan Landry, edited by Zachary Nicol.

Contact: