Artiste indisciplinaire, chorégraphe et enseignant, Nicholas Bellefleur explore un monde en constante mutation — queer, post-humaniste et radicalement vivant — dans lequel l’art, la danse et être ensemble deviennent un espace de soin, de résistance et de métamorphose.
Après avoir collaboré de près avec Andrea Peña, Virginie Brunelle et Wynn Holmes, Bellefleur fonde le proto studio aux côtés de Cai Glover et Caroline Namts à Tiothiake Montréal : un centre d’art auto-géré, un lieu pour la danse, la résistance et la coexistence.
404: MOTHER NOT FOUND
RAVERIE
LA NUIT NOUS APPARTIENT
A SAFE(R) SPACE
0018+ ÉROGÈNE
UNCANNY VALLEY
PRAXIS
LFDTCLASS
SLOWCLASS
PROTO
CONTACT
© BELLEFLEUR 2027
Débinariser la danse,
12 août 2023
LE DEVOIR
Une première chorégraphie québécoise co-produite par La Biennale de Venise,
27 juin 2023
LE DEVOIR
Les dansseurs demandent « Révolution » d’améliorer les conditions de travail
4 août 2021
Festival Quartiers Danses 2025
DAC’OR 2025 (extrait)
MIRAGE CORPORATIF x COWORKER
proto studio 2025
404: MOTHER NOT FOUND
Meat Factory 2025
Fringe MTL 2025
Ouverture de
ROYALMOUNT 2024
RAVERIE
Fierté MTL 2024
LA NUIT NOUS APPARTIENT
Festival Carrefour 2024-25
A SAFE(R) SPACE
Tangente 2022
Vue sur la Relève 2021
Short & Sweet 2020 (extrait)
Festival Quartiers Danses 2019
Virginie Brunelle
Wynn Holmes / LFDT
Dave St-Pierre
Dana Gingras / AOD
Sébastien Provencher
Harold Rhéaume (FDD)
Les 7 doigts / 7 Fingers
Fleuve Espace Danse
Gioconda Barbuto
Sadler’s Wells
Espace Go
Théâtre Maisonneuve
Lugano Arte e Cultura
Opéra de Paris
London Opera House
Théâtre St-Denis
Le Grand Théâtre de Québec
Ariane Moffatt, Soleil Denault
2025
MANIFESTO 6.58, film de danse
Andrea Peña & Artists
2022
CUBED, vidéoclip
Baile, House of Youth
2021
Passepied, vidéoclip
Jean-Michel Blais
2021
LE.DÉFI.DE.L’AMOUR., vidéoclip
Lumière
2021
Danser, docu-fiction
Artv 2014
ILS DANSENT! avec Nico Archambault, série documentaire
Radio-Canada, TV5
2011
Thank you for being you
Cracked Open:
On Social Life and the Gift of Friction.
The textured beauty of discomfort, connection, and becoming.
photo: Kristina Hilliard 2025
This return to idiorythmie made re-entering social life feel like a form of friction. Being with others — navigating conversations, environments, and shared experiences — felt suddenly overwhelming, not because we had become less social, but because we had become more sensitive. More aware of what it costs to remain present. And perhaps for the first time, we could name that cost.
But this friction is not a flaw. On the contrary, it may be the very essence of what social life is. We are conditioned to associate ease, smoothness, and comfort with goodness — and discomfort, tension, and slowness with failure or dysfunction. But this binary reveals more about the pathology of modernity than it does about the nature of social existence.
Philosopher Byung-Chul Han, in Saving Beauty, critiques this modern obsession with smoothness. In his view, the contemporary world increasingly seeks to eliminate resistance, conflict, and even complexity. The ideal object — whether it’s a smartphone, a body, or a social interaction — is designed to be smooth, frictionless, and instantly consumable. “The smooth,” he writes, “is the signature of the present time.” It is the aesthetics of a world without edges, without pause, without pain. A world that reflects the values of neoliberal capitalism: speed, transparency, comfort, optimization.
But in eliminating friction, we also eliminate depth.
Friction is the texture of real life. It is what allows for contact, transformation, and encounter. When we are in true relation — with another person, with an idea, with a place — something rubs. And in that rubbing, there is heat, vulnerability, even pain. But there is also growth. The ego, confronted with another worldview or presence, develops fissures. The smooth façade cracks. And through those cracks, something new can emerge — humility, insight, a softening, a shedding.
In contrast, the smooth social interaction — pleasant, agreeable, curated — offers no such opportunity. It protects us from discomfort but also from change. It keeps us in a loop of sameness, a feedback chamber where nothing unexpected can occur. Social media, for instance, offers the illusion of connection, but it is primarily smooth. It allows us to manage the terms of our exposure, to curate our personas, to mute or block dissent. The result is a sterilized form of sociality — clean, algorithmic, and hollow.
This smoothness is seductive because it mimics safety. But true safety — the kind that nourishes — does not eliminate friction; it holds space for it. It allows for disagreement, rupture, contradiction. It values the uncomfortable pause, the awkward silence, the unresolved tension. Because it knows that these are the very sites of becoming.
If we listen closely, our desire for solitude may be less about misanthropy or escapism, and more about a longing for integration — a need for time and space to metabolize experience. Modern society, structured by the logics of patriarchy, colonialism, and capitalism — that three-headed monster — has no place for integration. Its tempo is relentless, and its values are externalized: produce, perform, progress. There is no built-in pause for the internal work of digestion, reflection, or repair.
But integration is not a luxury. It is essential. It is how we learn from experience rather than repeat it. It is how we alchemize wounds into wisdom, interaction into understanding. Without integration, social life becomes noise.
In his work on racialized trauma, somatic therapist Resmaa Menakem writes:
“Trauma decontextualized in a person looks like personality. Trauma decontextualized in a family looks like family traits. Trauma decontextualized in people looks like culture.”
When we fail to contextualize our exhaustion, our reactivity, our withdrawal from social life, we risk internalizing them as flaws or pathologies. But what if these tendencies are actually the echoes of collective wounds? The product of inherited, unresolved trauma stored in the nervous system — shaped over generations by systems of violence?
And if this is true — if trauma travels across generations — then so does wisdom. Intergenerational pain is real, but so is intergenerational resilience. So is intergenerational intelligence. There are ancestral tools for integration, for rupture, for repair. We carry within us the memory not only of what broke us, but of how we put ourselves back together.
We are social creatures, not in spite of this friction, but because of it. We need each other to grow. We need the discomfort of being seen, the risk of being misunderstood, the courage to speak even when our voice shakes. These are the soft eruptions that erode the ego and open us to one another.
To live socially is to agree to be disturbed.
And in that disturbance, we participate in the larger, cosmic collaboration of which we are a part — not just human to human, but human to non-human, to landscape, to atmosphere, to time itself. The space between us is not empty. It is charged. Alive with the potential of transformation.
If we are all one, then we need each other to become ourselves.
And if fissures appear — if we crack, if we shatter — that may be the truest sign that we are doing the work. The work of unlearning. Of transgressing. Of dying and becoming.
Of growing.
Humanity has been sculpted by violence in slow, deliberate strokes. Generation after generation, our bodies and minds have been shaped by the machinery of patriarchy, colonialism, white supremacy, and capitalism. These systems did more than organize economies or govern laws — they reprogrammed our relational instincts.
They taught us to distrust. To suppress what’s tender. To tie our worth to what we produce. To brace instead of soften. To fear stillness. They rewired us for survival, not connection. They normalized disconnection — from the land, from each other, from ourselves.
And yet, within this rupture lives a memory. A pulse of something older, wiser, more whole. Beneath the architecture of domination, something else endures — an ancestral intelligence, waiting to be felt again.
“Rarely, if ever, are any of us healed in isolation. Healing is an act of communion.”
— bell hooks, All About Love
Texte écrit par
Nicholas Bellefleur 2025
© BELLEFLEUR 2027