Nicholas Bellefleur (they/il) is an interdisciplinary artist, somatic facilitator, community leader and educator based in Tio’tia / Montreal. They create spaces of presence and transformation where dance, technology, play, and critical thought collide. Rooted in a queer and neurodivergent perspective, their practice moves fluidly between performance-making, improvisation, embodied research, alternative pedagogies, and collective experiments. 

Whether through posthuman performance works, consciousness-oriented workshops, or choreographic systems, Nicholas explores how bodies, people, environments, and larger systems shape and transform one another. Their response is to develop practices and methodologies for unlearning conditioning, reawakening intuition, and cultivating embodied, situated, and sensitive ways of being.

Their artistic and pedagogical proposals (performative, relational, or contemplative) emerge from deep listening to the body, altered states of perception, and the poetic power of glitch, ritual, and chaos. Each becomes an invitation to slow down, feel differently, take aligned action and dream collectively.

Their work is deeply interested in relationality: what happens between bodies, between people, between structure and spontaneity, between individual experience and the ecologies we are already part of. Choreography becomes both a form and a way of thinking — a tool for noticing how things organize themselves, how systems inhabit bodies, and how new forms of relation can emerge. Rather than imposing transformation, Nicholas is interested in creating the conditions for what already exists to reveal itself.

Nicholas celebrates aliveness through punk and ecological ballets, happenings, workshop-performances, one-on-one coaching, and choreographic anthologies. Whether in a studio, a field, a theatre, a bunker, or a dream, they seek ways to unlearn, to feel differently, and to craft gestures that permeate possibility.

Nicholas is the co-founder of Proto Studio, a self-managed community art centre for the performing arts in Montreal, where they are interested not only in making art, but in building the conditions, relationships, and structures that allow artistic communities to gather, experiment, and thrive. Through Always Already, an evolving container for their artistic research and practices, they continue to explore embodiment, relationality, systems, emergence, and the strange intelligence of what is already in motion.

With a diploma from l’École supérieure de ballet du Québec, alongside rigorous training in contemporary dance, improvisation techniques, classical voice, and theatre, Nicholas continues to evolve through ancient and invented forms, aesthetics and praxis.


We have seen Bellefleur in athletic and conceptual works of Andrea Peña & Artists (2021–25) and Dana Gingras / Animals of Distinction (2023-24), the brutally poetic physicality of Virginie Brunelle (2021–24), the provocative ideas and practices of Dave St-Pierre (2021), the sensitve works of Harold Rhéaume (2019–22), and the neopunk choreographies of Wynn Holmes with LFDT (2022–24), where they also acted as associate director and facilitator of LFDT classes for 5 years.

Other collaborations include Ballet BC, 7 fingers, BJM Danse, RoyalMount, MGM Resorts, Centre-National de Danse-Thérapie (Grands Ballets), and others.