Nicola Bullock (USA) is a choreographer, dancer, and writer based out of Berlin. At times she is also a producer, teacher, and facilitator. Powered by a physical drive to dance and create, she makes solo and group work for the stage and screen. Through her work Nicola seeks to language the invisible forces which shape our bodies, lives, and world. Her work has been presented in Tunisia, Canada, Israel, Georgia, at various locations in Germany and throughout the USA.

Most recently Nicola performed her solo 'Stuck In Free Fall' to audiences in Berlin, Edinburgh, and North Carolina, and wrote and designed an accompanying artists book (2023); co-directed the immersive theatre piece 'The Path of Pins or the Path of Needles' with Josephine Decker and Pig Iron Theatre Company for the Philadelphia Fringe Festival (2022); and did movement research for the participatory audio-theatre piece Dancing With Violence with Min Yoon/Citizen Truth) (2022). In 2023 she earned an MFA in Dance from the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Artist Statement

I am a choreographer and dancer specializing in improvisation and contemporary performance. At times I am also a producer, teacher, and facilitator. Powered by a drive to find and forge understanding through physicality I make solo and group work for the stage and screen under the moniker NB(D).

I make art which reveals the dissonance between our internal states and our external shapes. I move frequently, playfully, and sometimes disruptively between the sacred and the profane, the tragic and the comic, the cosmic and the quotidian. I delight in meeting impossible philosophical quandaries with restless physical energy. My artistic inquiry is shaped by what is currently happening in my body- whether the concern is identity or how to change the world- because I know there are many others who share these questions.

My creative practice centers intuition, meandering movement sessions, and digressive writing. Through listening to the stories our bodies tell and the stories we tell about them, my work sources from the energy of the present moment to inform its direction. Striving for connection within my own practice, within an ensemble, and between the performers and the audience is at the forefront of my consciousness as I work. A lot of my work is self-reflexively about bodies and dance itself, the very tool and medium which is its expression.

I like seeing the rawness and realness of the performers onstage, and I reject images of perfection and ease. Sounds- whether classical piano music, a ticking clock, or the voices of performers- serve to orient audience members to something familiar in otherwise peculiar worlds. I play with costumes and physical states- clean or dirty- as though they are curtains for the body, revealing only that which I want to be seen. My pieces frequently take place in non-traditional settings such as warehouses, fields, and bathtubs.

I create characters who display multiple levels of their psyches through movement as their physical forms shift and they assume whole new identities. Rituals and rites of passage usher in their deaths and rebirths as pop music plays in the background. My characters are simultaneously ordinary and strange, an amalgamation of recognisable elements that, when combined, become harmoniously discordant.

I believe that art creates new narratives and visions for the future by dreaming, demonstrating, and sharing the embodied possibilities onstage that everyday interactions are incapable of instigating. I honor the body as a living and autonomous force rather than an abstraction of shape or object of desire. I know that how we move, communicate, and co-habitate inside of a dance studio and onstage is no different than how we move through, communicate in, and co-create the world; and I know that it matters how we do it. I believe that art is magic, and through my work I endeavor to create generous, accessible work that languages the invisible forces that shape our bodies, lives, and world.