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Intellectual collaborations thrive in environments where ideas are shared, freely and respectfully, among people representing different backgrounds and perspectives. This is why the Neubauer Collegium regularly opens its inquiries and conversations to the public.

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At Threshold

A barefoot man in a suit lying on his back on the floor
Performance

At Threshold

This event features a lecture-performance by Chicago-based artist and performer Zachary Nicol.

This event, presented as part of the Movement Theory Lab's spring 2026 visiting artist series, features a lecture-performance by Chicago-based artist and performer Zachary Nicol. The piece draws on a decade of work as a standardized patient and ultrasound model to investigate clinical education, labor, and exposure, developing an autotheory of the consenting body as the site of pedagogical utility and historical entanglement.

The Movement Theory Lab is supported as part of the Arts Labs initiative at the Neubauer Collegium.


ABOUT THE ARTIST

Zachary Nicol is an artist, choreographer, and performer based in Chicago. Their performance and video work uses research in dance, movement, site, and image to unfold problems of representation and paradox in the performing body.

Their solo and collaborative work has been presented at national and international venues including Museo Universitaro del Chopo, BACAL (Mexico City), Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Watershed Art & Ecology, 6018|North, Blanc Gallery, Links Hall, Pivot Arts, Trap Door Theatre, Co-Prosperity, Lumpen Radio, filmfront, OuterSpace, Compound Yellow (Chicago), Krannert Center for Performing Arts (Urbana, IL), the National Museum of Romanian Literature (Bucharest), and S1 Gallery (Portland, OR), among others.

Nicol was a 2023 Chicago Dancemakers Forum Lab Artist; has been artist in residence with Ragdale Foundation, Annas Projects, ACRE, and Links Hall; and has received support from Whistle Space, Lit & Luz, Villa Albertine, and Chicago Artists Coalition. They have guest-taught workshops and classes at Columbia College Chicago, the University of Chicago, and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and they work regularly as a dramaturg for dance and theatre.

Nicol has performed and contributed to dance, film, and performance projects by artists including Anna Martine Whitehead, Andy Nicholas Li, Courtney Mackedanz, Gabriel Chalfin-Piney-Gonzalez, Adam Linder, Joe Namy, Mlondi Zondi, Alexandra Pirici, Elise Cowin + Josh Hoglund, Kim Brandt, Ginger Krebs, Catherine Sullivan, and others.

Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry

This event features a lecture-performance by Chicago-based artist and performer Zachary Nicol.

About the Artist Learn More

Amit Chaudhuri: The Raga as Investigation of Song

Lecture

Amit Chaudhuri: The Raga as Investigation of Song

This talk incorporates a North Indian classical music performance and explores Chaudhuri’s belief that ragas are not based on melodies.

At this series of lectures with performances, writer and musician Amit Chaudhuri (Professor of Creative Writing, Ashoka University; Neubauer Collegium Visiting Fellow, 2025–2026) will explore how North Indian classical musical forms like the khayal as well as his own experiments with the raga, the blues, and the soundscapes of the contemporary world emerge from, and express, complex philosophical shifts and departures. Chaudhuri will also consider how the everyday, in India, is situated in philosophical positions that are unwritten, and “in the air.”

Organized by the Sonic Borderlands of South Asia research project at the Neubauer Collegium in partnership with the International Balzan Prize, the Committee on Southern Asian Studies, and the Department of Music at the University of Chicago.

Monday, May 4
The Raga as Investigation of Song
This talk incorporates a North Indian classical music performance and explores Chaudhuri’s belief that ragas are not based on melodies, but investigations into them.

Monday, May 11
Music as a Non-Universal Language
This talk is organized around a performance of Chaudhuri’s “non-fusion” repertoire, which disposes of cultural categories like “East” and “West” not in order to embrace universality but to address a constant provisionality.

Monday, May 18
The High Philosophies of Orality
We associate the “oral” today with the vital, the raw, and the multivocal. Chaudhuri looks, instead, at how, in India, orality has often been the domain within which sophisticated philosophical lineages have been disseminated.

Neubauer Collegium

This talk incorporates a North Indian classical music performance and explores Chaudhuri’s belief that ragas are not based on melodies.

Register

Out Here at Court Theatre

Two seated women holding hands and smiling at each other romantically.
Performance

Out Here at Court Theatre

The new musical, developed in partnership with the Neubauer Collegium's Arts Labs initiative, premieres at the Court Theatre this spring.

Out Here is a new musical, developed in partnership with the Neubauer Collegium's Arts Labs initiative, about a family reconfiguring itself and rediscovering joy.

Dawn has a house, a husband, and a family, but she wants more. She wants her ex-girlfriend, Robin. She wants nothing to change and she wants everything to change, and she wants to control all the terms. As she’s caught between what’s been and what’s next, Dawn must learn to reimagine her expectations, harmonize with loved ones, and trust the process. If she can do all that, she might just learn a new song. Strikingly original, Out Here explores the unexpected freedom in relinquishing control, and how, sometimes, you have to break something apart to create something better.

Download the program

Court Theatre

The new musical, developed in partnership with the Neubauer Collegium's Arts Labs initiative, premieres at the Court Theatre this spring.

Learn More

Amit Chaudhuri: Music as a Non-Universal Language

Lecture

Amit Chaudhuri: Music as a Non-Universal Language

This talk is organized around a performance of Chaudhuri’s “non-fusion” repertoire.

At this series of lectures with performances, writer and musician Amit Chaudhuri (Professor of Creative Writing, Ashoka University; Neubauer Collegium Visiting Fellow, 2025–2026) will explore how North Indian classical musical forms like the khayal as well as his own experiments with the raga, the blues, and the soundscapes of the contemporary world emerge from, and express, complex philosophical shifts and departures. Chaudhuri will also consider how the everyday, in India, is situated in philosophical positions that are unwritten, and “in the air.”

Organized by the Sonic Borderlands of South Asia research project at the Neubauer Collegium in partnership with the International Balzan Prize, the Committee on Southern Asian Studies, and the Department of Music at the University of Chicago.

Monday, May 4
The Raga as Investigation of Song
This talk incorporates a North Indian classical music performance and explores Chaudhuri’s belief that ragas are not based on melodies, but investigations into them.

Monday, May 11
Music as a Non-Universal Language
This talk is organized around a performance of Chaudhuri’s “non-fusion” repertoire, which disposes of cultural categories like “East” and “West” not in order to embrace universality but to address a constant provisionality.

Monday, May 18
The High Philosophies of Orality
We associate the “oral” today with the vital, the raw, and the multivocal. Chaudhuri looks, instead, at how, in India, orality has often been the domain within which sophisticated philosophical lineages have been disseminated.

Neubauer Collegium

This talk is organized around a performance of Chaudhuri’s “non-fusion” repertoire.

Register