has a long, hybrid career across theatre, dance, mime and contemporary circus.
He originally trained as an actor and dancer, then shifted into mime, working with influential physical theatre and mime figures such as Peta Lily, Philippe Gaulier, David Glass, Lindsay Kemp and Andrew Dawson.
“The workshop provided a group of artists and producers coming from all around Europe not only to collectively reflect on representation, diversity and inclusion but also to individually question our relation to the realities of blackness and whiteness.
It offered a creative introspection which is needed to shift our mind-sets and therefore to impulse change in our perimeters of actions and power.
I left these two days of workshop feeling that I had started a personal journey, as much as a collective one.”
He ran his own company, Angels of Disorder, making devised physical theatre and circusinfluenced work.
After an intensive course at Circus Space in London, he cofounded Company FZ with Flick Ferdinando; their show Throat (performed by Zaccarini and directed by Ferdinando) became a landmark contemporary circus/theatre piece, winning a Total Theatre Award, gaining a Stage Best Actor nomination, and touring internationally for almost a decade..
He has worked as a director, choreographer and movement director, including soloist work with the Adam Darius Company, as a member of DV8 Physical Theatre and movement direction for theatre productions in London venues such as the King’s Head and Battersea Arts Centre, as well as choreographing aerial work for highprofile events like the Royal Variety Show, Hermes, John Galliano for French Vogue, the Nobel Prize ceremonies and commercial commissions.
Over time, he moved from being primarily a performer to becoming a researcher and teacher, developing “Circoanalysis,” which fuses circus with psychoanalysis and therapeutic thinking, and completing a doctoral thesis on circus, therapy and psychoanalysis.
This arc—from performer in theatre/dance/circus to director, dramaturg and finally professor—underpins his current work in FutureBrownSpace, where he brings decades of embodied, crossdisciplinary performance experience into a research focus on race, care and radical pedagogy.
This arc—from performer in theatre/dance/circus to director, dramaturg and finally professor—underpins his current work in FutureBrownSpace, where he brings decades of embodied, crossdisciplinary performance experience into a research focus on race, care and radical pedagogy.
As an artist and scholar, I investigate blackness, embodiment, and voice in the arts in order to unsettle the habits of the white gaze and open speculative, reparative futures. Through performance, writing, and collaborative research, I create spaces where racialized and marginalized bodies are not merely represented but centered as generators of theory, aesthetics, and new social imaginaries. Blackness/brownness is an expertise to be nurtured on its own terms. My mission is to develop artistic and pedagogical practices that transform institutions from within, nurture radical forms of care and critique, and transport audiences, students and participants toward the inner futures in which our differences are a source of creative power, relation, and joy.
He is currently Professor of Performing Arts at Stockholm University of the Arts, for the Profile area Bodily and Vocal Practices and often identifies as a Dragademic.
Defintion below:
An intertextual figure invoked within both academic and performance contexts that bridges scholarly and popular culture.
In the former it performs an ambivalent identification with scholarly discourse when that discourse assumes a universal or neutral tone by employing shade and close reading (see below).
In the latter it smuggles critical theory—Black Study, decolonial motifs, and queer methodology—into non-academic contexts by using popular culture as its vehicle.
The figure blurs the categories of gender and genre in playfully imprecise analogies. It transposes the drag queen’s identification with women to the artist’s orientation towards theory. It attempts to produce a discourse of a scholarly tone within artistic research, but with no grounding in a theoretical discipline. Its attraction to theory produces a lure, an entrapment by mimicry, that ends up as a form of parody of the master’s tools. It reads genre with a queer, black/brown gaze; the genre of academic knowledge is something to be read, when it gets epistemologically self-important.
On the ground, at the roots, on the street, the ebony power of the dragademic contests the fairness of the Ivory Tower: “Mirror, mirror on the wall, you ain’t never been the fairest of them all.” As drag is to gender, so dragademia is to a particular genre of knowledge-producing academia.
It is ambivalent, desiring, iconoclastic, satirical. In popular parlance, one could say the figure is both c*cky and c*nty.
Shade is widely known as an expression of contempt or disrespect for someone via subtle or indirect insults.
When employed by the dragademic it serves to provide some cool respite for the blindingly obvious.
When our eyes start smarting from how bright the elephant is in the room—and this figure was developed for very white, racially anxious rooms, so the elephant is often white, which is how the dragademic views the concept of whiteness—shade comes to our rescue.
A read is associated to shade; it is the direct delivery of a critique, and a reading can emerge from shade.
In this instance, of being the only brown queer in a room, shade, as a layered, pun-heavy deconstruction of universality or neutrality, cannot be processed intellectually in the moment; the affect is felt, but the meaning takes time to pull itself together, by which point the dragademic has moved on to something else so you don’t realize that you’v ejust been read.
In some rooms this is the only tactic available to insert a queer, black, or decolonial critique without anyone noticing in time. In this respect it shares some affinities with fugitive practices.