Marc Brew was just beginning his career as a ballet dancer when a head-on car accident left him paraplegic at the age of 20. That is the starting point for an astonishing, moving collaboration between him and the choreographer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui that creates an almost phantasmagorical picture of the event that changed his life.
Presented as part of the Norwich and Norfolk festival, an Accident/a Life begins with Brew lying limp in front of a car, headlights blazing. On screens either side, his words are printed alongside images that both set the scene and emphasise the meaning of this life-changing event and its consequences. As he crawls, crablike across the stage, the car is hoisted high into the air, where it remains, physically and metaphorically hanging over the action like a bad dream.
Two figures in crash dummy costumes occasionally appear, manipulating props, becoming silent participants – doctors, therapists – in the action. Video images, sometimes clear, sometimes distorted, flash past. At one moment Brew’s mother is shown on screen, worried but warmly supportive; there’s a tantalising glimpse of him dancing before the actions of a drunk-driver killed his three companions and dashed his hopes.
Yet the cleverness of Pepijn Van Looy’s design and Maxime Guislain’s imaginative visuals is that the focus remains firmly on Brew himself. His voiceover is unemotional, deadpan. Yet his movement, directed by Cherkaoui, is uncannily expressive as he manoeuvres his limp legs into different shapes or makes his prone body pulse as he describes his cardiac arrest. His arms weave beautiful patterns. Then finally, in a wheelchair, he speeds around the stage in a solo of sudden, fleeting wonder. It’s incredibly powerful, an exhilarating defiance of fate, an assertion of living.
Destiny is much more doomy in Romeo & Juliet, on tour in Northern Ballet’s revival of a production directed by Christopher Gable and choreographed by Massimo Moricone that was originally seen in 1991. It quickly became the company’s most popular production. Now it feels a bit of a period piece, slightly too polite for its tragic trajectory, but attractive nonetheless.
Its storytelling is clear, and Lez Brotherston’s designs create an elegant Italian setting of greying stone and elegant pillars filled with costumes that are both stylised and bright. There’s some sharp characterisation too: a comic nurse danced with flair by Heather Lehan and a soaring jester-like Mercutio, all split jumps and brio, pulled off with show-stealing zest by Aaron Kok.
In fact the entire company seems in sharp form, with Dominique Larose’s Juliet acting as a lodestar for feeling, communicating her hopes and fears in dancing of great naturalness and sincerity. But the actual steps are sometimes over-elaborate, falling into balletic niceties that restrict the trajectory.
Sometimes, too, they seem to pull against Prokofiev’s score, which was played with great clarity by the Northern Ballet Sinfonia under conductor Daniel Parkinson. The presence of live music immeasurably enhances the production. The greatest tragedy is that, thanks to Arts Council England cuts, the orchestra will not be there when the company takes the production out on tour.
Star ratings (out of five)
an Accident/a Life ★★★★
Romeo & Juliet ★★★
