Not quite dance, not quite theatre, An Accident/A Life is more like a multimedia, queasily hallucinatory staging of a story that puts the body of a dancer at its centre. That dancer is Marc Brew, and the story revisits the traumatic turning point in his life when, at the beginning of his ballet career, the car he was in was hit by a drunk driver. All three of his companions died; Brew survived but was left paraplegic, aged 20. The story he tells is harrowing, touching, brutal and tender, but what makes this feel like a work of almost classical tragedy – you will absolutely experience fear, pity and catharsis – is its notably unclassical treatment of the staging, the body and its voice.
The set is simple, symmetrical, and devastatingly effective: two screens flank a car that first sits impassively on the ground and is later hoisted up to hang perilously above the stage, like a traumatic memory that defines everything around it. Two figures in crash dummy costumes serve both as supplementary characters (clinicians, nurses, even alter egos of Brew’s fragmented self) and as stagehands, moving around bits of set, or using hand-held cameras to relay scenes on to the screens.
In the ambulance and hospital scenes in particular, those video projections break into kaleidoscopic fragments of faces and colours – druggy geometries that find their counterpart in the diamond folds of Brew’s inert yet hyperflexible legs as he manipulates them into skewed formations. His body remains a focus throughout, whether finding its own capacities as he explores – physically as well as mentally – a therapist’s couch, or wearing a costume that maps the skeleton beneath. His voice, meanwhile, remains preternaturally calm: rather than express his story, Brew narrates it from a safer emotional distance – a disquietingly dissociative effect that echoes the trauma response.
Brew had previously created two autobiographical solos, one about a lost past and the other about recovery. An Accident/A Life now faces the car crash itself. Interestingly, and perhaps crucially, Brew is not the author of but a collaborator on this story: it is directed by Belgian choreographer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, who brings his considerable experience of working with diverse bodies and genres to bear on this outstanding work. It must surely have been therapeutic for Brew; as theatre, it is sensitive, revelatory and cathartic for us too.
