Performance
an Accident/a Life
Tramway, Glasgow
Mary Brennan (22 - 23/3/24)
five stars
Split seconds… That’s all it took for the accident to happen. The aftermath, however, remains ongoing.
Split seconds…
Marc Brew was just 19, with a promising career as a professional dancer in South Africa, when a drunk driver ploughed into the car where Brew and three friends were travelling.
They died. He survived. Now this new piece - given its UK premiere at Tramway over the weekend - picks up on the subsequent narrative, taking us inside Brew’s life-changing experiences with an unflinching honesty that is compellingly dramatic but never histrionic or gratuitous. Instead,
Brew’s determination to live, slowly coming to terms with being paralysed from the waist down - and thereafter still be involved with dance-making - is truly humbling. You silently wonder ‘would I? could I‘ triumph over such adversity?
In shaping and staging an Accident/a Life, Brew’s own innermost energies come to the fore in a visionary collaboration with director Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui.
Together they draw together spoken story-telling with film, music and movement in a flow of striking ‘snapshots’ that track Brew’s gradual journey from hospital bed to months-long recuperation back home with his beloved Mum in Australia.
Video - live and pre-recorded - is projected onto screens with Brew himself centre-stage, physically assisted by black-clad ‘shadow selves’ while, hanging overhead like a Sword of Damocles, is a real car.
Like us, it bears witness to Brew’s voicing intimate details of being scared, of feeling humiliated at being so helpless - what grown man needs his Mum to bathe him like a baby again?. But through it all, Brew’s own life force defies the odds: and now he’s before us again at Tramway - ever the expressive artist he was, and still is.
Meanwhile a resourcefully-creative team unite to make this complex production seem truly anchored in Brew’s memories. Words like ‘life-affirming’ and ‘inspiring’ merely hint at what this remarkable performance achieves with dignity and stoic humour.
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