A special, exciting new collaboration between Australian dancer Marc Brew and the world-renowned Flemish-Moroccan choreographer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui leads to the world premiere of An Accident. In this first joint creation, Brew (performer and co-creator) and Cherkaoui (choreographer and director) unravel moments from our lives, exploring profound events and fraught memories with and without words - using dance, storytelling, film and a car.
The starting point for Brew and Cherkaoui was sharing their own life stories and the important turning points in them. For Brew that, first and foremost, was his car accident, which turned him from a successful ballet dancer to a paralyzed man condemned to a wheelchair in a split second in 1997.
Following previous, acclaimed solos
It taught Brew - who has performed at our festival before - to "think out of the box" and develop a new perspective on dance. "Even though I could no longer walk, jump, turn or stretch my foot, I still felt like a dancer. I began to explore how I could move with my changed body, in my wheelchair, or outside of it, alone or with others." Not only did that lead to such remarkable solos as For Now I am, acclaimed by press and audiences alike. and Remember When, but meanwhile Brew has also been successful for years as a choreographer (he is currently associate artist with British Ballet Cymru) and as artistic director of inclusive dance companies such as Axis Dance Company and his own Marc Brew Company. Festival director Samuel Wuersten: "Marc may look fragile, but he is anything but. He and Larbi are two 'forces of nature' that interact and reinforce each other."
A 'modified sponge'
Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui is one of the most in-demand and award-winning contemporary choreographers of his generation. Already for his first creation, Anonymous Society from 1999, he received several international awards. Since then he has built up an extensive body of work that in a very personal and idiosyncratic way explores and questions diverse cultures and their traditions. He himself once called himself a "modified sponge," because he "sucks in" numerous dance forms, connects them with each other and flexibly responds to the qualities of his dancers and dance partners for each performance - whether it is a Spanish flamenco dancer, a Swedish contortionist, an Indian kathak dancer, Chinese monks or Argentine tango dancers. Cherkaoui was artistic director of Ballet Flanders from 2015 to 2022. Since then, he has directed the Ballet du Grand Théâtre de Genève and in addition, since 2010, he has had his own group, Eastman, and is an associate artist at Sadler's Wells in London and Théâtre National de Bretagne in Rennes. He has also provided choreography for several award-winning films and for performances and music videos by Beyoncé.
