Marc Brew

Currently living and working in Glasgow, Marc Brew grew up in a small country town called Jeriledrie in New South Wales, Australia and at the age of 11 he started his training as a professional dancer at the Victorian College of the Arts Secondary School and The Australian Ballet School. In 1997 Marc moved to South Africa to take up his first professional job with PACT Ballet. Whilst travelling on a day trip to a game reserve on a Saturday afternoon, after morning ballet class, Marc was involved in a car accident as a passenger, leaving him with a C6/C7 spinal cord injury and massive internal injuries which almost took his life on multiple occasions. His three friends in the car were killed and the drunk driver who caused the accident driving the wrong side of the motorway towards traffic survived with a broken leg.

“I remember waking up in the hospital, where everything was very white, very clinical and I was continually being X-rayed and examined to find out what was wrong, and that’s when they discovered I had a spinal cord injury, and that I was paralysed because of that, and had suffered massive internal injury from the car accident. I was told by a doctor I would never walk again, a professional dancer’s worst nightmare. So my body may have been considered as broken/damaged goods in relation to how it was prior to my accident and then I had to look at how I rediscovered my body and how it worked.

“When I first had the accident, I couldn’t bear to look in the mirror and my body changed a lot; straight away I lost 20 kilos just from being bedridden. But eventually I realised it was my thinking and perception that needed to change and I began to question: how else can I move and how else can I dance; how can I express myself and what can I do with what is moving in my body? I think that’s the great thing about dance; there’s not just one particular style that suits one particular person, there are so many ways to dance.”

Marc moved to Scotland to work with Scottish Dance Theatre as Associate Director after receiving a cultural leadership grant to shadow Artistic Director Janet Smith. He decided to make Glasgow his home after receiving opportunities and support to produce his own work and to be part of the strong contingency of disabled artists creating high quality work in Scotland.

Since creating his own company in 2008, Marc’s work has been in demand nationally and internationally, touring to the USA, Australia, Qatar, Brazil and throughout Europe. Marc has collaborated with disabled and non-disabled artists such as Dame Evelyn Glennie and has blazed a trail of high quality work, challenging audience’s perceptions of who can dance.

Marc was selected to create a work Fusional Fragments as part of the Unlimited Commissions for the London 2012 Cultural Olympiad and in 2014 received a commission to create "(i)land" as part of the Commonwealth Games Festival in Glasgow, and in 2015 Marc became the first disabled choreographer to choreograph a work for a national ballet company with his piece Exalt for Scottish Ballet and IndepenDance 4 and Traces Imprinted for Ballet Cymru. Marc is currently Guest Artistic Director with AXIS Dance Company and Associate Artistic Director at Ballet Cymru www.marcbrew.com

Marc has also used his dance work as a way to express his experiences. One of the first works created as part of his company was Remember When, a memoir of his life and body as he knew it before the accident. Last year the piece was nominated for Outstanding Achievement in Performance (Individual) at the prestigious Isadora Duncan Awards in the USA.

Marc' new solo work For Now, I am... had its premier at Dance International Festival in Glasgow in May 2015. A fantastic piece looking at the present and where he is now, evoking his memories of being in hospital, the journey of reconciling being in the world in an entirely new way. The piece was met with 5 star reviews and high praise from audiences and, following a successful run at the 2015 Edinburgh Festival Fringe, the company has toured the piece across the world.

MayBe is the piece that Marc is currently working on and he is spending time in Brazil with dancer Gisele Cazalans and musician Natalia Mallo. It will premiere later this year.