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The Arts Intel Report

Marc Brew and Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui: An Accident / A Life

May 16–17, 2024
Klybeckstrasse 1b, 4058 Basel, Switzerland

Some of Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui’s best works have been collaborations: the 2005 ironical confessional Zero Degrees, with fellow choreographer Akram Khan, or the 2010 Babel, in which the Moroccan-Flemish choreographer mined the cast members for their most absurd encounters with cultural non-sequiturs while on international tours. (The piece was commissioned by the adventurous Ballet du Grand Théâtre de Genève, which Cherkaoui now runs.) For the new An Accident / A Life, he serves as director. The performer and choreographer is Marc Brew, who until recently ran Axis, the pioneering troupe of disabled and non-disabled dancers in the Bay Area. The accident that gives this piece its name was a head-on collision in Brew’s 20s. It left him paralyzed from the waist down; it reorganized his life. With impeccable timing and multiple media—movement, video, and words—the pitiless solo achieves a hallucinatory accuracy where any representation at all would seem inadequate, if not impossible. —Apollinaire Scherr

“An Accident / A Life” will tour from Tramway (in Glasgow), to the Théâtre Les Halles (in Sierre), to Kaserne Basel, to the Norwich Theatre Royal. The production’s tour will end May 25