CHOREOGRAPHER, director, teacher – Glasgow-based Marc Brew is constantly criss-crossing the globe in one or other of these roles. Just last Saturday he was on television screens across the UK and beyond as one of the judging panel for the final of the BBC Young Dancer 2017 competition. You’d think that – when his busy schedule allowed – he’d rest on his well-deserved laurels.

However Marc Brew has been harbouring one additional dream that he was determined to make a reality. “I always wanted to have my own band,” he says, smiling broadly. The words are scarcely out of his mouth when a drum roll behind him announces the full-on presence of an outfit called – what else – BREWBAND. With songs written and moves sorted, final rehearsals done and dusted during April and with a London opening already under their belt, Brew’s hybrid combo of musicians and dancers is on the road and touring Scotland.

There’s a great story behind the whole adventure, and it harks back to when Brew was commissioned to make a piece for the London 2012 Cultural Olympiad. It was called Fusional Fragments, and it led to him collaborating closely with the world-renowned musician, Dame Evelyn Glennie.

“I love music, I love dance, and I love how those worlds can collide, come together, create new ideas,” he says. “And I felt that very strongly when I was working with Evelyn (Glennie) on Fusional Fragments. It started off with the music and the movement being quite separate, but then I felt ‘I want more from this!’ I want them to be integrated into one work where she’s on the stage, totally involved as a part of it. Playing live within the choreography, and not as any kind of add-on or after thought.”

Anyone who saw his company, Marc Brew Dance, performing Fusional Fragments at Tramway in October 2012, will remember seeing Glennie – hair wild, dressed in greeny-brown fragments, looking like a woodland sprite – moving among the dancers while playing various percussive or chiming instruments. Her presence brought a primal, mystical feel to the patternings of Brew’s choreography. No wonder he wanted to push this kind of on-stage integration further, and not merely in terms of bringing musicians into the immediate moment of live dance. Brew set himself, and his team, a more far-ranging challenge: to open eyes and ears to talents that maybe even the performers didn’t know they had. It’s been a “go on, surprise yourself!” process in the studio and now BREWBAND showcases these brave new “selves”, turning up the volume on breaking out of the same-old, same-old routines. Brew, himself, prefers to call it a gig, rather than a dance piece.

There are profound and personal reasons why Brew constantly opts to think outside of the box. A car accident when he was 19 ended his promising career as a professional ballet dancer. He now uses a wheelchair. Nonetheless he has kept faith with dance-making and his achievements as an award-winning artist with disability – performing in his own choreography as well as making work for other companies at home and abroad – have made him an inspirational role model for others. But Brew knows, from his own experiences, how easily an audience can be influenced by what they take in, at first sight.

“People make snap decisions, they make assumptions,” he says. “They can be influenced by what kind of venue they’re in, by the title of a piece, even. And for many audiences, they associate disability with limitations. The Unlimited commissions [Fusional Fragments was one of them] are all about challenging those perceptions, but I found myself thinking that there are other labels that get stamped on us. Labels cab become our identity and stop us, stop other people, from seeing all the possibilities we have inside ourselves. Really, BREWBAND is ultimately about that. It is about three musicians and three dancers – one of them in a wheelchair – coming together, swapping over those roles but at the same time moving out of their usual comfort zones. Sharing truths about themselves, discovering a new kind of confidence in what they are actually capable of – a dancer not only finding a “voice”, but singing out on-stage, or a musician coming out from behind his instrument, really freeing up his body, and becoming a part of the movement. It’s been so amazing in the studio, just watching people growing in themselves, and escaping those old labels.”

Just as amazing is the bond of mutual trust and creative rapport that has formed among six people who had never worked together before joining BREWBAND. Now on-stage, and ready to groove are musicians Graeme Smillie (of Unwinding Hours/The Vaselines),?Jill O’Sullivan (BDY_PRTS/Sparrow And The Workshop),?Peter Kelly (Galchen/The Kills) with dancers Martyn Garside (San Francisco Ballet), Marta Masiero (Scottish Dance Theatre) and Alice Sheppard (Axis Dance Company). Colourful glad rags have replaced rehearsal clobber, shared warm-ups for voices and bodies are now second nature before a show and as the lights come up Marc Brew is living that long-held dream: he’s got his own band. Rockin’ or what?

BREWBAND plays Ayr Gaiety tonight and The Brunton, Musselburgh tomorrow night.

For other Scottish tour dates, see marcbrew.com